Group Meeting 13/03/14

We worked in groups to try and decipher which printed images of artists' works fit into which theme. We found that numerous pieces of work could have been placed in a number of themes, emphasising how these themes overlap and revealing what kind of content might be situated under these words. We delved further into what each theme could mean and the kinds of words and concepts that would fit under that umbrella. The following themes are of my greatest interest:

• Memory: "This anthology investigates the turn in art not only towards archives and histories, the relics of modernities past, but towards the phenomena, in themselves, of "haunting" and the activation of memory. It looks at a wide array of artistic relationships to memory association, repetition and reappearance, as well as forms of "active" forgetting. Art that engages with memory embodied in material and spatial conditions is examined beside works that reflect upon memory's effect through time, and yet others that enlist the agency of remembrance or forgetting to work through aspects of the numerous pasts by which the present is always haunted.
  
• Ruins: "The abiding interest of artists in ruination and decay has led in particular to the concept of the modern ruin - an ambiguous site of artistic and architectural modernism, personal and collective memories, and the cultural afterlife of eras such as those of state communism and colonialism. Contemporary art's explorations of the ruin can evoke on the one hand diverse experiences of nostalgia and on the other hand a ceaselessly renewed encounter with catastrophes of the recent past and apprehensions of the future. For every relic of a harmonious era or utopian dream stands another recalling industrial decline, environmental disaster, and the depredations of war.
  
• Time: This anthology contextualises art that proposes alternatives to the models of linear time that have underpinned both capitalism and progressive modernity. Contemporary art has explored such diverse registers of temporality as 'wasting and waiting;regression and repetition; deja vu and seriality; unrealized possibilities and and idleness; non-consummation and counter productivity; the belated and the premature; the disjointed and the out-of-sync - all of which go against sequentialist time and index slips in chronological experience.'