We presented the sharing event "On Crisis and Representation" at Perdu, Amsterdam, featuring the cohort of Cycle 1 of the Fellows Award: Moving Narratives. The gathering invited us to reflect on the prevailing structures of contemporary crises and their critical representations.
Cover: Is It A Body: A Field Inside a House, 2019, Dian Suci Rahmawati.
Inequality, imperialism, poverty, war, genocide, patriarchy, xenophobia, ecocide — the list goes on. Today, we live in a world where crises accumulate at an accelerating pace. In response, artists and cultural practitioners persist in creatively showcasing catastrophes and their repercussions.
Yet, it seems that so much representation of crisis has itself generated a crisis of representation. This manifests in the fact that we can more readily imagine the end of the world itself rather than transforming the world’s daily suffering. Despite the abundance of artistic responses, photojournalism, forensic documentation, citizen recording, or archiving of the events as they unfold; we remain stuck in the face of an unyielding cycle of repeating crisis.
The symptoms of our contemporary crisis of imagination are closely intertwined with a crisis in representation, requiring a serious conceptual, discursive, and aesthetic engagement.
The cohort of Moving Narratives curated a sharing moment (of individual and collective, visual, performative, and discursive work) that not only represented crises and their consequences but also challenged our imagination considering possibilities and approaches that are not simply moved by the world (representing the world as it is), but rather inspire moving the world.
Highlights
Moving Narratives
2021—Ongoing
In collaboration with the British Council, this programme amplifies artistic practices that reexamine history and challenge dominant narratives.
