Artists’ lives

1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Courtney
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
The Future ◽  
Project Officer ◽  
National Life ◽  
Story Collection

Since 1990 the National Life Story Collection has documented the lives of almost eighty of Britain’s visual artists by means of in-depth tape-recordings, often completed over many months. Cathy Courtney, Project Officer of Artists’ Lives, describes the evolution of an initiative which will subtly alter the context in which historians of the future come to assess the art of our time.

Kuntanshi yamikalile (The Future): speculative nonconformity in the works of Zambian visual artists

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Andrew Mukuka Mulenga
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
African Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
Contemporary African Art ◽  
Freeze Time

In recent years, select African visual artists practising on the continent as well as in its diaspora have increasingly been attracted to themes that explore, portray or grapple with Africa’s future. Along with this increasing popularity of the ‘future’ or indeed ‘African futuristic’ themes by visual artists, such themes have also attracted academic consideration among various scholars, resulting primarily in topics described as ‘African Futurism’ or Afrofuturism. These are topics that may be used to disrupt what some scholars – across disciplines and in various contexts – have highlighted as the persistent presumptive notions that portray Africa as a hinterland (Hassan 1999; Sefa Dei, Hall and Goldin Rosenberg 2000; Simbao 2007; Soyinka-Airewele and Edozie 2010; Moyo 2013; Keita, L. 2014; Green 2014; Serpell 2016). This study makes an effort to critique certain aspects of ‘African Art History’ with regard to the representation of Africa, and raises the following question: How can an analysis of artistic portrayals of ‘the future’ portrayed in the works of select contemporary Zambian artists be used to critique the positioning of Africa as ‘backward’, an occurrence at the intersection of a dualistic framing of tradition versus modern. Furthermore, how can this be used to break down this dichotomy in order to challenge lingering perceptions of African belatedness? The study analyses ways in which this belatedness is challenged by the juxtaposition of traditional, contemporary and futuristic elements by discussing a series of topics and debates associated to African cultures and technology that may be deemed disconnected from the contemporary lived experiences of Africans based on the continent. The study acknowledges that there is no singular ‘African Art History’ that one can talk of and there have been various shifts in how it has been perceived. I argue that while currently the African art history that is written in the West does not simplistically position Africa as backward as it may have done in the past, there appear to be moments of a hangover of this perception (Lamp 1999:4). What started out as a largely Western scholarly discourse of African art history occurred in about the 1950s and the journal African Arts started in the 1960s. Even before contemporary African art became a big thing in the 1990s for the largely US- and Europe-based discourses there were many discussions in the US about how the ‘old’ art history tended to freeze time and that this was not appropriate (Drewal 1991 et al). In order to advance the discourse on contemporary African visual arts I present critical analyses of the select works of Zambian artists to develop interpretations of the broader uses of the aforementioned themes. The evidence that supports the core argument of this research is embedded in the images discussed throughout this dissertation. The artists featured in the study span several decades including artists who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s, such as Henry Tayali and Akwila Simpasa, as well as artists who have been practising since the 1980s, such as Chishimba Chansa and William Miko and those that are more current and have been producing work from the early 1990s and 2000s, such as Zenzele Chulu, Milumbe Haimbe, Stary Mwaba, Isaac Kalambata and Roy Jethro Phiri.

Battling the Buddha of Love

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Marie Falcone
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Rural India ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Resistance Movement

This ethnography explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, as they worked to build the “world's tallest statue” as a multi-million dollar “gift” to India. This effort entailed a plan to forcibly acquire hundreds of acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh. The Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to “Save the Land.” In telling the “life story” of the proposed statue, the book sheds light on the aspirations, values and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against it. Since the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are “non-heritage” practitioners to Tibetan Buddhism, the book narrates the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists from around the world. The book endeavors to show the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy. Thus, this ethnography of a future statue of the Maitreya Buddha—himself the “future Buddha”—is a story about divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar’s potential futures.

What oral historians and historians of science can learn from each other

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 673-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL MERCHANT
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
The Other ◽  
British Library ◽  
National Life ◽  
Life Story Interviews ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis paper is concerned with the use of interviews with scientists by members of two disciplinary communities: oral historians and historians of science. It examines the disparity between the way in which historians of science approach autobiographies and biographies of scientists on the one hand, and the way in which they approach interviews with scientists on the other. It also examines the tension in the work of oral historians between a long-standing ambition to record forms of past experience and more recent concerns with narrative and personal ‘composure’. Drawing on extended life story interviews with scientists, recorded by National Life Stories at the British Library between 2011 and 2016, it points to two ways in which the communities might learn from each other. First, engagement with certain theoretical innovations in the discipline of oral history from the 1980s might encourage historians of science to extend their already well-developed critical analysis of written autobiography and biography to interviews with scientists. Second, the keen interest of historians of science in using interviews to reconstruct details of past events and experience might encourage oral historians to continue to value this use of oral history even after their theoretical turn.

