SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Short abstract:  Processes of memory survive through a myriad of artful skills. Their perduring performance adapts to specific contexts in order to communicate knowledge across time and space. This panel discusses imaginative solutions to remembrance which are generally avoided by historiographies of art.   Long abstract:  What are the particular artful practices which preserve knowledge across temporal and spatial boundaries? How is past learnt and lived in specific contexts? This panel invites papers which expand the notion of art to include the lived mnemotehnics, whether embodied or consciously (re)produced. Specific examples of tangible and intangible arts of memory may be informed, inter alia, by discussions of politics, religion, oral and written histories, importance of place and sense of belonging, materiality, cultural destruction and arts initiatives. Knowledge survives despite obstacles and violence of grand narratives. It is channelled through human and non-human agencies, in practices, places, artefacts, images, sounds and smells. As a cultural process, memory also becomes modified (and commodified), reappropriated and contested. It may be unconsciously essential to daily practices, but at times it is the silent language of resistance or at the forefront of social changes. Explorations into these phenomena, usually scattered amongst disciplines, are grouped here to build upon the notions of art, investigate the different modes of remembrance and understand their role in personal and communal histories. This panel invites interdisciplinary approaches to arts of memory, and encourages analyses of specific and contextualised examples.