Events by Anthropology and the Arts Network (ANTART)
FUTURE EVENTS
Upcoming workshop at EASA2024 in Barcelona
Flipping the Coin: Anthropology, art, and the potential of ideas in circulation
MACBA: Aula 0 - Wednesday, July 24, 7:30 pm
Led by María Inés Plaza Lazo, Founder of Arts of the Working Class, María Berrios, Director of Curatorial Programmes and Research at MACBA, and artist Michael Hart together with the ANTART convenors, this workshop invites participants to consider the terminologies and methodologies of their academic research to the end of entering into dialogue with research practice beyond the academy. What would that look like? How might we flip the coin to consider an anthropological and curatorial revision of art into meanings and systems from the streets? Arts of the Working Class is a multi-lingual street journal on poverty and wealth, art and society. Published every two months, street sellers earn money directly and vendors keep 100% of their sales. As a medium and platform, the newspaper creates special and sustainable connections between artists, workers, academics, urbanists, cultural and social institutions from different countries and languages and the most vulnerable members of society; those deeply affected by extreme poverty and disabled of participating of the kind of agency given to groups and individuals in the safe space of the academic field. This pursuit not only creates new ways of communicating and behaving around and through art, but also of direct redistribution and more sustainable dissemination of cultural capital: being space –material, immaterial– for participation in content production, discussion and dissemination. Moderated by AWC, the workshop proposes ways to do and undo research in a manner which constructs dialogue with people informally working on the streets of Barcelona.
Panel at EASA2024 in Barcelona
P245: Reconfiguring and expanding practices: Anthropology and the curatorial
PAST EVENTS
EASA – ANTART NETWORK WORKSHOP
“Re-worlding relations: Anthropology, art, and design”
November 10-11, 2023
Venue: Newcastle University
Guest speakers:
Professor Barbara Glowczewski (Anthropologist, French National Scientific Research Center, CNRS)
Professor Anna Maria Guasch (Art Historian, University of Barcelona)
In this symposium we take up the concept of worlding to explore practices of arranging the world otherwise and to test a theoretical compass mediated by sensibility and sustainability. Worlding is an idea with a complex genealogy despite, or perhaps because of, its Heideggarian lineage which Gayatari Spivak locates as central to the maintenance of an ongoing coloniality. And yet, worlding allows us to enact a plurality of thinking and practice to contest hegemonic structures, values, and ways of being. It also centres material processes and practices as the means to glimpse how to craft alternative forms of life and relations. We wish to explore: How might anthropology, art, and design - each deeply relational modes of knowledge production and sensory experience – come together to refract the course of a universal modernity? How might such alliances propose alternative forms of organisation and living in-with the world(s)? How might anthropology, art, and design set out paths of re-worlding for new sensible and sustainable relations that move us toward a pluriversal existence? How might such processes occur, be they in the studio, the academy, or virtually through digital forms? What forms of narrativisation and what kinds of knowledge might be produced by re-worlding processes?
Panels at EASA Conference 2022, Belfast, UK
P072: Hopeful chronopolitics: contemporary art and ethnography
Talks and Podcast
Between December 2020 and June 2021, the ANTART network hosted a series of public online talks with 10 of the 15 artists/anthropologists who contributed to our 2020 exhibition, Field/works, with invited guests. Moderated by Jennifer Clarke and Maxime Le Calvé, these conversations between anthropology and the arts have been published as podcasts and will be available for the next two years.
Access: Apple Podcast or Soundcloud.
Field/Works.
Kaleidoscopic activities between anthropology and art
ANTART “Field/works” online exhibition
2020 Location: Online
2021 Location: Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon
While ANTART hosted a panel at EASA 2020 (P023): ‘Anthropology and Art: on the dynamics and polemics of situating definitions of art’ convened by the Network Convenors (Clarke, Laine, and Le Calvé), the Network also played a special role at the 2020 EASA conference, by initiating and curating an exhibition organised in collaboration with local (Lisbon) institutional partners and artists. The exhibition was curated by Jennifer Clarke, Anna Laine, and Maxime Le Calvé, in collaboration with a local partner Fernando Dias and Jorge dos Reis from FBAUL ((Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon). Initially intended as a physical exhibition, we successfully transitioned to a virtual exhibition and events in July 2020, which is still available to view. The exhibition was primarily funded by EASA (covering artist fees and small design costs) as part of the EASA2020 conference. With design students from our partner FBAUL, and the support of EASA’s organisers, nomadit, we created a new website to present this exhibition, which is envisioned as an ongoing platform for the current network.
