Seminar
Art practices and models of political resistance between the Atlantic and the Pacific
Aula Magna, Facultad de Geografía e Historia, Universidad de Barcelona,
18 November 2015, 9.45 – 14.00

On the basis of various case studies, this symposium wants to study the ways modernism and modernity (considered representatives of a colonial structure of thinking) served as subversive tools and models of resistance by giving voice to subaltern agents within the context of Cold War politics. Adopting a postcolonial approach, it will seek to undermine Western epistemologies, invoking issues of ideological, as well as racial and identificational nature; such issues areunderstood as mechanisms of resistance against as well as negotiation with the cultural imperialism embodied by the political positioning of the countries in the transatlantic axis. Departing from the concept of “decentralized modernity(/ies)” it proposes to examine the various configurations of artistic modernity between the Atlantic and the Pacific, as well as studying their twofold (artistic and political) dissident potential, as the catalysts of the global imaginaries that determined the Cold War period and contributed to shape today’s world.

Program
9.45-10.00 > Opening remarks
10-00-10.45 > Keynote by Jonathan Harris (Birmingham City University): From Cold War Modernity to postcolonial Contemporaneity: Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and technologies of democratic resistance in South Korean art since the 1990s.
10.45-11.15 > Fabiola Martínez (Saint Louis University): No hay mas ruta que la nuestra: Art, politics, and identity in Mexico during the 1950s
11.15-11.45 > Coffee Break
11.45-12.15 > Paula Barreiro López (UB): Modern Art and the “Third World”: Globalising the Cultural Guerrilla in revolutionary Cuba
12.15-12.45 > Jaime Vindel (UCM): Shards of an artistic-political experience: impacts of Tucumán Arde in the international art context in the early 1970s (in Spanish).
12.45-13. 15 > Laia Manonelles (UB): Dissidence as a product or as a critical device. Experimental art in China (in Spanish).
13.15-14.00 > Round-table (chair: Olga Fernández López)

Scientific committee:

Paula Barreiro López, Olga Fernández López and Jonathan Harris

Multimedia

Galeria