Reclaiming the Past: Decolonizing Aesthetics of Memory

Widely acknowledged as a major turning point in the history of visual depictions of war, Francisco de Goya's renowned print series The Disasters of War (made between 1810 and 1814) remains a touchstone for serious engagement with the violence of war and the questions raised by its artistic representation. In this paper, I offer a new account of Goya's print series by taking readers through a series of representative images. Drawing on facets of Goya's artistry rarely considered together before-the expressive effects of his serial presentation of images, the interplay of text and image that characterizes the series, and the complex status of aesthetic illusion in his oeuvre- I challenge the notion that documentary realism and historical testimony were his primary aims. I argue that while the depiction of the atrocities of the Napoleonic War in Spain was central to Goya's project, the lasting power of the print series stems from the artist's complex moral and aesthetic meditations on the subject. Such reflections in fact trouble facile notions of testimony, historical remembrance, and commemoration. Making new contributions to longstanding debates about historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, I offer a new story of the Desastres de la Guerra, in order to highlight the ways in which Goya's masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony. At the same time, the paper makes a case for Goya as an important figure within the genealogy of modern critical reflections on violence, memory and representation. More than a century before the Second World War and the Holocaust, Goya was working through distinctively modern concerns related to the memory of atrocity and the multiple temporalities to which such memory belongs. The problem of bodies is central to Goya's work and his engagements with "aesthetic memory" (a form of remembrance that signals its artifice and its illusory status) speak in fascinating ways to the issue of "creative approaches to memory." The paper draws on and further extends lines of inquiry from my recently published book, The Art of Witnessing: Francisco de Goya's Disasters of War (U of Toronto Press, 2023). 

The figure of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) – the 'Great Soul' – has achieved global memory status. A lawyer, social activist and leader of the Indian nationalist movement against British imperial rule, Gandhi is well-remembered and commemorated for his doctrine of nonviolent protest as a tool for political resistance and social change. Gandhi's memory has travelled transnationally, transculturally, and transmedially across generations, forming aspects of India's 'soft power' and nation brand building (Wagner 2010), and consolidating into a malleable memory commons referenced by multiple social movements (Chabot and Duyvendak 2002). In recent years, this settled memory of Gandhi as inspiration, hope and apex of transformative social change activism has become contested, with new memory sites and claims coming into view. Statues of Gandhi have been vandalised in Johannesburg and London following reports of Gandhi's anti-Black racism when living in South Africa (BBC 2015, 2021), and a statue of Gandhi was removed from the University of Ghana campus following student and faculty protests (BBC, 2018).


With these tensions in mind – both the travelling nature of Gandhi's memory and its 'fixed' and 'undone' uses and contestations – in this presentation we examine the curation of Gandhi's legacy through the exhibition Our Time for a Future Caring (2019), curated by Roobina Karode for the India Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale. Taking place at one of the artworld's most prestigious platforms, as a collaboration between the Ministry of Culture and the Confederation of Indian Industry, the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Our Time for a Future Caring took as its curatorial prompt the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth. The exhibition drew together eight inter-generational Indian artists showcasing works that respond to the memory and philosophies of Gandhi, his "acts of resistance and recuperation" (Karode 2019), across the mediums of sculpture, painting, video installation, mixed-media and performance.


In conversation with works such as Covering Letter (2012) by Jitish Kallat, which remediates a historical correspondence from Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler in 1939, before the start of World War II, and Ashim Purkayastha's works on postage and revenue stamps that alters Gandhi's memory images, this presentation will consider the creative practices of memory curation, and the links between art, memory and imaginaries for change.


Methodologically, the presentation combines an analysis of the exhibition discourses, curatorial strategies, artworks, press materials, interviews and art reviews, to consider how transcultural modes of curating social justice memories take place, within and across borders, and across temporalities (to speak to the future). We unpack the provocation Our Time for a Future Caring and its relation to memory practices and ideas, to argue for a closer consideration of how activist memories are mobilised – and made to move – within the constraints of institutional frameworks (an international biennale, with governmental and private funding) and the possibilities of artistic and curatorial practices (calling upon the imagination).

Heritage tourism is ubiquitous in many cities around the world often used to forge a cultural imaginary of national memories, identity and belonging. Particularly, in many European cities where such heritage tourism abound, the stories and memories of slavery and colonialism tend to be marginalised, even overlooked in the cultural imaginary. However, this marginalisation is currently under challenge as new forms of tourism practices and performances emerge telling the stories of slavery and colonial heritage in major cities. But how does tourism transform and narrate the past to provide representations that disrupt the cultural memories of slavery and colonial heritage? In this paper, I develop the concept of the embodied absence of the past as a framing to explore the transformative memory work of tourism in relation to slavery and colonial heritage. I conceptualise the embodied absence of the past as the awareness of the physical presence yet narrative absence of the shared history, heritage and role of African-descent people in European societies. This awareness, I argue, is activated through tourism encounters of slavery and colonial traces which trigger an evocation and reconstruction of personal and collective memories.
This paper draws on a 3-year project involving empirical fieldwork at slavery and colonial heritage tourism sites in Ghana (Elmina Castle and Slave Dungeons), Suriname (Boni Trail at Plantation Resort Frederiksdorp), Brazil (Dutch heritage tour in Recife and Olinda), Germany (Decolonial Tour Berlin) and the Netherlands (Black Heritage Amsterdam Tours) using participant observation of tours and interviews with key stakeholders. I focus on how tourism practices and performances in relation to slavery and colonial heritage makes visible and challenges this embodied absence of the past. In particular, I trace the ways in which tourism creates transformative liminal spaces in which plural cultural memories of the past are activated, contested, negotiated and transit between different sites in an ongoing emergent process of becoming. I argue that tourism, beyond commodifying the past, performs important socio-cultural, political and memory work in ongoing societal debates on dealing with slavery and colonial heritage memories.