Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Ben Highmore, Reader in Media Studies, University of Sussex, UK

Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative and World Literature, University of Illinois, USA; with Yasemin Yildiz, Assistant Professor in Germanic Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois, USA.

Lisa Saltzman, Professor of Art History, Bryn Mawr College, USA

The international conference Performances of Memory in the Arts pursues a new line of research in the crossover between Performance Studies and Memory Studies. By understanding memory as a performance, the organizers of the conference shift the focus to artistic practices of cultural memory. Art and popular culture enact memory and generate processes of memory. They do memory, and in this doing of memory new questions about the cultural dimensions of memory arise: How do art objects and artistic practices perform the past in the present? What is their relationship to the archive? Does the past speak in the performed past (or do we speak to it)? To what purpose do objects ‘remember’? And for whom do they remember (or forget)?

The performative turn helps to understand cultural memory as a process of dealing with the past in the present that is embodied and mediated, linking a present to a past and to a future. Inviting a reconsideration of the persistence of the historical past in the present, it centers not only on nostalgic or ‘presentist’ aspects of cultural memory, but also on its historical and historicizing – as well as its utopian – facets. The concept of a performance of memory crucially opens up to the practice of ‘doing memory’. Cultural memory is being performed in the codes of the art work. Art and popular culture are dynamic processes that mediate memory through narrative strategies, visual and aural styles, intertextual references and intermedial relations, re-enactments and ritual performances. They are thus engaged in non-linear processes of remembering and forgetting, collapsing time and space, and bringing the vicissitudes of desires, memories, and affects to the fore.

Central questions that will be addressed at this conference are: 

• How do art objects and practices perform the past in the present? 
• And how do they open up possibilities for a different future? 
• How do art and popular culture ‘do memory’? 
• And what kinds of memory do they ‘do’?

Issues we will explore are: 

• what is at stake in the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesis that make up cultural memory;
• how memory, performance and affect are contingent on one another in their relation to time, both looking forwards and backwards, while being performed in the present;
• how art and popular culture, in performing affective memories, may produce a relevant experience for the spectator, listener or reader.

The conference will cover a wide range of artistic disciplines: fine arts, literature, music, cinema, theatre, digital media and fashion. 

Topics that will be addressed in panels include, among others:

Memory, migration, and emotion

Memory, trauma and identity 

The performative aspects of art; art as a memory trigger

Literary and artistic interventions in cultural forgetting

Consumer culture as planned obsolescence

The consumption of the past in contemporary fashion

Performances of photographic memory

Performing the archive; archival performances

Performing identity in the digital archive

Performing multidirectional memory 

Engendering the performance of memory

Remembering forgotten writers and artists

Disremembering as a performance of memory

Memory and schizophrenia in cinema

‘Performance and mnemotechnology’; the impossibility of a natural memory

The production of presence

The persistence of the historical past

Conference committee 
Marguérite Corporaal, Vincent Meelberg, Liedeke Plate, Anneke Schulenberg, Anneke Smelik, Martijn Stevens, Wouter Weijers

Research programme 'Performances of Memory' 
coordinated by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik