Images as witnesses to history, materialized memories or their active co-creators? The multi-faceted relationship between the past and its visual representations will be the main focus of the 7th edition of the international genealogies of memory conference to be held in Warsaw on 6-8 December. The agenda features inter alia lectures by Ernst van Alphen, Robert Hariman, Constantin Parvulescu and Wojciech Suchocki, as well as Mieke Bal leading the tour of her own video-installations entitled “Dis-Remembered: A Long History of Madness” and “Mis-Remembered: Reasonable Doubt”.

6-8 December 2017

Presentation

Images as witnesses to history, materialized memories or their active co-creators? The multi-faceted relationship between the past and its visual representations will be the main focus of the 7th edition of the international Genealogies of Memory conference to be held in Warsaw on 6-8 December. The agenda features inter alia lectures by Ernst van Alphen, Robert Hariman, Constantin Parvulescu and Wojciech Suchocki, as well as Mieke Bal leading the tour of her own video-installations entitled “Dis-Remembered: A Long History of Madness” and “Mis-Remembered: Reasonable Doubt”.

The objective of the conference Image, History and Memory. Genealogies of Memory in Central and Eastern Europe is to stimulate interdisciplinary reflection on signs and images in the context of building historical narratives. How do images and visualisations impact our understanding of history? How do they co-shape – or maybe generate – the content of collective memory? The examples to be discussed will include a wide range of topics : from the most obvious ones like documentary photographs, monuments or artistic reinterpretations of past events to the less obvious ones, such as selfies taken by tourists against the backdrop of memorial sites. The full programme of the conference is available at: http://bit.ly/Genealogies2017.

Interested in attending the conference in Warsaw? There are three more days in which you can register at: bit.ly/GenealogiesRegistration – admission is free.

For those unable to attend the conference, the ENRS will provide a live streaming of the whole event, via the ENRS YouTube channel: youtube.com/enrs2012. All updates regarding the streaming will be posted on: bit.ly/Genealogies-Watch-Online.   

Conference programme

Day 1 | Wednesday, 6 Decemeber 2017

9:00 Registration
9:30 Welcome

• Rafał Rogulski, Director of the Institute of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity
• Juliusz Szymczak-Gałkowski, Director of the Department of International Cooperation, Ministry of Science and Higher Education
• Joanna Wawrzyniak, Initiator of the Genealogies of Memory in Central and Eastern Europe programme

10:00 Opening Remarks: Piotr Juszkiewicz (Poland)

10:15 Keynote Lecture: Mieke Bal (Netherlands), Dis-Remembered and Mis-Remembered: A Confrontation with Failures of Cultural Memory

Chair: Anna Kutaj-Markowska (Poland)

11:15 Coffee Break

11:45 Panel A. Remembrance, History, Image: Theories and Cognitive Perspectives

Chair: Joanna Wawrzyniak (Poland)

• Vitalii Ogiienko (Ukraine), Image of the Starving Little Girl: From Initial Traumatic Holodomor Experience to Media Icon
• Andrei Nacu (Romania), The Relation between the Family Album and the Re-evaluation of Romania’s Communist Past
• Filip Lipiński (Poland), Stratified Image. Medium, Construction and Memory in Frank Stella’s Polish Villages
• Florin Abraham (Romania), Histor(iograph)y and Memory in ‘Post-Truth Era’. Towards a European Public Sphere? Some Theoretical Considerations

Written Presentation: Tomasz Szerszeń (Poland), Memory, Photography, History. Post-Soviet Auto-photo-biographies

Commentary: Luiza Nader (Poland)

14:15 Lunch Break

• 15:00 Keynote Lecture: Wojciech Suchocki (Poland), Matejko. How Was He Doing This?

