Afonso Dias Ramos
Afonso Dias Ramos é Investigador no Instituto de História da Arte (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), Editor Associado da "Revista de História da Arte", e Professor Auxiliar Convidado na NOVA FCSH e na Universidade de Coimbra. Foi Investigador Convidado no Museu Calouste Gulbenkian (2020) e Art Histories Fellow no Forum Transregionale Studien em Berlim, afiliado na Freie Universität Berlin (2018-19). Tem um mestrado e doutoramento em História da Arte pelo University College London. Trabalhou no Museu Calouste Gulbenkian em Lisboa e estudou História da Arte na Universidade Nova de Lisboa e Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). Foi recentemente co-editor dos livros "Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: uma criação consciente de situações, uma situação consciente de criações" (IHA, 2023), "Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) e "Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art" (The MIT Press, 2023), e editor de "O Castelo Surrealista de Mário Cesariny" (Documenta, 2024) e "Hoje Soube-me a Pouco" (Tinta-da-China, 2024).
---
Afonso Dias Ramos is a Researcher at the Art History Institute (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), Associate Editor of "Revista de História da Arte", and Guest Lecturer at NOVA FCSH and at Universidade de Coimbra. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (2020). He was an Art Histories Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin (2018-19), affiliated with Freie Universität Berlin. He holds an MA and received his PhD in the History of Art from University College London. He previously worked at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and studied History of Art at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). He recently co-edited the books "Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: uma criação consciente de situações, uma situação consciente de criações" (IHA, 2023), "Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and "Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art" (The MIT Press, 2023), and edited "The Surrealist Castle of Mário Cesariny" (Documenta, 2024) and "Hoje Soube-me a Pouco" (Tinta-da-China, 2024).
Email: [email protected]
---
Afonso Dias Ramos is a Researcher at the Art History Institute (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), Associate Editor of "Revista de História da Arte", and Guest Lecturer at NOVA FCSH and at Universidade de Coimbra. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (2020). He was an Art Histories Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin (2018-19), affiliated with Freie Universität Berlin. He holds an MA and received his PhD in the History of Art from University College London. He previously worked at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and studied History of Art at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). He recently co-edited the books "Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: uma criação consciente de situações, uma situação consciente de criações" (IHA, 2023), "Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and "Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art" (The MIT Press, 2023), and edited "The Surrealist Castle of Mário Cesariny" (Documenta, 2024) and "Hoje Soube-me a Pouco" (Tinta-da-China, 2024).
Email: [email protected]
less
Interests
Uploads
Edited Books by Afonso Dias Ramos
Acompanhando a exposição Hoje soube‑me a pouco. Introversões e utopias artísticas no pós‑25 de Abril, no MAAT — Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia, este volume reúne uma colecção de ensaios livres escritos por investigadores de diferentes áreas e gerações, por ocasião dos cinquenta anos da Revolução dos Cravos. Sem a tentação de uma panorâmica geral ou a veleidade de um balanço final, privilegiaram‑se momentos soltos e evocativos das vicissitudes do último meio século em Portugal, entrecruzando filosofia e literatura, artes e moda, arquitectura e património, feminismo e ecologia, a partir da particularidade de uma imagem, um objecto, um conceito ou um episódio.
Ensaios de Afonso Dias Ramos, Alexandre Melo, Filomena Silvano, Golgona Anghel, João Pinharanda e Sérgio Mah, José Miranda Justo, Manuel Bogalheiro, Pedro Levi Bismarck, Teresa Castro
https://tintadachina.pt/produto/hoje-soube-me-a-pouco/
An edited collection that addresses the vital intersection of contemporary art and activism in this watershed cultural moment.
Activism is a critical point of contention for institutions and genealogies of contemporary art around the world. Yet artists have consistently engaged in activist discourse, lending their skills to social movements, and regularly participating in civil and social rights campaigns while also boycotting cultural institutions and exerting significant pressure on them. This timely volume, edited by Tom Snow and Afonso Ramos, addresses an extraordinary moment in debates over the institutional frameworks and networks of art including large-scale direct actions, as well as a radical rethinking of art venues and urban spaces according to racial, class, or gender-based disparities, including demonstrations against the extractive and exploitative practices of neoliberal accumulation and climate catastrophe.
From ACT UP and its affiliate groups since the dawn of the AIDS crisis to the counter-spectacle and street theatrics of the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy, to ongoing protest movements such as Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, and Decolonize This Place, activist aesthetics has proven increasingly difficult to define under traditional classifications. Resurgent campaigns for decolonial reckoning, ecological justice, gender equality, indigenous rights and antiracist pedagogies indicate that the role of activism in contemporary art practice urges a critical reassessment. One pressing question is whether contemporary art's most radical politics now takes place outside, against, or in spite of, conventional sites of display such as museums, biennials, and galleries.
Artists include:
ACT UP//Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme//Allora & Calzadilla//Tania Bruguera//Black Audio Film Collective//Andrea Fraser//Nan Goldin//Gulf Labor Coalition//Amar Kanwar//Liberate Tate//Sethembile Msezane//Zanele Muholi//Jan Nikolai Nelles and Nora Al-Badri//Decolonize This Place//Michael Rakowitz
Writers include:
Dave Beech//Judith Butler//Amílcar Cabral//Elias Canetti//Douglas Crimp//Jodi Dean//Chto Delat?//Gilles Deleuze//T.J. Demos//Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber//Gavin Grindon and Catherine Flood//Félix Guattari//Brian Holmes//Carrie Lambert-Beatty//Lucy Lippard//Yates McKee//MTL Collective//Gregory Sholette//Françoise Vergès//Peter Weiss//Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller
For more information, see:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546560/activism/
With essays by António Carmo Gouveia; Rui Assubuji; Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus; Inês Ponte; Patrícia Ferraz de Matos; Bárbara Direito; Nuno Domingos; Nadia Vargaftig; Inês Vieira Gomes; Filipa Lowndes Vicente; Afonso Dias Ramos; Catarina Laranjeiro; Maria José Lobo Antunes; Nuno Porto; Patricia Hayes.
