Session 10 – Continuous Present 2

Sandra Krizic Roban
Leaning Images: Reading Nasta Rojc and Ana Mušćet

This paper introduces the work of Nasta Rojc, the late-19^th-century artist, which exists at the periphery of the Croatian art scene. Her silenced voice resonates from the work of Ana Mušćet, who used unfixed collage to create numerous intimate statements, temporarily uniting materials and treating them as an opportunity for contact. Instead of photography’s immanent “capturing”, she takes parts of photographs and sketches left behind by Nasta, as well as those appropriated from other sources, arguing that the past, events, and facts do not exist, only interpretation.
In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s own particular practice of witnessing includes a description of an office filled with scattered notes, letters, and all kinds of written documents, where the author feels as though he is standing in the midst of a paper flood. I bring the weight of the details that the narrator descibes into my own interpretation of the complex relationships of a particular female artist, whose journey to Scotland I recently “reconstructed”. “The greater the distance, the clearer the view.” Is it possible to establish a connection in a grain of sand captured by Nasta’s camera without threatening  her convincing “I”? The order of things begun with Nasta Rojc’s Self-Portrait with a Rifle continues with the complex intertextual interpretation in the work of Ana Mušćet, as a composition of travelogues, facts, fictions, images, and text. The narrative that connects the work of two artists is marked by a gaze “through the crosshairs”, one of them painted and the other spoken as a kind of threat. The focus is on leaning images, which make possible the study of the past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay.

Sandra Križić Roban holds a PhD in art history, and is an art critic, curator, lecturer and writer, working as scientific adviser at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb. Her research topics are contemporary art, the history and theory of photography, post-war architecture, public space discourse and contemporary war memorials in Croatia. She is one of the co-founders of the Office for Photography, a non-profit association for contemporary photography from Zagreb. She has hosted a number of retrospective exhibitions, as well as extensive thematic exhibitions, both at home and abroad.
She has published two comprehensive studies on contemporary photography and contemporary painting in Croatia: At Second Glance: The positions of Contemporary Croatian Photography (2010) and Croatian Painting from 1945 until Today: Responsibility of Image at the Time of Impatient look (2013). Recent publications: Vlado Martek – Preparing for Photography (2018), Postmedia and Non-institutional Art Practices from 1960s (with Leonida Kovač, 2017), and Hana Miletić – Street Photography (2016).

Mark Edwards
Shelter

This paper is based on a body of research and photographs entitled ‘Shelter’.  Acting as a form of recovery and monument to its legacy, it focuses on a former WWII RAF bomber station; a place where memory, trauma and loss are all embedded. They address Britain’s post-war distain for the air campaigns and what Sebald described as Germany’s ‘individual and collective amnesia’ in refusing to confront the resulting catastrophe of the shattered cities.  ‘Horrors’ and silence, which, he claimed, cast a shadow over his life.
In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald wrote about the image of bomber squadrons embarking on their nightly missions over Europe.  These raids set out from bases situated across the East of England.  Most stations were temporary and after the war were reclaimed by farming, landowners and nature.  Sebald lived in Norfolk, once home to over fifty WWII bomber stations, and he would often walk around one such base imagining the horror the airmen were about to encounter, and, inflict. 
In 2014, I made a series of photographs on one of these decommissioned stations depicting a series of woodpiles and corrugated metal structures (built to store wood and repel rain) that I encountered as I walked the overgrown perimeter track of the former WWII RAF base at Hethel, Norfolk.  A base situated just seven miles from Sebald’s former home in Norwich. 
Built from the enveloping coppiced woodland and sitting amongst the last vestiges of dilapidated military buildings, perimeter tracks and barbed wire, these woodpiles allude to a form of shelter reminiscent of the aircraft hangers, bomb shelters and accommodation huts originally found on the camp.  They also reference the forest camps described by Primo Levi, and, intriguingly, mirror Sebald’s vision of Cologne and other bombed out cities across Europe at the end of hostilities.

I am an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Suffolk.  My work primary focuses on the contemporary landscape of East Anglia, Suffolk and Essex.  The resulting large-scale photographs, made through the use of an 8 x 10 inch plate camera, depict spaces that are formed through the activity of time and human endeavor.  My work has been published and exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally and is included in major photographic collections including the V&A Museum, The Government Art Collection, The Hyman Collection of British Photography and Norwich Museum.  Recent exhibitions include Inheritance, A Green and Pleasant Land, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2017-18) and Into the Woods:  Photography & Trees, V&A Museum, London (2017-18). I have presented my research and work through academic papers at numerous conferences including The Photographers Gallery, London (2019), Tate Britain (2015), V&A Museum, London (2014) and the Sainsbury Centre For Visual Arts, Norwich (2014).

Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
Memory, Word and Image in Sebald and Joyce: Towards a Non-Linear, Transhistorical Ethics Communicated Through Minor Adjustments in the Book’s Visual Elements

W.G. Sebald and James Joyce may not seem to share much in terms of traditional literary scholarship. Their concerns, however, for the traumas of history (a “nightmare” from which Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus wished to awake), make them both fruitful case studies of cultural memory.
This paper proposes that their works’ shared interest lies in the subtle inclusion or manipulation of typesetting or visual elements, such as placing advertisements, musical scores, footnotes and diagrams in the text. I will pay particular attention to such word-and-image combinations as elements that (seem to) break the linearity and the speed of the narrative, while establishing particularly poignant links to historical occurrences and sites.
I will attempt to argue that for both writers, working on either side of WWII, there is an ethical drive at play in employing these strategies: one that seeks to sensitise readers to both the connectedness and the fragility of human lives. Both authors, by humbly placing their characters’ lives at the outer edges of the maelstrom of catastrophic failures of regimes, ultimately make their readers hope against hope that remembering and conceptualising history in the ways they did (through their word and image strategies) can somehow modify the inevitable repetitions in and of history. Theirs are minor histories in minor literatures (Deleuze and Guattari) that forcefully resonate today.

Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Amsterdam and academic director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. Until 2014 she was Professor of Iconology in Belfast, where she led a Research Graduate School. She studied in Heidelberg, London and Cologne, where she gained her PhD (researched as James Joyce Foundation Scholar, Zurich). She held an Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship, UCD.
Her research focuses on word and image studies, visual legacies of (Irish) writers, performance, the historiography of art and curation. Rooted in Joseph Beuys studies, she is interested in sculpture, performance, social practices, post-War art histories and art research.
Her books include: Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique (ed., Valiz 2017); Post-War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean (Steidl 2011); James Joyce als Inspirationsquelle für Joseph Beuys (Olms 2001); and Joyce in Art (Lilliput 2004).
She has curated at: Royal Hibernian Academy and Goethe Institut, Dublin; Tolstoy Estate, Russia; MoA, Seoul National University, Korea; Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; LCGA, Limerick; CCI, Paris; Maagdenhuis, University of Amsterdam; M HKA, Antwerp, and the VanAbbemuseum, Eindhoven.