Forum

The VLC Forum 2024: Correct History*, as the conditional, hypothetical impulse of the asterisk in the Center’s 2022-2024 Focus Theme Correction* indicates, interrogates speculative histories embedded within polyvocal narratives. Over three days, the VLC Forum explores the ways in which history and historiography invariably function as acts of correction and revision while examining some of the ideological mechanisms that drive them. Discursive strands come together to consider how historical narratives and ideological formations are created, edited, altered, and contested, including historical revisionism, whitewashing, and rehabilitation by state and other hegemonic political actors. The phrase correct history has many meanings, and one early, sardonic use can be found in Naeem Mohaiemen’s 2014 solo show and book Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (“Prisoners of Correct History”) (Kunsthalle Basel, curated by Adam Szymczyk, 2014), which, Mohaiemen revisits for the VLC Forum. 

Focusing on art, exhibition-making, and cultural practice writ large, the VLC Forum brings together scholars, artists, and curators whose reparative and recuperative artistic strategies point toward ways of redressing historical injustice, restitution of artifacts, and negotiating conflict and historical relatedness. Speakers consider various modes of cultural production and their significant role in reinscribing into the record voices and events that have been erased, silenced, and omitted by the violence of history. Harkening back to the first Correction* seminar with scholar Cresa Pugh, who argues that the plundering of the Benin Bronzes was itself an act of “historical revisionism” by imperial powers, this closing convening closes the loop to argue for poetic, artistic, and speculative forms of history-making that imagine new futures amid ongoing attempts at narrative control, denialism, censorship, and repression of peoples and their stories. Participants include: Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Andrea Geyer, Adam HajYahia, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Naeem Mohaiemen, Kent Monkman, Carlos Motta, Larissa Nez, Mahdi Sabbagh, Zoé Samudzi, Hande Sever, Selfless Abandon (Miriam Parker and Luke Stewart) and more.