This edited collection presents the first critical and historical overview of photography in Portuguese colonial Africa to an English-speaking audience. Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975 brings together sixteen scholars from interdisciplinary fields as varied as history, anthropology, art history, visual culture and museum studies, to consider some of the key aspects in the visual representation of the longest-lasting European colonial empire in the African continent. The chapters span over two centuries and cover five formerly colonial territories - Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe - deploying a range of methodologies to explore the multiple meanings and the contested uses of the photographic image across the realms of politics, science, culture and war. This book responds to a marked surge of international interest in the relationship between photography and colonialism, which has hitherto largely overlooked the Portuguese imperial context, by delivering the most recent scholarly findings to a broad readership.
For more information see:
https://link.springer.com/book/9783031277948
Resumo:
A 18 de abril de 2021 cumpriu-se o centenário do nascimento de Ernesto de Sousa, que desde os anos quarenta do século XX até ao seu falecimento, a 6 de outubro de 1988, teve um papel fundamental nas artes em Portugal e marcou as gerações de artistas que vieram a trabalhar depois do 25 de abril. Para assinalar o centenário, a Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian organizou com o Instituto de História da Arte da NOVA FCSH o Colóquio Centenário de Ernesto de Sousa no dia 2 de junho de 2021. O livro Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: Uma criação consciente de situações / Uma situação consciente de criações resulta desse encontro, incluindo seis novos estudos sobre Ernesto de Sousa que foram submetidos a revisão por pares, testemunhos e revisitações de vários autores, a transcrição de uma mesa-redonda com artistas e curadores sobre o seu papel nas artes visuais portuguesas, contributos de artistas especificamente concebidos para o livro, e ainda um texto inédito de Ernesto de Sousa. Escrito em três línguas, português, castelhano e inglês, este livro cruza artistas, críticos, curadores e investigadores, numa discussão a várias vozes sobre Ernesto de Sousa. O livro é disponibilizado em acesso aberto e, com apoio da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, será impressa uma edição limitada de 150 exemplares.
Abstract:
The centenary of Ernesto de Sousa’s birth was marked on 18 April 2021. From the 1940s until his death on 6 October 1988, he played a fundamental role in the arts in Portugal and impacted generations of artists working after the 25th April Revolution of 1974. To commemorate this centenary, the Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Art History Institute of NOVA FCSH organized the Centenary Colloquium of Ernesto de Sousa on 2 June 2021. The book Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: A conscious creation of situations / A conscious situation of creations follows on from that encounter, featuring six new peer-reviewed studies about Ernesto de Sousa, statements and revisitations from several authors, the transcript of a round-table with artists and curators on his role in the Portuguese visual arts, contributions from artists conceived specifically for this book, as well as a previously unreleased text by Ernesto de Sousa. Written in three languages, Portuguese, Spanish and English, this book brings together artists, critics, curators and researchers, in a polyphonic discussion about Ernesto de Sousa. This book is available on open access and, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a limited edition of 150 copies will also be printed.
ISBN (Print): 978-989-54405-8-0
ISBN (Electronic): 978-989-54405-7-3
Available at:
https://institutodehistoriadaarte.com/publications/e-books/ernesto-de-sousa-1921-2021-uma-criacao-consciente-de-situacoes-uma-situacao-consciente-de-criacoes/?frame-nonce=31be312ec8
Available here: https://rha.fcsh.unl.pt/index.php/rha/issue/view/ReturnsOnFutureArtHistories
Contributions:
Basia Sliwinska, Afonso Dias Ramos, "Re-turns: On Future Art Histories", pp. 5-8.
Camilla Salvaneschi, "Afterlives: On the Art Periodical’s Return through Anthologies and Special Issues", pp. 10-37.
Beatriz Madaleno Alves, "Beyond the Material: A Case Study of the Yaawo Beaded Hair Combs for Repatriating Agency", pp. 38-63.
Hagar Ophir, "Final(?) DISPOSITION (Restless Objects ) A Ride from the Storage to the Palace", pp. 64-76.
Marcella Marer, "The Bird’s Eye From Up Above or From Down Below: Changing Perspectives on Aerial Photography of Indigenous Lands in the Brazilian Amazon", pp. 76-101.
Martim Ramos, "a darker, better place", pp. 102-115.
Zofia Reznik, "The Vulnerable Body in the Archive: Matriculating Oral Herstories of Art with (Self-)care", pp. 116-141.
Marija Griniuk, "Curating as Care in Performance and Live Art: A case study of Lithuanian and Sámi art", pp. 142-168.
With texts by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, Jean-Luc Nancy, João Pinharanda, José Manuel dos Santos, and Juan Barja.
Papers by Afonso Dias Ramos
https://tintadachina.pt/produto/hoje-soube-me-a-pouco/
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/editions/edicao-25/joao-penalva-efemera-linguagem-da-rua
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/electra-24/michael-hardt-nothing-takes-longer-solve-false-problem
Available online at:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_12
This chapter explores the drastically overlooked nexus between atrocity photography and mass insurgency during the endgame of European colonial empires across Africa. Specifically, it addresses the most widely reproduced and most consequential set of photographs in the Portuguese empire, graphically depicting and exposing the bloody incidents behind the outbreak of the decolonization war in Angola in 1961. The largest campaign of atrocity photography in the world and the largest military effort of any Western nation in the last half of the twentieth century were then intimately bound. Unaddressed and unchallenged for decades, and yet still customarily used to frame the narrative or to shut down any discussion on the colonial past, this chapter attempts to reconstruct the trajectory of those hundreds of readily available, shocking black-and-white photographs in terms of their production and circulation, teasing out some of the crucial political, moral, and historiographic questions that they continue to raise.