Void Pasts and Marginal Presents: On Nostalgia and Obsolete Futures in the Republic of Georgia

Slavic Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Elderly People ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Republic Of Georgia ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Life Story Interviews

In contemporary Georgia and beyond, nostalgia for the Soviet past is often ridiculed and dismissed as a reactionary wish to turn back time. In this article, however, I explore generational nostalgia as temporal displacement of present political struggles. Drawing on life story interviews with middle-aged and elderly people in the provincial town of Gori, I argue that nostalgic longings may be understood as active attempts to presence personal pasts and futures that have publicly been rendered absent by an official rhetoric and practice that explicitly rejects the Soviet past. From this perspective, post-Soviet generational nostalgia temporally connects several dimensions of absence: the experience of one’s personal past being publicly cast as void; a perceived lack of social security, influence, and significance in the present; and a dynamic whereby these two dimensions render former dreams and visions for the future obsolete.

APPLICATION OF NARRATIVES IN PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSULTATION OF RESCUERS – JFO PARTICIPANTS HAVING PROBLEMS WITH TIME PERSPECTIVE

2019 ◽  
pp. 28-37
Author(s):  
N. Afanasieva
Keyword(s):  
Time Perspective ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Time Orientation ◽  
Psychological Counselling ◽  
The Past ◽  
Joint Forces ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

The article determined the ways to use narratives in psychological counselling of rescuers – Joint Forces Operation (JFO) participants for optimization of their time perspective. Psychological counselling is considered as a special type of a narrative, which have the following characteristic elements related to its deployment – a starting point, localization, beginning, development of actions, culmination, a solution and a code. This structure of narrative deployment is directly related to a time-perspective structure, since its reflects the chronology of events. Rescuers participated in the JFO have a negative attitude towards the past, which is associated with the experience of really unpleasant events and injuries, so pleasant impressions are shadowed and most of the memories are reconstructed into negative ones. Rescuers’ attitude to life is associated with pursuance of joy, excite, enjoy at the present, risk taking without worries about possible consequences of such behaviour. The future life in general is less important than the present and the past. In order to optimize the time orientation of rescuers – JFO participants, we suggest using the elements of their autobiographical narratives during psychological counselling. The autobiographical narrative of each person is a unique combination of memories, awareness of event meanings, feelings and mythology, which all together build an individual life story. An individual history includes all events occurred with a person in the past. An autobiographical narrative includes a selection of events in the context of three time intervals – the past, the present and the future. Psychological counselling for rescuers – JFO participants is aimed at time orientation balancing, which is needed for an individual’s effective life. A balanced time orientation is the most psychologically and physically healthy for a person and is optimal for his/her life in society. Positive changes in the time perspective are one of the indicators of traumatic symptom reduction.

Świadek historii... w stulecie odzyskania Niepodległości... – z Ireną Wojnar rozmawia Adam Fijałkowski („Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny”)

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (4(250)) ◽  
pp. 289-302
Author(s):  
Irena Wojnar ◽  
Adam Fijałkowski
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Personal Consciousness ◽  
Post War ◽  
The University ◽  
Civic Duties

Editor in Chief of “The Pedagogical Quarterly” discourses with Irena Wojnar, employed at the University of Warsaw since early post-war time. Her intellectual evolution (l’âge où l’on grandit) occurs in changing dramatic periods of our history, optimism of elementary school before the World War II, painful time of clandestine education during the Nazi occupation in Warsaw, hopes and illusions of the post-war epoch. In these periods, the essential inspirations for Irena Wojnar were successive books of Bogdan Suchodolski, with symbolic titles: Love life – be valiant (2nd ed. 1930), Whence and where are we going to? (1943) and Education for the future (1947). In the Polish school before the WWII, pupils were educated in the spirit of patriotism and civic duties, sensibility to the surrounding world and the service of humans. Tragic heroism of the WWII became the proof of those values. In the conditions of constant aggressive and permanent threat, quasi “against the night”, the fight with the occupant becomes the essential moral duty. For young people, pupils and students, when secondary and tertiary schools were closed by the Nazis, this duty signified participation in clandestine education supporting hope to preserve future order in the world and preparation of the future activity in the free Poland after the WWII. The end of the WWII created a chance for the future shape of the world in line with our humanistic values. It was the period of the reconstruction of Warsaw, destroyed during the WWII, becoming a city of “sorrow and dreams”. In the final part of the conversation there appears the general opinion that every individual life–story, beyond its individual aspects, reveals a more general educational idea. Human life runs across destiny and personal consciousness. Independently of our destiny, we have a chance to choose values important for us, to realise the “poetics of the self” (poétique du soi) based on our capacity to overcome own limitations and to increase goodness in the world.

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