Open Arts Journal, issue 3, 'Disturbing pasts: Memories, controversies and creativity', Summer 2014

Editors: Uilleam Blacker, University College London, UK; Elizabeth Edwards, De Montfort Leicester, UK; Leon Wainwright, Colgate, New York and The Open University, UK

In many countries, legacies of war, colonialism, genocide and oppression return again and again to dominate contemporary culture, politics and society. The controversies surrounding traumatic pasts can shape policy, make or break governments, trigger mass demonstrations, and even spark violent confrontation. These pasts also inspire creative means by which the past is remembered, remade and challenged.

This, the third issue of the Open Arts Journal, explores the theme of traumatic pasts and their complex and often dramatic influences on the present day, bringing to the foreground the rich visual and creative responses to such pasts that issue among artists.

The collection derives from a major knowledge exchange project that focused on a two-day event (Museum of Ethnology, Vienna/Weltmuseum Wien, 2012) sponsored by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), European Science Foundation. The project drew together individuals from the arts and heritage sectors and the wider public beyond academia – a diverse range of creative practitioners, including artists and photographers, curators, cultural policy-makers, and academics.
The collection includes clickable links to film footage of authors’ presentations and audience discussion.

Contents

Introduction
Disturbing pasts: Memories, controversies and creativity
Leon Wainwright
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s01lw

Difficult pasts and public space

Echoes of the Great War: The recordings of African prisoners in the First World War
Anette Hoffmann
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s11ah

'A riot of our own': a reflection on agency
Carol Tulloch
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s12ct

The exhibition 'Namibia-Germany: a shared/divided history'. Resistance, violence, memory
Clara Himmelheber
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s13ch

Break! On the unpleasant, the marginal, the taboo and the controversial in Norwegian museums
Liv Ramskjær
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s14lr

Making meaning from a fragmented past: 1897 and the creative process
Peju Layiwola
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s15pl

Mallaby's car: colonial subjects, imperial actors, and the representation of human suffering in postcolonial exhibitions
Susan Legêne
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s16sl

Visual investigations

Comments on the art and research project 'The division of the earth: tableaux on the legal synopses of the Berlin Africa conference'
Dierk Schmidt and Malte Jaguttis
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s21ds

Late photography, military landscapes, and the politics of memory
Simon Faulkner
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s22sf

Forced displacement, suffering and the aesthetics of loss
Maruška Svašek
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s23ms

Nuclear war as false memory
John Timberlake
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s24jt

Collaborations

I miss you, Jew!
Rafał Betlejewski
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s31rb

Spatial dialogues and Holocaust memory in contemporary Polish art: Yael Bartana,Rafał Betlejewski and Joanna Rajkowska
Uilleam Blacker
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s32ub

Margit Ellinor: forgotten images
Bente Geving
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s33bg

A comment on contemporary Sámi art
Sigrid Lien
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s34sl

Troubled traces: painting and displaying intercultural traumas of Aboriginality
Heather Kamarra Shearer
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s35hs

Empowering art: reconfiguring narratives of trauma and hope in the Australian national imaginary
FIONA MAGOWAN
http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s36fm

'Disturbing Pasts: Memories, Controversies and Creativity' (www.open.ac.uk/Arts/disturbing-pasts) is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme 'Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation', co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 235366/291827.