Available online at:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_1
This chapter provides the state of the art and an introduction to some of the central theoretical and historiographic questions structuring the scholarship on photography within the African territories formerly under Portuguese colonial rule. It seeks to map out the existent sources and the different approaches to this topic, tracing the new directions within the critical literature as well as its most uncharted subjects. Organised as an overview, all the case studies under discussion comprise new research into archival material, and raise a host of questions for the future of this field of studies.
Versão completa em:
https://www.publico.pt/2023/09/10/culturaipsilon/noticia/triunfo-arte-diaspora-africanas-londres-2062440
Acompanhando a exposição Hoje soube‑me a pouco. Introversões e utopias artísticas no pós‑25 de Abril, no MAAT — Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia, este volume reúne uma colecção de ensaios livres escritos por investigadores de diferentes áreas e gerações, por ocasião dos cinquenta anos da Revolução dos Cravos. Sem a tentação de uma panorâmica geral ou a veleidade de um balanço final, privilegiaram‑se momentos soltos e evocativos das vicissitudes do último meio século em Portugal, entrecruzando filosofia e literatura, artes e moda, arquitectura e património, feminismo e ecologia, a partir da particularidade de uma imagem, um objecto, um conceito ou um episódio.
Ensaios de Afonso Dias Ramos, Alexandre Melo, Filomena Silvano, Golgona Anghel, João Pinharanda e Sérgio Mah, José Miranda Justo, Manuel Bogalheiro, Pedro Levi Bismarck, Teresa Castro
https://tintadachina.pt/produto/hoje-soube-me-a-pouco/
An edited collection that addresses the vital intersection of contemporary art and activism in this watershed cultural moment.
Activism is a critical point of contention for institutions and genealogies of contemporary art around the world. Yet artists have consistently engaged in activist discourse, lending their skills to social movements, and regularly participating in civil and social rights campaigns while also boycotting cultural institutions and exerting significant pressure on them. This timely volume, edited by Tom Snow and Afonso Ramos, addresses an extraordinary moment in debates over the institutional frameworks and networks of art including large-scale direct actions, as well as a radical rethinking of art venues and urban spaces according to racial, class, or gender-based disparities, including demonstrations against the extractive and exploitative practices of neoliberal accumulation and climate catastrophe.
From ACT UP and its affiliate groups since the dawn of the AIDS crisis to the counter-spectacle and street theatrics of the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy, to ongoing protest movements such as Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, and Decolonize This Place, activist aesthetics has proven increasingly difficult to define under traditional classifications. Resurgent campaigns for decolonial reckoning, ecological justice, gender equality, indigenous rights and antiracist pedagogies indicate that the role of activism in contemporary art practice urges a critical reassessment. One pressing question is whether contemporary art's most radical politics now takes place outside, against, or in spite of, conventional sites of display such as museums, biennials, and galleries.
Artists include:
ACT UP//Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme//Allora & Calzadilla//Tania Bruguera//Black Audio Film Collective//Andrea Fraser//Nan Goldin//Gulf Labor Coalition//Amar Kanwar//Liberate Tate//Sethembile Msezane//Zanele Muholi//Jan Nikolai Nelles and Nora Al-Badri//Decolonize This Place//Michael Rakowitz
Writers include:
Dave Beech//Judith Butler//Amílcar Cabral//Elias Canetti//Douglas Crimp//Jodi Dean//Chto Delat?//Gilles Deleuze//T.J. Demos//Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber//Gavin Grindon and Catherine Flood//Félix Guattari//Brian Holmes//Carrie Lambert-Beatty//Lucy Lippard//Yates McKee//MTL Collective//Gregory Sholette//Françoise Vergès//Peter Weiss//Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller
For more information, see:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546560/activism/
With essays by António Carmo Gouveia; Rui Assubuji; Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus; Inês Ponte; Patrícia Ferraz de Matos; Bárbara Direito; Nuno Domingos; Nadia Vargaftig; Inês Vieira Gomes; Filipa Lowndes Vicente; Afonso Dias Ramos; Catarina Laranjeiro; Maria José Lobo Antunes; Nuno Porto; Patricia Hayes.
This edited collection presents the first critical and historical overview of photography in Portuguese colonial Africa to an English-speaking audience. Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975 brings together sixteen scholars from interdisciplinary fields as varied as history, anthropology, art history, visual culture and museum studies, to consider some of the key aspects in the visual representation of the longest-lasting European colonial empire in the African continent. The chapters span over two centuries and cover five formerly colonial territories - Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe - deploying a range of methodologies to explore the multiple meanings and the contested uses of the photographic image across the realms of politics, science, culture and war. This book responds to a marked surge of international interest in the relationship between photography and colonialism, which has hitherto largely overlooked the Portuguese imperial context, by delivering the most recent scholarly findings to a broad readership.
