Violence is (a) sensitive matter. Intensive and consuming. A fact of life, and yet heavily fictioned. For some, it is a human universal, embedded and affecting; shaping history, delimiting social structures, and even determining planetary fate. Contrastingly for others, violence is itself this universalizing discourse of colonial-modernity. For some violence exposes injustices and asymmetries. It is the utterance and resistance of the oppressed. Others construe violence as the essential logic of all relations, the foundation of the social. While violence may pervade the lived experiences of all, it surely does so in ways that are differentiated in valency, intensity, and outcome.
Representation of violence is ubiquitous. Representation itself is often understood as a primary matrix of violence. Digital networks relay violent events instantaneously; artistic practices often seek to disclose the psycho-social experience of violence. These forms may be seen to extend or redistribute the force and logic of violence. The ethical demand to bear witness is tempered by the challenge to disclose violence without reproducing it. Representation may disclose violence as a semiotic field with its own modes of enunciation. Some propose a limit to representation in genocidal violence while others believe that we properly touch violence through the non-discursive. Divergent figurations of violence—as utterance from elided histories and subaltern lives; as limit or logic of representation; as materiality—shape different inquiries.
This conference invites contributions addressing the question of violence in different formats—panels, performances, events, screenings, and discussions—and proposes an encounter between contemporary artistic research and other domains of inquiry.