Who performs the nation state? Unruly image worlds and matters of belonging

Who performs the nation state? Unruly image worlds and matters of belonging.

The modernist project of the nation state with its promise of emancipation and its aspirations to create a deep horizontal fraternity, worked at the same time to tear apart the social fabric by nationalizing culture and instituting the juridical category of citizenship that also serves as a tool in the production of illegality. This lecture investigates the regenerative potential of art works, which though situated in different national/ diasporic contexts, resort to transcultural crossings in order to reassemble self and community. By breaking across the Eurocentric divide to emancipate works – irrespective of their origins – from the prisons of manufactured tradition, unruly images seek to bring forth a new conception of the universal that is no longer the possession of any single collective. At the same time these works provoke us to query the uneven contexts of the contemporary art world, where artists are caught in negotiating the scales between the global, the national, and the local, and where critiques of nationalism often end up being trapped within the structural contradictions of the nation-making process.

Monica Juneja

Speaker

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