For anthropologists and artists “doing fieldwork” in contemporary worlds, art can be much more than an object of investigation. Curation and creation through visual, audio, or performing arts are at the heart of our work, extending the established anthropological interest in writing as a medium of thought and knowledge sharing. Our exhibition invited and presented works by anthropologists and artists who break disciplinary boundaries, and whose practice foregrounds experimental, and open approaches to the theme “field/works”.The opening event was advertised on the EASA conference page and had more than 100 guests. The social media page (Facebook) reached around 900 people. The website shows the work of 17 artists and anthropologists (and interdisciplinary collaboration modes) in a virtual exhibition, including 2 artists who are part of the seminal collective Ethnographic Terminalia. (AAA), which Field/Works has been inspired by.
The Trouble with Art - 2019 ANTART Meeting
The 2019 Symposium of the Anthropology and the Arts EASA Network (ANTART) took place from 21-22 September 2019 at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin under the title THE TROUBLE WITH ART. Philistinism, Iconoclasm, and Skepticism of Art in Anthropology. It was funded by EASA and CARMAH, with kind support of CARMAH staff.
Art has always occupied an ambivalent position in anthropology; it has been subject to both fascination and scepticism. Alfred Gell went as far as positing that anthropology is essentially anti-art, advocating instead a ‘methodological philistinism’ and ‘resolute indifference’ in our study of modern and contemporary art. Aesthetics has often been questioned as a Western, Bourgeois construct. The anthropology of art historically departed from this paradoxical, iconoclastic rejection of art practice and in particular, art theory. In this workshop, we explored the foundations of the iconoclastic ethos of anthropology, and sought to reassess the role of art within the discipline. What is the trouble with art in anthropology? Our aim was to examine how the anthropology of art can be re-founded, from a paradoxical sub-field, to a contribution to the theoretical problems of anthropology, and a critical discipline of contemporary societies.
In three panels, one roundtable, one performance intervention, and a gallery visit, panelists and speakers problematised the role of art in anthropology, as well as anthropology’s ‘philistine protocols’. It was discussed how and to what extent iconoclasm is both a subject of anthropology as well as of artistic practices; and how or in what sense skepticism towards and in art can be mobilized as a generative way to think about the future of the field of art no longer as a subfield, but a central concern for anthropology.
More information, photos, and recordings from the event will be made available on the CARMAH website and on the network page: http://www.carmah.berlin/events/easa-antart-2019/
The meeting also concluded in discussions about the future of the network, in particular the hand-over of its convening team. Roger Sansi (Barcelona) and Jonas Tinius (Berlin), who had been convening the network since its founding in 2017 will be passing on the convening role to two teams of four convenors who will be responsible for the network in the coming years. Roger and Jonas will remain affiliated with the convening teams, and pass over to the teams for the new year (2020).
Full programme and abstracts here
Panel: Tinius, Jonas (convenor): The Future of Anthropological Representation: Contemporary Art and/in the Ethnographic Museum: The Future of Anthropological Representation.
Panel at Royal Anthropological Institute Major Conference ‘Art, Materiality, and Representation’, British Museum/SOAS, London/UK. 1-3 June 2018.
Workshop: ‘Art and Alterity: Anthropological Perspectives’. Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Institute of European Ethnology, Berlin/Germany, 13-14 September 2018.
Summer School: ‘Ethnography of the Arts / Art of Ethnography'. Summer School at Villa Arson, jointly organised by FU Berlin and Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, Nice/France. 17-24 September 2017
Ethnographies of Curating/the Curatorial (Margareta von Oswald, Christine Gerbich, Franka Schneider, Anna Schäffler, Jonas Tinius). Faculty Seminar, Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin/Germany. 13 December 2016.
Reviewer meets reviewed (Anthropology, Art, and the gift - Roger Sansi and Jonas Tinius). Seminar at the British Museum, organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute, London/UK. 17 November 2016.
Contemporary Anthropologies of Art Workshop. Convened by Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius, Department of Anthropology, University of Durham/UK. 8 September 2015. Keynote: Prof Arnd Schneider (Anthropology, Oslo).
Encountering Concepts in Art and Anthropology, Workshop at the Universitat de Barcelona/Spain, 11-12 June 2015. Download report
Anthropologies of Art Lab (L200), EASA Conference, Tallinn/Estonia, 3 August 2014.
Relational Patrons: Perspectives on intimate and transnational art collaborations (Panel, convened by Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius). European Association of Social Anthropology Conference 2014. Talinn/Estonia, 2 August 2014.
