Graduate Students in Art History invite all to a full day of events during the symposium "Fictions and Frictions: The Politics and Power of Narrative." Registration will begin at 8:30 am in the Link Gallery. The Symposium will begin at 9 am.
The construction of a counternarrative can be a strategy for political resistance, revealing power structures by articulating a perspective on social reality alternative to the dominant or norm. Yet, alternative realities are not always positive or emancipatory, as demonstrated by the proliferation of claims of “fake news” and “alternative facts.”
When multiple narratives collide into each other, they create friction at their edges. In that friction, we might find new perspectives and possibilities. As Jacques Rancière has argued in The Politics of Aesthetics, “Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions,’ that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done”.
This symposium will focus on narrative edges in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of the way that visual and performative fictions function politically.
For a full conference schedule and more information, please visit the symposium website.
Sponsored in part by the Society for Art History and Archeology, School of Art + Design Visitors Committee, Modern Art Colloquium, and the Student Organization Resource Fund
