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Arnika Ahldag, Rebecca Hanna John: “Very little resistance from the Orient’s part”?  On Moments of Failure in Hermann Goetz’s and Robert Lachmann’s Orientalist Journeys
“Very little resistance from the Orient’s part”? On Moments of Failure in Hermann Goetz’s and Robert Lachmann’s Orientalist Journeys
(p. 115 – 136)

Arnika Ahldag, Rebecca Hanna John

“Very little resistance from the Orient’s part”? On Moments of Failure in Hermann Goetz’s and Robert Lachmann’s Orientalist Journeys

PDF, 22 pages

  • contemporary art
  • artistic practice
  • protest movements
  • resistance

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English

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Arnika Ahldag

Arnika Ahldag is the Chief Curator at the Museum of Art & Photography in Bangalore. As an art historian her interests cover the representation of labor in Indian contemporary art, institutional critique, exhibition histories and archives. She holds a PhD from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and an MA from University College London and Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg. She co-founded the Feminist Syllabus, which is part of the workshop series Pact of Silence, How to break it, a program for intersectional feminist discourses in the arts. Over the past years she has lectured at the National School of Drama and OP Jindal Global University in New Delhi.

Rebecca Hanna John

is an art historian and author invested in transnational perspectives on art. She studied art history, literature and media studies at the University of Konstanz, Paris University Diderot, Humboldt University of Berlin, as well as at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. In 2019, she joined the DFG graduate program “Cultures of Critique” at Leuphana University Lüneburg, with a PhD project on archival critique and transnational narratives in contemporary art practices.
Other texts by Rebecca Hanna John for DIAPHANES
Sebastián  Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...: On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

What forms does withdrawal—meaning either that which withdraws itself or which is being withdrawn—take in artistic and cultural practices? What movement(s) does it create or follow in specific contexts, and with what theoretical, material, and political consequences? The contributors of this book address these questions in a variety of writing practices, each focusing on specific scenes. These scenes are organized under three parts that structure the chapters: Passivity, Failure, and Refusal; Disappearance and Remembrance; Resilience and Resistance. Through interviews, artistic and literary texts, visual contributions, and academic texts, the authors explore various modalities of withdrawal ranging from a silencing of critical voices to a political and aesthetic strategy of refusal. The enforced disappearance of government opponents, for instance, may be implemented as a means of state violence, but withdrawing may also mean the decision not to participate in such violence, either through forms of passivity or refusal. Moreover, in the neoliberal logic of resilience, the relationship between subjective agency and imposition from the outside remains tense. The aim of this book is to tackle these tensions, as well as the ambiguities and complexities of withdrawal.

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