Astrid N. Korporaal | Kingston University, London (original) (raw)
Papers by Astrid N. Korporaal
Third Text, 2024
This interlude follows the AAH conference, when all of the authors who contribute to the special ... more This interlude follows the AAH conference, when all of the authors who contribute to the special journal edition are present. Their wide-ranging conversation covers the idea and possibilities of a polyphonic history of art. This interlude is a starting point, a jumping off point from where a group of authors, researchers and artists reflect on new ways of thinking about, and new ways of presenting, art history. Their conversation develops an ambition to move away from the well-trodden and often reductive methodological frameworks of art history, as they debate ideas around transnationalism, globalism, artist-centric art histories and the idea of artist as author. This interlude is about collective endeavours, both by the subjects being discussed in each paper, and by the authors who are writing about them.
Futures, Jan 31, 2024
The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompan... more The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompanied by the promise of simulating utopian futures. The visions they conjure include limitless options for opening, exploring, and expanding new worlds. However, these tropes reproduce settler-colonial attitudes to space, time, and civilizational progress. They project the militarized and consumerist roles of neoliberal western societies into the future, while hiding their negative effects across past and present environments. In this article, I ask whether virtual worlds can be used to connect users with reparative futures. Looking at artworks by Colombian artist Ana María Millán and Chinese artist Cao Fei, I discuss how they intervene into existing virtual landscapes and aesthetics to question their modes of co-creation. I argue that they combine recontextualization, roleplay and rehearsal as forms of reparative practice. They resist narratives of exceptional authorship and agency in favor of pluralized approaches to the future. Rather than supporting the gamified erasure of existing worlds, these works hold space for loss, memory, and survival. By redistributing responsibility for harm from below and imaginations beyond the horizon of dominant visibility, these practices approach reparative futures.
Futures, 2024
The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompan... more The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompanied by the promise of simulating utopian futures. The visions they conjure include limitless options for opening, exploring, and expanding new worlds. However, these tropes reproduce settler-colonial attitudes to space, time, and civilizational progress. They project the militarized and consumerist roles of neoliberal western societies into the future, while hiding their negative effects across past and present environments. In this article, I ask whether virtual worlds can be used to connect users with reparative futures. Looking at artworks by Colombian artist Ana María Millán and Chinese artist Cao Fei, I discuss how they intervene into existing virtual landscapes and aesthetics to question their modes of co-creation. I argue that they combine recontextualization, roleplay and rehearsal as forms of reparative practice. They resist narratives of exceptional authorship and agency in favor of pluralized approaches to the future. Rather than supporting the gamified erasure of existing worlds, these works hold space for loss, memory, and survival. By redistributing responsibility for harm from below and imaginations beyond the horizon of dominant visibility, these practices approach reparative futures.
MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 2023
Luna Marán is a producer, director, cinematographer, exhibitor, and cultural manager. Born and ra... more Luna Marán is a producer, director, cinematographer, exhibitor, and cultural manager. Born and raised in the Indigenous Zapotec community of Guelatao de Juaréz, Oaxaca, she has worked for over a decade in out-of-school education, through the guiding principles of gender equality, diversity, and communality. I spoke with Marán about the role of emancipation in her work, particularly in the way it connects to the Zapotec culture and their philosophy of ‘comunalidad.’
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Nov 9, 2020
Archivo Papers , 2023
This article looks at the Dutch and Surinamese Maroon film Stones Have Laws (Dee Sitonu a Weti, 2... more This article looks at the Dutch and Surinamese Maroon film Stones Have Laws (Dee Sitonu a Weti, 2018), as an example of unlearning colonial modes of perception, authorship, participation, and framing reality, through transcultural collaboration. Exploring the tension between the image as document and as medium, I look at the ways this project interacts with the history of ethnographic filmmaking in its observational, reflexive, and participatory forms, and the postcolonial notion of the returned gaze. Connecting Indigenous, decolonial and phenomenological theories of the reciprocity of vision and plurality of lifeworlds, I argue that this work demonstrates how the image can act as a reminder of the ways our senses and conceptions of reality are interrelated with that of more-than-human beings and environments. Translocal collaborations call on both filmmakers and viewers to co-create a vision that is shaped by multiplicity, consent, temporal commitment, and contextual grounding.
Performance Paradigm, 2021
Although parrhesia as a term is rarely used, its attributes appear to be more and more pervasive ... more Although parrhesia as a term is rarely used, its attributes appear to be more and more pervasive elements of the contemporary po- litical sphere, with assertions of risk-taking, truth-telling and fulfilling a moral duty slipping into the vocabulary and aesthetics of political speech, campaigns, activism and institutional critique.
In this piece of writing, I approach two main questions. Firstly, might it be possible to think o... more In this piece of writing, I approach two main questions. Firstly, might it be possible to think of land reclamation projects as creative interventions, instead of as expansionist or disruptive practices? Secondly, how could this approach open up a different way of thinking about the relations between knowledge transfer, contemporary art and ecology? Finally, I would like to connect the issues related to coastal tactics to artistic practices dealing with instability and flexibility, need and creativity in relation to space. My aim is to examine the ‘natural’ creativity of spatial tactics emerging from and intervening into the border between land and water, between man and sea, and their social, cultural and political effects. By considering instances of creative knowledge transfer related to living with the tide, it may become possible to break through more established notions of watery circulations on a global scale.
In order to explore the role of creativity in the production of space, I will refer theoretical notions on the relation between nature, politics and ecological thought, by such authors as Felix Guattari, on ‘ecosophy’, and Bruno Latour, on ‘cosmopolitics’. The grounding of this theory will take place through case studies of specific artistic practices, which deal with spatial practices and the shaping of channels for knowledge transfer and social interrelation, namely those of Robert Smithson, Goldin & Senneby and Francis Alÿs.
Articles by Astrid N. Korporaal
A recent curatorial collaboration between London’s Lisson Gallery and a new art initiative in Cai... more A recent curatorial collaboration between London’s Lisson Gallery and a new art initiative in Cairo called Beirut takes the different social and political contexts in which the organizations operate and makes them productive towards an examination of statecraft. Conceived as a platform for artistic exchange, The Magic of the State exists as a pair of interconnected exhibitions, presenting different works by the same group of contemporary artists.
An outsider among outsiders, Kelley's fascination with the sub-cultural combines a unique aesthet... more An outsider among outsiders, Kelley's fascination with the sub-cultural combines a unique aesthetics and sense of humor in a way that invites associations with the works of artists as diverse as British artists Tracy Emin or Jeremy Deller and LA-based contemporaries such as John Baldessari or Paul McCarthy.
A grey film lies heavy over the planet's skin, a blue light fanning outwards from the pierced fra... more A grey film lies heavy over the planet's skin, a blue light fanning outwards from the pierced fragment of a bullet-hole.
Talks and Presentations by Astrid N. Korporaal
A talk on some of the ways contemporary female artists produce knowledges that avoid the active-p... more A talk on some of the ways contemporary female artists produce knowledges that avoid the active-passive distinction, and how their work complicates both identity politics and ideas of embodiment in ways that foreshadow and mix theories of post-humanism, performativity and new materialism. Fragility enters into this narrative not as a passive state of being or origin, but as a way of understanding methodology and the role of the artist/curator/writer: an ongoing process of becoming undone, passing through experiences of splitting, breaking and multiplication in order to extend and diffract beyond the notion of a unified self.
Journal Articles + by Astrid N. Korporaal
Third Text
collaborative writing experiment for Polyphony issue
Third Text, 2024
This interlude follows the AAH conference, when all of the authors who contribute to the special ... more This interlude follows the AAH conference, when all of the authors who contribute to the special journal edition are present. Their wide-ranging conversation covers the idea and possibilities of a polyphonic history of art. This interlude is a starting point, a jumping off point from where a group of authors, researchers and artists reflect on new ways of thinking about, and new ways of presenting, art history. Their conversation develops an ambition to move away from the well-trodden and often reductive methodological frameworks of art history, as they debate ideas around transnationalism, globalism, artist-centric art histories and the idea of artist as author. This interlude is about collective endeavours, both by the subjects being discussed in each paper, and by the authors who are writing about them.
Futures, Jan 31, 2024
The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompan... more The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompanied by the promise of simulating utopian futures. The visions they conjure include limitless options for opening, exploring, and expanding new worlds. However, these tropes reproduce settler-colonial attitudes to space, time, and civilizational progress. They project the militarized and consumerist roles of neoliberal western societies into the future, while hiding their negative effects across past and present environments. In this article, I ask whether virtual worlds can be used to connect users with reparative futures. Looking at artworks by Colombian artist Ana María Millán and Chinese artist Cao Fei, I discuss how they intervene into existing virtual landscapes and aesthetics to question their modes of co-creation. I argue that they combine recontextualization, roleplay and rehearsal as forms of reparative practice. They resist narratives of exceptional authorship and agency in favor of pluralized approaches to the future. Rather than supporting the gamified erasure of existing worlds, these works hold space for loss, memory, and survival. By redistributing responsibility for harm from below and imaginations beyond the horizon of dominant visibility, these practices approach reparative futures.
Futures, 2024
The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompan... more The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompanied by the promise of simulating utopian futures. The visions they conjure include limitless options for opening, exploring, and expanding new worlds. However, these tropes reproduce settler-colonial attitudes to space, time, and civilizational progress. They project the militarized and consumerist roles of neoliberal western societies into the future, while hiding their negative effects across past and present environments. In this article, I ask whether virtual worlds can be used to connect users with reparative futures. Looking at artworks by Colombian artist Ana María Millán and Chinese artist Cao Fei, I discuss how they intervene into existing virtual landscapes and aesthetics to question their modes of co-creation. I argue that they combine recontextualization, roleplay and rehearsal as forms of reparative practice. They resist narratives of exceptional authorship and agency in favor of pluralized approaches to the future. Rather than supporting the gamified erasure of existing worlds, these works hold space for loss, memory, and survival. By redistributing responsibility for harm from below and imaginations beyond the horizon of dominant visibility, these practices approach reparative futures.
MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 2023
Luna Marán is a producer, director, cinematographer, exhibitor, and cultural manager. Born and ra... more Luna Marán is a producer, director, cinematographer, exhibitor, and cultural manager. Born and raised in the Indigenous Zapotec community of Guelatao de Juaréz, Oaxaca, she has worked for over a decade in out-of-school education, through the guiding principles of gender equality, diversity, and communality. I spoke with Marán about the role of emancipation in her work, particularly in the way it connects to the Zapotec culture and their philosophy of ‘comunalidad.’
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Nov 9, 2020
Archivo Papers , 2023
This article looks at the Dutch and Surinamese Maroon film Stones Have Laws (Dee Sitonu a Weti, 2... more This article looks at the Dutch and Surinamese Maroon film Stones Have Laws (Dee Sitonu a Weti, 2018), as an example of unlearning colonial modes of perception, authorship, participation, and framing reality, through transcultural collaboration. Exploring the tension between the image as document and as medium, I look at the ways this project interacts with the history of ethnographic filmmaking in its observational, reflexive, and participatory forms, and the postcolonial notion of the returned gaze. Connecting Indigenous, decolonial and phenomenological theories of the reciprocity of vision and plurality of lifeworlds, I argue that this work demonstrates how the image can act as a reminder of the ways our senses and conceptions of reality are interrelated with that of more-than-human beings and environments. Translocal collaborations call on both filmmakers and viewers to co-create a vision that is shaped by multiplicity, consent, temporal commitment, and contextual grounding.
Performance Paradigm, 2021
Although parrhesia as a term is rarely used, its attributes appear to be more and more pervasive ... more Although parrhesia as a term is rarely used, its attributes appear to be more and more pervasive elements of the contemporary po- litical sphere, with assertions of risk-taking, truth-telling and fulfilling a moral duty slipping into the vocabulary and aesthetics of political speech, campaigns, activism and institutional critique.
In this piece of writing, I approach two main questions. Firstly, might it be possible to think o... more In this piece of writing, I approach two main questions. Firstly, might it be possible to think of land reclamation projects as creative interventions, instead of as expansionist or disruptive practices? Secondly, how could this approach open up a different way of thinking about the relations between knowledge transfer, contemporary art and ecology? Finally, I would like to connect the issues related to coastal tactics to artistic practices dealing with instability and flexibility, need and creativity in relation to space. My aim is to examine the ‘natural’ creativity of spatial tactics emerging from and intervening into the border between land and water, between man and sea, and their social, cultural and political effects. By considering instances of creative knowledge transfer related to living with the tide, it may become possible to break through more established notions of watery circulations on a global scale.
In order to explore the role of creativity in the production of space, I will refer theoretical notions on the relation between nature, politics and ecological thought, by such authors as Felix Guattari, on ‘ecosophy’, and Bruno Latour, on ‘cosmopolitics’. The grounding of this theory will take place through case studies of specific artistic practices, which deal with spatial practices and the shaping of channels for knowledge transfer and social interrelation, namely those of Robert Smithson, Goldin & Senneby and Francis Alÿs.
A recent curatorial collaboration between London’s Lisson Gallery and a new art initiative in Cai... more A recent curatorial collaboration between London’s Lisson Gallery and a new art initiative in Cairo called Beirut takes the different social and political contexts in which the organizations operate and makes them productive towards an examination of statecraft. Conceived as a platform for artistic exchange, The Magic of the State exists as a pair of interconnected exhibitions, presenting different works by the same group of contemporary artists.
An outsider among outsiders, Kelley's fascination with the sub-cultural combines a unique aesthet... more An outsider among outsiders, Kelley's fascination with the sub-cultural combines a unique aesthetics and sense of humor in a way that invites associations with the works of artists as diverse as British artists Tracy Emin or Jeremy Deller and LA-based contemporaries such as John Baldessari or Paul McCarthy.
A grey film lies heavy over the planet's skin, a blue light fanning outwards from the pierced fra... more A grey film lies heavy over the planet's skin, a blue light fanning outwards from the pierced fragment of a bullet-hole.
A talk on some of the ways contemporary female artists produce knowledges that avoid the active-p... more A talk on some of the ways contemporary female artists produce knowledges that avoid the active-passive distinction, and how their work complicates both identity politics and ideas of embodiment in ways that foreshadow and mix theories of post-humanism, performativity and new materialism. Fragility enters into this narrative not as a passive state of being or origin, but as a way of understanding methodology and the role of the artist/curator/writer: an ongoing process of becoming undone, passing through experiences of splitting, breaking and multiplication in order to extend and diffract beyond the notion of a unified self.
Third Text
collaborative writing experiment for Polyphony issue