Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Enslavement and Art: Forced Labor in the History of Art
Online and in-person, Humboldt Labor at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, 17–18 June 2024

Organized by Eva Ehninger and Ittai Weinryb

Registration due by 15 June 2024

Forced labor is a broad category all too often taken to comprise a human condition whose only shared feature is broadly defined as the control over another human, especially in regards to their labor and reproductive capacities (categories of ‘slavery’, ‘forced labor’ as well as ‘unfree’, ‘enslaved’, and ‘indentured human condition’ are still poorly defined in this context). Forced labor was and continues to play a central role in the intimate entanglement of aesthetics and commerce. Art production and patronage were part of networks that unfree humans aided in financing. These networks continue to echo in the collections, libraries, and museums, many built through the profit of unfree humans, that hold premodern and modern art today. This conference seeks to expand our current understanding of the role forced labor played in the world of art making and consumption. It challenges concepts of heritage and their corresponding attributions of identity, representation, and ownership, and looks at transformations of value, from the perspective of forced labor. Hopefully, this conference will therefore prompt comparative thinking to uncover the foundations, the structures, the practices, as well as the sustained consequences and current realities of forced labor in relations to art.

Admission is by registration only. To participate on-site or via Zoom, please register here»

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9.00  Coffee

9.30  Introduction by Eva Ehninger (Berlin) and Ittai Weinryb (New York)

10.00  Space
Moderation and Response: Elisaveta Dvorakk (Berlin)
• Valika Smeulders (Amsterdam) — ‘… Placing a Moor Next to Young Girls’: The Colonial World Order in Dutch Art
• Meredith Martin (New York) — Neoclassicism and Pro-Slavery Ideology in Paris and Saint-Domingue
• Burcu Dogramaci (Munich) — Remembering Forced Labor: DP Artist Exhibitions in Munich in 1947 and 1948

12.15  Lunch Break

14.15  Capital
Moderation and Response: Johanna Függer-Vagts (Berlin)
• Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton) — Mobile Enclosures: Cultivating Plantation Life across the British Empire
• Carrie Pilto (Amsterdam) — Someone Is Getting Rich

18.00  Other Women Stopped Work and Joined Us: Filmic Re-imagination of Work in Yugantar‘s Molkarin
Film Screening and Conversation with Pallavi Paul (New Delhi) and Nicole Wolf (London)
Organization and Moderation: Aisha Allakhverdieva, Franziska Blume, Justine Ney, and Hanna Steinert (Berlin)
Kino Central (Rosenthaler Str. 39, 10178 Berlin)

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10.00  Materiality
Moderation and Response: Juliette Calvarin (Berlin)
• Jennifer Chuong (Cambridge, MA) — An Unforced Production: Dox Thrash and the Invention of Carborundum Engraving
• Elizabeth Dospel Williams (Washington, DC) — Concealing / Revealing: Depictions of the Enslaved in Late Antique Furnishing Textiles
• Matthew Rampley (Brno) — Modern Architecture and Global Material Extraction

12.15  Lunch Break

13.45  Body
Moderation and Response: Katja Müller-Helle (Berlin)
• Ana Lucia Araujo (Washington, DC) — Iron: The World Enslaved Blacksmiths Made in the Americas
• Mahalakshmi Rakesh (New Delhi) and Sneha Ganguly (New Delhi) — Artisanal Production and Agency: Regulations and Control in Early India
• David Joselit (Cambridge, MA) — Disfiguration and Survivance

16.00  Closing Remarks