Research Forum
Pigments of the Imagination: Fabricated Memory, Narrative and the Uncanny
Artists have long invoked notions of narrative and memory fabrication in their work. Using the Made Up theme of the Biennial as a launch-pad for a wider discussion on contemporary art practice as art history, this postgraduate research forum welcomes proposals from current or recently graduated postgraduate students that deal with story-telling, false memory, and the uncanny in art. This could include the familiar and the strange, memory fictions, fabrication as metaphor, embellishment, authenticity and impersonation and narratives of unreality.
£7 (£5.50 concessions), booking recommended
£4 (members)
This year’s Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art takes as its theme ‘Made up’. An artwork can fabricate a storied world, constructing a place from mythic narrative which inhabits an ‘Otherness’ that strikes at our sense of the uncanny. Hal Foster describes the uncanny as that which ‘renders the subject anxious and the phenomenon ambiguous, and this ambiguity produces an indistinction between the real and the imagined.’ Artists have long invoked such notions of narrative and memory fabrication in their work, from the moral tableaux of Hogarth, through to Mike Nelson’s invocation of an imaginary biker clan.
Using the themes of the Liverpool Biennial as a launch-pad to a wider discussion within contemporary art practice and art history, we welcome proposals from current or recently graduated postgraduate students that deal with story-telling, false memory, and the uncanny in art. Ideas for subject areas could include (but are not limited to):
- The Familiar and the Strange
- Memory Fictions
- Fabrication as Metaphor
- Embellishment
- Authenticity and Impersonation
- Narratives of Unreality
The panel will be chaired by Paul Domela, Liverpool Biennial.
Proposals for papers can be submitted to robert.knifton@tate.org.uk and should be no longer than one side of A4 in length. Please put ‘Pigments’ as the message subject. The deadline for submissions is Friday 19 September 2008.
