MiekeBal
Bergen National Academy of the Arts, 2009
Back cover text:
“Mieke Bal’s essay provides an extensive exploration of the issues of time and materiality relevant to Jeannette Christensen’s work. Referring to Bergson and Kristeva, Bal develops an understanding of matter as being in itself temporal and of time as living duration, both being essentially continuous and open-ended. She uses these concepts to look specifically at a language of porous and changing matter at work in Christensen’s art, and at the ways the works visualize or mobilize experiences of time that challenge the monumental time of history.”
Anke Bangma (adjunct professor Bergen National Academy of the Arts).
Fragments of Matter: Jeannette Christensen
Part Two: Special Issues, Special Pleading
1. Showing Trauma? Difficulty and Necessity
DON QUIJOTE, A LONG HISTORY OF MADNESS
Looking at photographs
Trauma Predicaments
Alone Within Himself: Drama versus Narrative
Impossible Story-Telling: Toward the Cinematic
A Way Out?
2. Agency, Facing
NOTHING IS MISSING (the installation)
Bertien van Manen
Introduction: Facing Migration
Abandoning Control
The triple Act of Facing
Intercultural Ethics: Relationality across Gaps
Preposterous Time
Facing Restraint
Facing Speech
For Critical Freedom
3. Cultural Citizenship vs. Identity
BECOMING VERA
STATE OF SUSPENSION, SEPARATIONS, Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugeni Onegin
Introduction: Citizenship Political, Colonial, Cultural
Becoming French in Cameroon, African in Russia
Becoming Pushkin
Preposterous Encounters of the Third Kind
Reality in Fiction
“My Africa”: Memory, Nostalgia, Exile
Encountering Cultural Citizenship
Impossible Cultural Citizenship
4. Affect as a Political Tool
MADAME B (the film, various installations)
DORIS SALCEDO: PALIMPSESTO
Introduction: The Point of Affect
From “Madame Bovary c’est moi” to “Emma is Us”
Ambiguous Focalisation: Suspending Judgment
What is Focalisation?
An Illness We All Have: Emotional Capitalism
Empathy: Siding with the Dying
Affective Things?
The Experience of Feeling-Looking
The Anthropomorphic Imagination
Affect, Medium and Mood
5. By Way of Conclusion
For Memory: Mis-remembered, Dis-remembered
ACCESS DENIED, A LONG HISTORY OF MADNESS, REASONABLE DOUBT
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, WHERE IS WHERE?
Introduction: Meandering Through Memory Thought
Making Acts of Memory
Reunion, Resilience, Resistance
What Kinds of Memory Matter?
Failing the Past is Failing the Present
For a Different Mode of Thinking
References
List of images
Author’s Filmography
Acknowledgments
Selective Index of Names and Titles
Selective Index of Terms and Concepts