Chair: Csaba György Kiss (Hungary)

16:00 Coffee Break

16:30 Panel B. Image and Historiosophy: Artistic Reflection on the Subject of History and Remembrance

Chair: Ewa Kociszewska (Poland)

• Tatiana Tereshchenko (Russia), Greek Vase Painting: Polysemantic Rethinking of History in the Images of the Others
• Justyna Balisz-Schmelz (Poland), Pictures for the Fathers. Baselitz’s Heldenbilder as Counterimages of the Socialist and Fascist Body
• Dorota Kownacka (Poland), Against Illusion. Abstraction towards the Reality. Kuno Raeber’s Material Turn. Karl Rössing’s Wood- and Linocut and the War Experience                   Aspect
• Roma Sendyka (Poland), ‘Hobbled Images’ as Memorial Documents for Underrepresented Events. Regaining Past through Reading the Affective and                           Recognizing the Precursory

Commentary: Katja Bernhardt (Germany)

Day 2 | Thursday, 7 December 2017

• 10:00 Keynote Lecture: Ernst van Alphen (Netherlands), Legacies of Stalinism and the Gulag: Manifestations of Trauma and Postmemory

Chair: Jan Rydel (Poland)

11:00  Coffee Break

11:30  Panel C. Images of History versus Remembrance

• Anastasia Pavlovskaya (Russia), ‘How Should a Monument to Pushkin Look Like?’:  The Pushkin Monument in Leningrad Discussion (1936-1937) and the Stalinist                        Memorial Culture
• Olli Kleemola (Finland), Building the Finnish National Mythos: Photographs from the Russo-Finnish Winter War 1939–1940
• Michał Haake (Poland), Picture and History. Exhibitions of Art as a Tool of Validation of Communist Authority in Poland
• Maria Khorolskaya (Russia), The Everyday in the GDR in Individual, Cultural and Political Memory

Commentary: Zuzanna Bogumił (Poland)

14:00 Lunch Break

15:00 Tadeusz J. Żuchowski (Poland), Introductory Remarks. Between Monument and Memorial

15:10 Panel D. Monuments as a Remembrance Image

• Burcin Cakir (Scotland), Diplomacy and Dead: Construction of Gallipoli War Memorials and State Agency
• Olga Barbasiewicz (Poland), Hidden Memory and Memorials. Remembering Korean Victims in Hiroshima
• Ksenia Surikova (Russia), Images of Memory: Monuments and Memorials of Second World War in Russia and Belarus
• Yaroslav Pasko (Ukraine), Monuments as a Factor of Historical Memory and Identity Threat: Donbas and Ukraine

Written Presentation: Alicja Melzacka (Poland), Contemporary Art as a New Counter-Monument

Commentary: Tadeusz J. Żuchowski (Poland)

17:30  Coffee Break

18:00  Curatorial Tour through Mieke Bal’s Exhibition entitled: Dis-Remembered: A Long History of Madness, Mis-Remembered: Reasonable Doubt

Day 3 | Friday, 8 December 2017

10:00 Keynote Lecture: Robert Hariman (USA), New Media, Old Discourse: Relocating the Public Image

Chair: Michaela Marek (Germany)

11:00 Coffee Break

11:30 Panel E. Image in Popular Culture and New Media: Remembrance Medium, Fabric of History

Chair: Michaela Marek (Germany)

• Andrei Linchenko (Russia), Between Memory and Myth: The Transformation of Stalin’s Images in New Russian Media
• Ewa Wróblewska-Trochimiuk (Poland), Photography as Testimony: the Role of War Photographers in Documenting the Yugoslav Civil War (1991-1995)
• Maria Kobielska (Poland), Museums and Photographs: Creating a ‘Memory Device’
• Robbert-Jan Adriaansen (Netherlands), Smiling in Auschwitz. The Semiotics of Instagram Selfies at Holocaust Memorial Sites

Commentary: Katarzyna Bojarska (Poland)

14:00 Lunch Break

14:45 Keynote Lecture: Constantin Parvulescu (Spain), Narratives of Abuse in East Central European Film

Chair: Piotr Juszkiewicz (Poland)

15:45 Coffee Break

16:15  Panel F. Film: Medium of History, Fabric of Memory

Chair: Piotr Juszkiewicz (Poland)

• Ana Krsinic Lozica (Croatia), Jasenovac Concentration Camp on Film
• Agnieszka Kiejziewicz (Poland), Bye Bye Innocence. War and Children’s Traumatic Memories in Japanese Film
• Beja Margitházi (Hungary), Embodying Sense Memory: Animating theAnalog/Photographic as Evidence of Traumatic Experience in East-European Post-Cinema (Son of Saul, Regina, Warsaw Uprising)
• Veronika Pehe (Czech Republic), From Socialism to Democracy on the Screen:Accommodating Images of the Socialist Past in the Post-1989 Czech Republic

Commentary: Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska (Poland)

18:45  Closing Remarks: Piotr Juszkiewicz (Poland)