For more information see:
https://link.springer.com/book/9783031277948
Resumo:
A 18 de abril de 2021 cumpriu-se o centenário do nascimento de Ernesto de Sousa, que desde os anos quarenta do século XX até ao seu falecimento, a 6 de outubro de 1988, teve um papel fundamental nas artes em Portugal e marcou as gerações de artistas que vieram a trabalhar depois do 25 de abril. Para assinalar o centenário, a Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian organizou com o Instituto de História da Arte da NOVA FCSH o Colóquio Centenário de Ernesto de Sousa no dia 2 de junho de 2021. O livro Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: Uma criação consciente de situações / Uma situação consciente de criações resulta desse encontro, incluindo seis novos estudos sobre Ernesto de Sousa que foram submetidos a revisão por pares, testemunhos e revisitações de vários autores, a transcrição de uma mesa-redonda com artistas e curadores sobre o seu papel nas artes visuais portuguesas, contributos de artistas especificamente concebidos para o livro, e ainda um texto inédito de Ernesto de Sousa. Escrito em três línguas, português, castelhano e inglês, este livro cruza artistas, críticos, curadores e investigadores, numa discussão a várias vozes sobre Ernesto de Sousa. O livro é disponibilizado em acesso aberto e, com apoio da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, será impressa uma edição limitada de 150 exemplares.
Abstract:
The centenary of Ernesto de Sousa’s birth was marked on 18 April 2021. From the 1940s until his death on 6 October 1988, he played a fundamental role in the arts in Portugal and impacted generations of artists working after the 25th April Revolution of 1974. To commemorate this centenary, the Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Art History Institute of NOVA FCSH organized the Centenary Colloquium of Ernesto de Sousa on 2 June 2021. The book Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: A conscious creation of situations / A conscious situation of creations follows on from that encounter, featuring six new peer-reviewed studies about Ernesto de Sousa, statements and revisitations from several authors, the transcript of a round-table with artists and curators on his role in the Portuguese visual arts, contributions from artists conceived specifically for this book, as well as a previously unreleased text by Ernesto de Sousa. Written in three languages, Portuguese, Spanish and English, this book brings together artists, critics, curators and researchers, in a polyphonic discussion about Ernesto de Sousa. This book is available on open access and, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a limited edition of 150 copies will also be printed.
ISBN (Print): 978-989-54405-8-0
ISBN (Electronic): 978-989-54405-7-3
Available at:
https://institutodehistoriadaarte.com/publications/e-books/ernesto-de-sousa-1921-2021-uma-criacao-consciente-de-situacoes-uma-situacao-consciente-de-criacoes/?frame-nonce=31be312ec8
Available here: https://rha.fcsh.unl.pt/index.php/rha/issue/view/ReturnsOnFutureArtHistories
Contributions:
Basia Sliwinska, Afonso Dias Ramos, "Re-turns: On Future Art Histories", pp. 5-8.
Camilla Salvaneschi, "Afterlives: On the Art Periodical’s Return through Anthologies and Special Issues", pp. 10-37.
Beatriz Madaleno Alves, "Beyond the Material: A Case Study of the Yaawo Beaded Hair Combs for Repatriating Agency", pp. 38-63.
Hagar Ophir, "Final(?) DISPOSITION (Restless Objects ) A Ride from the Storage to the Palace", pp. 64-76.
Marcella Marer, "The Bird’s Eye From Up Above or From Down Below: Changing Perspectives on Aerial Photography of Indigenous Lands in the Brazilian Amazon", pp. 76-101.
Martim Ramos, "a darker, better place", pp. 102-115.
Zofia Reznik, "The Vulnerable Body in the Archive: Matriculating Oral Herstories of Art with (Self-)care", pp. 116-141.
Marija Griniuk, "Curating as Care in Performance and Live Art: A case study of Lithuanian and Sámi art", pp. 142-168.
With texts by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, Jean-Luc Nancy, João Pinharanda, José Manuel dos Santos, and Juan Barja.
https://tintadachina.pt/produto/hoje-soube-me-a-pouco/
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/editions/edicao-25/joao-penalva-efemera-linguagem-da-rua
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/electra-24/michael-hardt-nothing-takes-longer-solve-false-problem
Available online at:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_12
This chapter explores the drastically overlooked nexus between atrocity photography and mass insurgency during the endgame of European colonial empires across Africa. Specifically, it addresses the most widely reproduced and most consequential set of photographs in the Portuguese empire, graphically depicting and exposing the bloody incidents behind the outbreak of the decolonization war in Angola in 1961. The largest campaign of atrocity photography in the world and the largest military effort of any Western nation in the last half of the twentieth century were then intimately bound. Unaddressed and unchallenged for decades, and yet still customarily used to frame the narrative or to shut down any discussion on the colonial past, this chapter attempts to reconstruct the trajectory of those hundreds of readily available, shocking black-and-white photographs in terms of their production and circulation, teasing out some of the crucial political, moral, and historiographic questions that they continue to raise.
Available online at:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_1
This chapter provides the state of the art and an introduction to some of the central theoretical and historiographic questions structuring the scholarship on photography within the African territories formerly under Portuguese colonial rule. It seeks to map out the existent sources and the different approaches to this topic, tracing the new directions within the critical literature as well as its most uncharted subjects. Organised as an overview, all the case studies under discussion comprise new research into archival material, and raise a host of questions for the future of this field of studies.
Versão completa em:
https://www.publico.pt/2023/09/10/culturaipsilon/noticia/triunfo-arte-diaspora-africanas-londres-2062440
AFONSO DIAS RAMOS The constant focus in your work around the idea of participation in art has recently given way to the issue of audience attention. What has prompted this shift in focus?
