a ebook on the artwork and reminiscence of slavery | EUROtoday

L’Art historical past may also be practiced as a fight sport. An incredible struggle. And that is what Elvan Zabunyan, historian of latest artwork, professor on the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and artwork critic, does within the ebook which this 12 months gained over the jury of the Pierre Daix prize, created by François Pinault (proprietor of the Point).

Succeeding Show. Images of Birkenau, from the Sonderkommando to Gerhard Richter (Gallimard), by Éric de Chassey, Bringing the ends of the world collectively. Art, historical past, slavery in reminiscence (B42, 2024) is in actual fact a decisive work on the best way during which modern artwork carries the reminiscence of slavery. An atrocious story which didn’t finish, alas, with the assorted abolitions, however “continued with the expressions specific to segregation, racism, lynchings, prisons, social, cultural, political and police repressions of the 20th and 21st centuries, in all the countries having experienced it », notes the winner, already author of a pioneering work on the issue, Black is a color, a history of African-American art (Dis Voir, 2004), very valuable in the way in which he studies the work of a David Hammons or Adrian Piper.

This new book is based on a vast body of work from the United States and the Caribbean, signed by artists as fascinating as Arthur Jafa, Frank Bowling, Ellen Gallagher, and David Hammons, always. Two spaces that she connects by a common heritage, linked to dispossession, to the tearing away from an origin, to immeasurable suffering which grants them, she says, “an immense power of revolt and emancipation”.

“I chose the freedom to express myself as I wished”

The energy of the ebook additionally rests on its development which is each radical and poetic, for the reason that work is damaged down in response to every of the 4 parts, air (the one we breathe, the one from which we’re disadvantaged by the oppressor), the hearth (that of revolts), the earth (the one from which you’re disadvantaged, that to which you’re deported), and water, of which we all know, for the latter, how a lot it has nourished the creativeness of artists and writers, as it’s linked to the crossing transatlantic and the violence that was unleashed within the holds of the slave ships.

“What interests me is the way in which the artists have, themselves, represented, in and through their works, the historical facts of this period, and this, by choosing not to make an illustration but a creation”, confides Elvan Zabunyan, whose ebook attracts on archives linked to admirable figures like Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, who fled slavery earlier than turning into activists of the abolitionist trigger, and represent extraordinarily stimulating topics for the modern artists.

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But Bringing the ends of the world collectivelyas its title suggests, can be carried by the nice breath of literature, of Beloved by Toni Morrison, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, by The Matter of Absence by Patrick Chamoiseau, with texts by Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, WEB Du Bois or Michelle Cliff, and naturally Édouard Glissant. “I chose the freedom to express myself as I wished,” she affirms, claiming located and delicate writing, and a subjectivity in expression which doesn’t exclude the rigor of the topic. And to cite, within the introduction, a sentence that Angela Davis had entrusted to him, and which might have completely served as an exergue to the work: “Art allows us to feel what we have not yet formalized. Art is a beacon that shines a light on a future that we haven’t yet figured out how to describe. » At least, she clarified, “in the usual languages ​​that we use”.

Note that for this 12 months marking the tenth anniversary of the Pierre Daix prize, endowed with 15,000 euros, it’s coupled with a grant of 5,000 euros meant to assist and accompany the writing of younger artwork historians. It goes to researcher Clara Royer, doctoral scholar in artwork historical past and specialist inventive makes use of of telecommunications within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties.