CONFERENCE
The Past 100 Years, Part 1: WdW Review Offline
Saturday 28 February 2015 Location: Witte de With, 3rd floor Ours is a time in which pseudoreality prevails. Nations and corporations vie for our desires by peddling narratives against counter-narratives, which cancel each other out through competition and ultimately produce social anxiety and frenzy. As the adage goes: if you can cut people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded. The Past 100 Years, Part 1: WdW Review Offline, is a conference that discusses the destabilizing wake, and subsequent geopolitical reformations, that can be traced to the demise of two centuries-old empires: the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman. Join us at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, as we investigate how affect was marshaled to bind these and other empires together, sometimes in friendship, and other times as adversaries, while we also trace a longer arc to see how chains of alternate histories and tales are still being traded in these former geographic areas. This conference, staged with and through the institutions’ online platform WdW Review, consists of three registers: a critical section of keynote lectures and a film screening; a set of interpretative image readings of artworks featured in the exhibition The Sultan’s World at BOZAR, Brussels; and a geographic panel session based on WdW Review’s international network of editorial desks in Cairo, Istanbul, Moscow, and Rotterdam. Artist Dan Perjovschi will stage a series of visual interventions during the day.
WDW REVIEW OFFLINE