Collecting and Archiving Modern and Contemporary Art on the African Continent - Cluster Project
Abstract
- Abstract
-
Dr. Ulf Vierke, director of Bayreuth's Iwalewahaus, talks about his project: "Of Art Worlds - Collecting and Archiving Modern and Contemporary Art on the African Continent"
Find more information here: https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/Research/1research-sections/art_aestethics/Of-Art-Worlds/index.html
Origins & context
- Title
- Collecting and Archiving Modern and Contemporary Art on the African Continent - Cluster Project
- Language
- English
- YouTube playlist
- Presenting The Cluster Projects
- Date
- October 29, 2021
Identifiers & sources
Full text
- Transcript
- [Music] my name is will fielker i am director of eber liver horse the center for african art mainly modern art at byron university and within the cluster i have a research project on collections on the african continent my project and my own work are centered within the research section arts and aesthetics the title of my project is on artworks art collections and art archives on the african continent and now due to corona crisis also from the african continent my project was the last to start in our research section it only started january last year and two months after the start the postdoc of my project left for maternal leave and that implies that the project probably is going to be a bit longer lasting than initially planned some of the key questions that we are talking about or that we are trying to address in the project i probably can best explain with the help of a colleague or friend uh who's with me today that's this i don't know really whether he's friendly guy but he's called the lone man in cuba and the lone man in cuba really triggered some of the key questions within the already going on project and one of the questions was is it really a work by tijani mayakiri on the back side it's written or signed to johnny mayakiri but all the other works that we have in our collection tijuani mayakiri do not really fit this one on first side now the questions of the project are how can we ascribe first of all an artwork to individualistic styles to styles but of course we are not really talking about styles we are interested in the characteristics in the form of the art objects as such and how they relate then later on to the character or the form of the collection and with this work um it's quite interesting because on the second consultation it perfectly fits but it's really work to get there and it's some days of work to know that this is a teach animal theory of its best kind of course i do not have to say too much about why it's really fascinating to work on artworks like lone man and cuba but the other layer in our research of course are the collections on the african continent and there you really won't find too much research so nobody so far had a thorough look on private collections but also on major institutional collections like the marqueria university's collection which is part of our research as well the methodology that we apply on first hand is the classical iconology that you would find in our discipline one of the points of course is that in the field of african modern art you hardly find really convincing examples of applying this methodology and secondly it would have been a transfer of the findings that we gather on the level of the object um and transfer the concepts there like rhythm like framing to the above level the collections as such one quite interesting aspect is probably also related to the new situation that we had to deal with right now we can't travel to africa and thus we depend upon different corpuses for our data analysis and mainly digital corpus of course thus the shift towards the digital uh had been much faster than we expected and secondly getting into touch with the question what might fluid i.t ontologies look like um we are there and with mirko schwinfeld we have our hands upon that and it really might help us in the research to look at larger bodies of data digital data and apply tools that come from applied i.t sciences multiplicity of course is key to the very setup of the project as such um when we look at the collections and there are multiple layers that we would like to decipher in a way or at least to take as some central perspective within our analysis the other concept of course is relationality basically that's what the whole thing is about when we talk about i.t ontologies how the different layers in between the art work the art object or the aesthetic individual how we would call it in our research section right now and the above level of form the collection the institution how this is related but this is the area where we find our major questions and where we do not yet have the answers right now it feels like we are down in the machine room getting our hands dirty with black oil etc and the machine room is the database the work on the database that's really working with heavy tools on the one hand but it's fascinating to see how this relates to the way that we can cooperate and that we really can be part of a knowledge production that is a joint knowledge production with our partners uh in the acc's and in our case in museums on the african continent you