Art’s Reparative Turn: Creating Agency, Hopeful Futurities, and Movement Towards an Exit,
Shannon Forrester: Research presentation and panel convener
Panel abstract
The conference theme, Creativity Within Revolt, asks us to consider the potentialities of creative and artistic practice to catalyze ambitions dedicated to dissolving dominant systems of inequity. In light of this, creative practitioners working with subversive imaginaries across disciplines who are aligned with these aims will be the focus of this two-session panel. It will explore artistic research in visual art, poetics, interdisciplinary practice, and performance that engages with reparative practice as a medium of revolt against hegemonic systems of identity-based bias. In Reparative Reading, Paranoid Reading (2003) Sedgwick proposed that a critical reparative-based approach offers promising, productive, and undiscovered potential to create individual and social agency, producing a move toward an exit from these systems of marginalization by reaching for pleasure rather than avoiding shame while also having the potential to assimilate the violence and trauma that permeates these systems (Sedgwick: 2003; Best: 2016). A reparative approach therefore offers a constructive action, a re-making-invention of an empowered self-narrative, an undertaking of a kind of surgery on wounds inflicted by systemic oppression, producing a hopeful exit from othering’s shadows. This panel will offer new knowledge from the context of a creative imaginary engaged with the many possible new existence(s) repair might produce. Sedgwick's paper is a call for queer and feminist scholars to consider reparative theory vs. the predominate paranoid paradigms that currently dominate fields of liberatory studies. This panel seeks to further Sedgwick’s call by replacing the reading framework with artistic practice. These papers trace ways the creative fields generate proposals of hopeful futurities and/or empowered agency in revolt against dynamics of bias. The panelists foreground practices that explore the potential of queer ecologies and poetics, community-based practice, feminist takeovers, aesthetic agency, and new materialist conceptions of aliveness, each operating as diverse mediums of repair.
Panel part I
Chair panel part 1: Cleo Woelfle-Erskine Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, University of Washington Seattle
Respondent panel part 1: KJ Surkan Ph.D.
Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Kirin J. Makker, M.A., M.Arch., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism in American Studies, Hobart William Smith Colleges
“Womb Chair Speaks”
Selina Foltinek, Research Assistant, Lecturer, and PhD Candidate
University of Bayreuth, Germany
“Agency of Queer Female Authors: Creative Revolt against Heteronormativity”
Ernest Tjia, Edwin Erle Sparks Graduate Fellow
The Pennsylvania State University, Department of English
"Toward a Reparative Photographic Practice: on Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz"
Panel part II
Chair panel part II: KJ Surkan Ph.D.
Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, University of Washington Seattle
“Queer Shores: Towards a reparative ecopoetics”
Jeremy Chen, MFA
Department chair of American Studies, Senior Lecturer Studio Art; Assistant Professor, Grinnell College
“The Other PS1”
Shannon Forrester MFA, Ph.D. (candidate), Artist, Teaching Fellow, and Visiting Lecturer
Royal College of Art (RCA), UK
“The Reparative Turn of Revolt in Contemporary Painting: Exiting Through Embodied Practice and Social-agency”
Conference Theme
Creativity Within Revolt: In the current moment, people are drawing from multiple legacies of rebellion, protest, survival, and revolution to confront forms of dehumanization and ecological degradation that are foundational to the making of “America.” What might it mean to apprehend and respond to the creative acts of people in revolt? How might creativity enable other ways of envisioning and making sociality, community, bodily and spiritual integrity, and radical futurity?