CLAIRE BISHOP I wouldn’t say that participation has been a ‘constant focus’ of my work! It was a topic of my research 2004 to 2012. My first book was on installation art. I’ve also written about museums. What is a constant throughline in my research, going back to my dissertation, is spectatorship, the viewing subject. Secondary to this is an interest in historicising and theorising artistic strategies: installation, participation, and in the new book Disordered Attention three more: research-based art, performance exhibitions, and interventions. Why work on attention? One of the biggest changes in our culture and society over the last thirty years – a period that coincidentally coincides with what we call ‘contemporary art’ – has been digital technology. The speed and degree of change has been unimaginable; it affects how we communicate, how we think, how we research, how we write. Because it changes our experience of time, it also affects how we see. All this, I think, makes it a rich consideration for anyone dealing with art and spectatorship. In this book, I want to look at a thirty-year period of contemporary art historically, tracking changes over three decades, but through the lens of technological change. Any book on attention has to wrangle with two related discourses that have emerged since the 1990s. The first is the attention economy. None of us with a smartphone or computer is immune to its tentacles; every glance and click can be monetised. The other discourse is around ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). ADHD medication has become a central to maintaining performance in the university and neoliberal workplace; almost 10% of US schoolchildren are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed medication. ADHD discourse brings together questions of pedagogy, literacy, neurobiology and neoliberalism, and pathologises distraction in ways that unexpectedly inform considerations of visual art and performance.
AFONSO DIAS RAMOS You grew up in an academic household. Was art a major element while growing up?
SVETLANA ALPERS No, it was just a part of it. We had art around the house and my parents also had artist friends. Mark Rothko was a close friend and he summered where we summered in Vermont. So, we knew our artists. But art was not primary. That was the academy. It was Harvard University.
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-22/wolfgang-tillmans-wandering-bodies-travelling-images
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-22/hal-foster-history-present
EYAL WEIZMAN I had two competing interests as a young person. One was shaped by a certain interest in theory, particularly political theory, through the reading groups I was part of in Haifa, run by the Communist Party that had a headquarters there. This group of Palestinian, Israeli and Jewish intellectuals was trying to build a common understanding of the material realities of settler colonialism. Haifa is an interesting place in this sense, because the city still has a surviving Palestinian population. While most other major cities in Palestine were ethnically cleansed in 1948, in Haifa, some of the population survived in the urban culture of what became the Israeli state, rather than in the rural cultures that are wrongly associated with the expulsions of the Nakba.
Available at: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-18/eyal-weizman-aesthetics-and-human-rights
Essay on contemporary Portuguese photography. Artists surveyed:
Albano Silva Pereira; Ana Linhares; André Cepeda; André Príncipe; António Júlio Duarte; Dalila Gonçalves; Duarte Amaral Netto; Edgar Martins; José Pedro Cortes; Martim Ramos; Nuno Cera; Paulo Catrica; Paulo Mendes; Rita Magalhães; Tito Mouraz and Tatiana Macedo.
Ensaio sobre fotografia portuguesa contemporânea. Artistas incluídos:
Albano Silva Pereira; Ana Linhares; André Cepeda; André Príncipe; António Júlio Duarte; Dalila Gonçalves; Duarte Amaral Netto; Edgar Martins; José Pedro Cortes; Martim Ramos; Nuno Cera; Paulo Catrica; Paulo Mendes; Rita Magalhães; Tito Mouraz e Tatiana Macedo.
No one emulated the radical spirit of the Vincennes adventure quite like Deleuze – ‘when I went to another faculty’, he avowed, ‘I had the impression of falling back into the 19th century’ –, given his adamant refusal to teach in an amphitheatre or to speak through monologues, insisting on a pragmatic and experimental discourse that sought to address the most heterogenous of publics, looking for both horizontality in treatment and transversality in knowledge. If the forest remains abandoned, without any mark or sign of the radical past, the surviving images from that era disclose crowded rooms and a philosopher invariably surrounded by magnetophons, attesting to the general eargerness when it came to recording his impassioned speeches, as if they were Socratic dialogues. Decades later, the very same excitement drove the frantic quest for those amateur tapes on the internet – akin to what happened with the courses Barthes or Foucault gave at Collège de France. Seizing upon this seemingly boundless craving, Éditions de Minuit has just published the eight sessions of a course about the relationship between painting and philosophy which Deleuze gave shortly after moving over to Saint-Denis in 1981, in an edition that has been carefully annotated by the philosopher David Lapoujade.
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Gilles Deleuze, The Natural Catastrophe of Painting", Electra 24, 2024, pp. 220-223.
This review of Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman’s provocative book "Investigative Aesthetics: Conflict and Commons in the Politics of Truth"(2021), tackles the ways in which the production of knowledge in contemporary societies increasingly intersects with the problem of aesthetics, and discusses this critical contribution to the constellation of art, facts, truth, and investigation.
Keywords:
Aesthetics; Investigation; Activism; Forensic Architecture
Upon visiting a Picasso exhibition, Kafka remarked that art is a mirror that foretells the future, like a clock running fast. The interlocutor retorted that his literary oeuvre was precisely that, a ‘mirror of tomorrow’. Kafka would become the writer most often branded as avant la lettre in the entire history of literature, and yet, the prophetic character of his texts was not taken as a foresight of the future, but as a precise reading of the present. It was that time paradox that led Jorge Luis Borges to hold him as the model of a writer that invents his own predecessors, and led Edward Said to regard him as the best analyst of the yet non-existent Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The premonitory aura of his allegories, consisting of generic places and characters, would nevertheless end up being forcibly made to mirror all kinds of historical tragedies, the decline of the Habsburg empire, the disintegration of Europe, the rise of the Third Reich, the Shoah. This insistence on Kafka as an eternal forerunner, sentenced to plagiarise the future, kept him hostage to the odd phenomenon of literary anticipation, as a visionary that, from outside time and above history, prefigured the world, intuiting political systems even before they were formed. The most radical turn in this reception has occurred in the last decades under the post-colonial aegis, repositioning Kafka as someone of his own time, or rather, against his own time, as the combative and learned critic of the machines of dehumanisation underway despite the fanatic negationism around them – an entire differential treatment that spanned from forced labour policies to ethnic cleansing, as the fruit of imperial expansion. The eminent philosopher Marie-José Mondzain has just made a precious contribution to the ongoing historicisation and re-politicisation of Kafka, with a surprising essay on the author and the decolonisation of the imaginary, which foregrounds the ‘violence exercised by the imperialist apparatus and the new capitalist slavery’ (Mondzain 2022:19).
See more at:
http://www.sehepunkte.de/2022/03/34152.html
the making, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s 600-page volume "Potential History:
Unlearning Imperialism" (2019), and it duly delivers on its promises to radically rethink archives, history, museums, and photography. With encyclopaedic scope and scale, but the uncompromising urgency of a political manifesto, this landmark publication is the culmination of over a decade of thought-provoking reckonings with imperial violence by
the Brown University professor, curator, and filmmaker. It says something about this book that most reviewers consider it a handbook for the vexing issues of our time, yet all seem to have read a different copy. Covering an impressive range of contentious topics and jumping between specific situations and overarching generalities, it does not lend itself to quick summations. It keeps moving in unexpected directions and across multiple
registers, making a provocative case for unlearning our complacency with inherited political formations – concepts like archive, art, document, human rights and sovereignty, institutions like borders, nations, and citizens, disciplines like history, law, and theory, and categories like the new and the neutral, all of which drive what she describes as imperialism’s “progressive credo”. All of this, Azoulay claims, determined how the world is shared, experienced, and represented, pigeonholing bodies, lives and acts of violence as distinct and final, so that they can be consigned to the past in order to make way for the future. This is not yet another counter history, Azoulay tells us, but a counter to history.
Full review: http://analisesocial.ics.ul.pt/documentos/n235_a09.pdf
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha
Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism,
London and New York, Verso, 2019, 656 pp.
ISBN 9781788735711
London, Reaktion Books, 2017; 392 pp.; £40.00 hbk; ISBN
9781780238463
There is a disconcerting recentness about the word ‘postwar’, a late nineteenth century invention that speaks to modern trials and tribulations. It is no consolation that this term is now back with a vengeance. Some contend that it defines the present condition, since the arc of history is bending away from military strife. Others claim that there never was a postwar era, as it only served to cover up imperial conflicts across the world. Some predict that this millennium will be a new age of unending
civil and global wars. Others ring alarm bells that we are at the end of the postwar era and its liberal order. What remains undisputed in this age of foreboding is that concerns with warfare pervade contemporary culture. The visual arts became its prime example, judging by the flood of publications and large-scale shows on conflict-related issues in the last decade. It is then salutary that one of the leading historians of war and violence, Joanna Bourke, whose work defined how these concepts are thought of in relation to gender, emotions and the body, sought to redress such issues through the prism of visual culture. The result is a large, lavishly illustrated tome expertly edited by Bourke, with 16 chapters by as many scholars.
Volume: 55 issue: 2, page(s): 435-436
Article first published online: April 23, 2020; Issue published: April 1, 2020
Review of Ashraf Jamal, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South african Art, Milan: Skira, 2018. Available online at Burlington Contemporary: http://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/reviews/reviews/ashraf-jamals-essays-on-art-in-south-africa
Delinda Collier, Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016);
Alisa LaGamma (ed.), Kongo: Power and Majesty (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 2015);
Adeline Pelletier (ed.), Beauté Congo, 1926–2015: Congo kitoko (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2015).
July 13, 2019
Keynote: Professor Molly Nesbit (Vassar College)
Speakers: Larne Abse Gogarty (Slade School of Fine Art), Eric C. H. de Bruyn (Freie Universität Berlin), Afonso Dias Ramos (Forum Transregionale Studien, FU Berlin), Leigh Raiford (University California, Berkeley), Stephanie Schwartz (University College London), Blake Stimson (University of Illinois at Chicago), Andrew Witt (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Abstract: This conference spotlights the ways in which artists, critics, and historians have mobilised critical methods and methodologies against the rising tide of authoritarianism and illiberal populism. Featuring a wide range of projects — from the militant image to secret and clandestine works and networks — the one-day conference, Counterhistory: Latent and Underground Currents in American Art, aims to articulate new forms in the writing and research in art history. The goal of the event is to rethink the notion of the underground as an evocative terrain for thought and struggle, in particular, the peculiar ways through which images and objects are historically obscured and silenced but emerge, unexpectedly, out of states of latency. The conference seeks to make sense of these forms of delay, resurrection and survival.
The proposition to think counterhistorically presupposes a renewed engagement with method. The principle question this conference seeks to address is the following: how to reactivate repressed aesthetic projects and social forms as an act of political reorientation? As a way to rethink the standard narratives on modern American art, we encourage papers that closely consider the forking paths and broken links in the life world of objects and images. The project is premised on developing new strategies to respond to the countermovements demanded by the object of study as a means to identify and explore the elisions of official history.
Organized by Andrew Witt (Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow, Terra Foundation for American Art, HU Berlin) and Afonso Dias Ramos (Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Fellow, Forum Transregionale Studien, FU Berlin).
Please direct any questions to: andrew.witt(at)hu-berlin.de or a.ramos.11(at)ucl.ac.uk
The event is wheelchair accessible.
