Forum
VLC Forum 2024: Correct History*
Oct 24–Oct 26, 2024
The New School
In-person and online
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.
The Vera List Center Forum 2024 is presented as part of the center’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction*. It is curated by Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira with research support by Ariana Kallinga and is convened with the support of Tabor Banquer, Re’al Christian, and Adrienne Umeh.
This event is supported by the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy and the Helen Shapiro Lectureship fund.
The Fall 2024 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, individual donors as well as the following institutional funders:
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Boris Lurie Art Foundation/The Schaina and Josephina Lurje Memorial Foundation
Dayton Foundation
Mellon Foundation
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature
Terra Foundation for American Art
and The New School