Hauntopia / What if

Concept: Anette Baldauf, Renate Lorenz and the PhD-in-Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

In times of violent political upheaval, the exhibition explores the conjuring of specters as a proper method of arts-based research. They welcome the appearance of ghosts—events, signs, images, practices and objects that recount the ferocities of the past, while also holding the potentiality of a different future. Building on a glossary of hauntopic devices, the exhibited works make use of formats that employ ephemeral, opaque, or sci-fi elements and explore a range of ghostly aesthetics.

Artists: Aline Benecke, Katalin Erdődi, Zsuzsi Flohr, Sílvia das Fadas, Moira Hille, Zosia Holubowska, Hristina Ivanoska, Janine Jembere, Ruth Jenrbekova, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Rafal Morusiewicz, Lisa Nyberg, Read-in, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, Masha Godovannaya, Keiko Uenishi

Conference: September 8–9, 2017  
The conference employs the concept of haunting to create a language for the ways in which an unfinished past makes itself known in the here and now (Avery Gordon) and violent histories, or stories, initiate ongoing disruptions, wronging the wrong (Eve Tuck). Haunting often takes place when an official narrative insists that the violence of subjection and injustice is overcome (e.g. after the liberation from colonialism, after Stonewall, at the end of a war) or when their oppressiveness is strictly denied. Now ghosts “appear” as agency in-between subjectivities, images, and spaces and insist on a response. As the haunting becomes real, it stimulates an imagination of how things could be otherwise. What are the means and possibilities of our inquiries to welcome the specters of the past and make unresolved social violence demand its due?

Keynote lectures: Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara) and Eve Tuck (University of Toronto)

The conference is organized in collaboration with the European Artistic Research Network (EARN).

The Research Pavilion: Utopia of Access is created and hosted by Uniarts Helsinki and realized together with the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme and the Swedish Art Universities’ collaboration Konstex in co-operation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Zurich University of the Arts.