Please register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/counterhistory-latent-and-underground-currents-in-american-art-tickets-62999006725
IKB - Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt Universität Berlin / Terra Foundation for American Art
Forum Transregionale Studien and ICI - Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry
Organized by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Afonso Dias Ramos
With contributions by Khaled Barakeh, Rabiaâ Benlahbib, Alice von Bieberstein, Zuzanna Dziuban, Adam Harvey, Paul Lowe, Stephan Milich, Lamia Moghnieh, Tom Snow
Keynotes by Allen Feldman (NYU Steinhardt) and Andreas Maercker (WIKO fellow)
Artist Talk with Omer Fast, Kasia Fudakowski, Abdessamad el Montassir, and Damir Arsenijevic
Abstract:
Is there anything beyond trauma, and what does it look like? One of the most ubiquitous and fruitful concepts in contemporary cultural and academic discourse, trauma has been under fire as a Western-centric narrative and representational form that universalizes and decontextualizes violence, often perpetuating or conflating the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, and spectators. Have critical discourses on and artistic and activist thematizations of trauma run out of steam? Have they generated new forms of inquiry? Which alternative models have emerged in the process? The symposium proposes a transregional reassessment of the concept of trauma across a range of academic disciplines and cultural contexts. The future of this paradigm will be discussed primarily through the prism of representation, the arts, and visual culture in relation to forms of political, historical, and structural violence. The symposium explores the relation of trauma and aesthetics in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which it is being reshaped by increasing transnational displacements of people and digital flows of images and stories. At the same time, post-humanism and new materialism have challenged common conceptions of subjectivity and non-human agency, profoundly changing the understanding of traumatic ruptures affecting nature, landscapes, and animals. By implying that extreme experiences may pass down genetically across generations, the contentious field of epigenetics insists that the transmission of trauma has a bodily dimension. Last but not least, current anxieties about technology and the climate crisis seem to have generated a form of ‘pre-trauma’, channeled through narratives of global catastrophe and post-apocalypse. If there is anything beyond ‘trauma’, as these developments suggest, how should it be looked at? What new images, concepts, practices, and ways of seeing should be mobilized toward this task? Taking on the future of trauma studies as a pressing intellectual question of our time, the symposium will reflect on new forms of witnessing, representing, and possibly coping with extreme violence to emerge in the last decade, the variety of cross-cultural aesthetic responses they elicit, and their implications for rethinking the field at large.
Websites:
https://www.khi.fi.it/en/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/2019/06/beyond-trauma.php
https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/beyond-trauma/
Os Encontros em torno da exposição "Problemas do Primitivismo, a partir de Portugal" terão lugar no dia 28 de setembro. Reunirão autoras e autores indispensáveis para pensar os problemas levantados por esta exposição e debater a abordagem transdisciplinar do conceito de “primitivismo” a partir de Portugal.
Este fórum debaterá a partir das palavras-chave da exposição — Civilização, Museu, Ingénuo, "Mar Português", Extração, "Jazz-Band" — as relações entre arte e as ideologias dominantes do progresso, colonialismo e neocolonialismo, cultura visual e nacionalismo, propaganda, arte contemporânea e invenção da tradição. O museu, enquanto espaço ambivalente de inclusão e de segregação, espaço de transformação, mas também de produção estereotipada sobre o "Outro", serve de caixa de ressonância a este debate.
Abstract:
With the recent upsurge of interest in restitution, reparation and repatriation around the world, there has been a renewed critical engagement with media archaeologies in the digital age, exploring the particular affordances that they bring, and the problems that they pose, to such debates. In the last years, a slew of radical projects devoted to “digital restitution” – a term originally used to describe making historic photographs and audio recordings available to source communities – has made this issue infinitely more complex and nuanced, increasingly involving artists, theorists and activists in the experimental use of mobile scanners, 3D printing, VR, data mining, NFTs and several other automated processes, to challenge ideas of public access to cultural heritage and the epistemological foundations of the arts and humanities, fueling an unprecedented techno-political debate on the digital futures. Thus, this paper considers some of the most radical and contested digital restitution projects over the last few years – from the high-quality scans of the Nefertiti bust and subsequent release of data into the public domain, to the contested ultra-precise robot-made replicas of the Parthenon Marbles, or the non-fungible tokens for looted African artworks as the Benin Bronzes – so as to discuss the constitutive role of digital technology in both culture, society and politics. If contemporary technologies, as Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler have claimed, facilitate “restitution as ‘living present’ of what is dead”, this talk attempts to, on the one hand, contextualize the recent digital restitution projects, and, on the other hand, spotlight and discuss some of the aesthetic and theoretical limitations of such models.
Abstract:
It has recently become increasingly clear that André Malraux’s influential vision of the “imaginary museum” (1947), predicated upon a succession of images arranged on the basis of montage and collage, was more heavily indebted to the rhetoric of film and photography than had previously been thought. This transformative model of what a truly transnational and multicultural museum should aspire to be in the postwar liberal world order defined the institutional context of art and visual culture in the last half a century. This paper attempts to address the theoretical underpinnings of the idea of montage mobilized in the context of a museum without walls – drawing on important variations on this theme, from Sigmund Freud’s “mystic writing-pad” (1924) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizome” (1980), to Jean-Luc Godard’s “museum of the real” (1994) –, but it likewise confronts it with the specific valences, and shortcomings of the critical discourse on photography around this historical period – specifically the anti-humanist critiques of the medium levelled by Georges Bataille, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. Thus, another idea of montage that followed on from Malraux’s “imaginary museum” will also be taken into consideration in relation to The Family of Man (1955-62), the most visited exhibition of photography to ever tour the world, assembling hundreds of images by photographers from many nations, as a declaration of global solidarity following the Second World War, created by Edward Steichen.
