Memory Art and the Phantom Archive

A recent double book launch at Printed Matter books focuses on Contemporary Art, Trauma and Activist Resistance with authors Andreas Huyssen & Gregory Sholette

RECORDING OF EVENT: HERE

On February 16th Andreas Huyssen and Gregory Sholette presented their recent books, Memory Art in the Contemporary World and The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, at Printed Matter Books NYC. The event was co-sponsored by SPCUNY and Professor Nora M. Alter introduced the two speakers. Both books are part of the series New Directions in Contemporary Art from Lund Humphries Press (London and Chicago).

Huyssen’s timely work proposes that artistic interventions into traumatic social memories in the global South have created a ”new venue for political art today,“ while Sholette’s investigation pivots on the under-studied backstories of activist art. Both authors consider the positive and negative aspects of critical art practice at a time of hyper-aestheticized capitalism, rising authoritarianism, and widespread historical amnesia.

Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he taught beginning in 1986. He is the founding director of the university’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society and one of the founding editors of the New German Critique.

Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, activist and professor of studio art at Queens College, CUNY where he co-directs Social Practice CUNY with Chloë Bass. He has participated in, documented, and written about activist art for over forty years.

Nora M. Alter is a professor in the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts at Temple University, and author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Chris Marker (2006) and Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004).