[Liuhum] Seminar invitation 11/11

[Olga Zabalueva]

Dear colleagues!

Warm welcome to this week’s joint seminar by Tema Q, Tema G and LiU Humanities:

Redi Koobak, University of Bergen,

“Aesthetic Modes of Implication: Evoking Common Grounds of Injustice”
Thursday 11 November, 13-15
Tvärsnittet (Kopparhammaren 7) + hybrid on Zoom (https://liu-se.zoom.us/j/69992182037)

In this talk, I discuss the Tallinn-based artist Kristina Norman’s work on asylum seekers in Estonia. Known for her interdisciplinary artistic practice, Norman is devoted to creating sharp, provocative documentary and research-based art projects about human rights and the politics of memory. I will focus her video installation Common Ground (2013) where she juxtaposes the stories of Estonians who fled to Sweden in 1944 with narratives of contemporary asylum seekers waiting for their asylum decision in an isolated place in 2013. I examine how Norman’s project brought refugee issues to the collective consciousness in Estonia at a time when there were no significant local discussions around this. The artist uses a historical comparison not because she wants to equalize the experiences of these two sets of gendered and racialised refugees, set apart in time and space, but because she wants to highlight the (dis)similarities between experiences of hospitality regarding basic human needs such as food, water, shelter, physical and mental well-being (Koobak and Thapar-Björkert 2020). Arguably then her project constitutes both an interventionist practice and a communicative tool for understanding (in)hospitable political landscapes in Europe. Through close reading this artwork, I hope to open up for questions about the notion of complicity and its relationship to racism in Europe in the visual realm, in particular zooming in on the role of Eastern Europeans as “implicated subjects” (Rothberg 2019) in the European project which must be identified as a civilizational (Dzenovska 2018) and colonial.

Redi Koobak is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK), University of Bergen, Norway. She has worked as Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at Linköping University, Sweden and as Visiting Lecturer in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. Her research interests include feminist visual culture studies and contemporary art; intersections of postcolonialism and postsocialism; cultural representations of gender, war and nationalism; transnational and local feminisms; and creative writing methodologies. She is the editor, with Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, of the volume Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (Routledge 2021).



Best regards
Olga Zabalueva
PhD student
[Linköping University]
Department of Culture and Society (IKOS), Tema Q
IKOS PhD Council
581 83 Linköping
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