What does montage look like in the particular context of an historical era that has been deemed “postwar” even as colonial powers waged protracted and far-flung wars to retain imperial control of most of the world? How might we reckon with those ideas of montage that enabled the emancipatory promise of another world, and yet failed to account for the violence organizing the world from which they emerged?
Abstract:
To Kill Literature: Photography of Fiction and War in Angola
Several critical theorists have long pointed towards the vexing relationship between texts and images as a foundational aspect of history, existing in a dialectical conflict. But in an age that has come to be primarily defined by visual media, what is one to make of Walt Whitman’s old lament that “the real war will never get in the books”?
What happens when seeing supersedes reading in the public imagination? Over the last decade, a discernible trend within historiography and contemporary art has lent credence to the contemporary truism that, as Paul Virilio claimed, “it is impossible to imagine war without images”. And yet, in some large-scale conflicts such as the recent liberation and civil wars in Angola (1961-2002), the archival legacy and official memory of those events has instead been largely linked to the hegemony of written culture as well as to a perceived dearth of images. Taking this peculiar context into account, this paper discusses the ways in which, over the last decade, both fiction writers and visual artists have been assigning a newly privileged role to spectatorship over readership whenever they address those specific conflicts. In particular, this paper discusses a series of experimental lens-based artistic projects around those wars in Angola, in which photography increasingly steps into or takes over the domain of literary fiction, troubling the conventional cultural models and narrative forms associated with each medium, in the attempt to renegotiate the contract between the viewer and history.
"Photography was a crucial element in the history of modern Portuguese colonialism. The idealization and knowledge of the colonial territories, their resources and populations, would have been different in its absence. Their uses in the past and their legacy in the present were, and still are, vast, heterogeneous and long-lasting. Visions of Empire offers us a glimpse into the contexts of production and the uses of photography, connecting them to some of the main events and processes that shaped the history of the modern Portuguese empire."
"A fotografia foi um elemento fundamental da história do moderno colonialismo português. Sem ela, a idealização e o conhecimento sobre os territórios coloniais, seus recursos e populações, teriam sido diferentes. As imagens fotográficas foram encenadas e comercializadas, com diferentes propósitos. Os seus usos no passado e os seus legados no presente foram e são vastos, heterogéneos e duradouros. Visões do Império dá-nos um vislumbre dos contextos de produção e de uso da fotografia, relacionando-os com alguns dos eventos e processos mais relevantes da história do império colonial português."
COORDENAÇÃO
Margarida Kol de Carvalho
Maria Cecília Cameira
CURADORES
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
Joana Pontes
TEXTOS
Afonso Dias Ramos
Aniceto Afonso
Carmen Rosa
Catarina Mateus
Cláudia Castelo
Joana Pontes
José Pedro Monteiro
Mia Couto
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
Myriam Taylor
Nuno Domingos
Telma Tvon
INSTALAÇÃO ARTÍSTICA Romaric Tisserand
VÍDEO-COMENTÁRIO Myriam Taylor
Photography was a crucial element in the history of modern Portuguese
colonialism. The idealisation and knowledge of the colonial territories, their resources
and populations, would have been different in its absence. Photographic
images were staged and commercialised with diverse purposes. They changed
hands, both officially and secretly, and they were forgotten or destroyed. They
documented individual and collective dreams and memories. They fuelled
the imagination around colonial domination, helping to make it come true.
They contributed to defining a particular vision of the “Other” as essentially
different — regarding ways of life, customs and mentality — and to the establishment
and maintenance of laws and practices founded on political, social,
economic and cultural discrimination and drawn along racial lines. But they
also served to denounce the iniquities and violence of colonialism, encouraging
aspirations for a more humane and egalitarian future that spanned various
political hues and orientations. Their uses in the past and their legacy in
the present were, and still are, vast, heterogeneous and long‑lasting.
Visions of Empire offers us a glimpse into the contexts of production and the uses
of photography, connecting them to some of the main events and processes
that shaped the history of the modern Portuguese empire.
O «TERCEIRO IMPÉRIO COLONIAL» PORTUGUÊS ATRAVÉS DA FOTOGRAFIA Uma recolha polifacetada de fotografias que, acompanhadas de breves textos de contextualização, colocam em perspectiva a história, os eventos e os actores mais relevantes do império colonial português. Recuperam‑se passados coloniais diversos e oferecem‑se pistas para novas reflexões, mais apuradas, sobre as suas reverberações contemporâneas. «A produção e a disseminação da fotografia, operadas com propósitos diversos e com impactos desiguais, foram elementos constitutivos das formas de imaginação (geo)política, económica e sociocultural dos territórios coloniais, dos seus recursos e das suas populações. Serviram o expansionismo colonial de finais de Oitocentos, documentaram e exibiram o ‘outro’, as suas putativas ‘tradições’, os seus ‘usos e costumes’, o seu corpo e ‘alma’ (muitas vezes de modo indigno, despudorado e voyeurista, em especial no que dizia respeito ao género feminino), produzindo estereótipos e preconceitos resistentes ao tempo e ao conhecimento acumulado, que perduram até hoje.» — Da Introdução Com textos de: Aniceto Afonso, Cláudia Castelo, Mia Couto, Nuno Domingos, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Catarina Mateus, José Pedro Monteiro, Joana Pontes, Afonso Dias Ramos, Carmen Rosa, Myriam Taylor, Romaric Tisserand e Telma Tvon
EDIÇÃO BILINGUE PT | EN