Interdisciplinary colloquium: Between Narrative and Embodiment

Between Narrative and Embodiment: Materializing Identities
Interdisciplinary Colloquium at the Czech Memorial Scrolls Museum, London
7 March 2011
4:00-9:00 pm

The participants of the colloquium are preoccupied with the negotiation of the seam between stories and histories as narratives - told or written - and material attributes of human lives, artifacts, which necessarily figure in and furnish those narratives. Art practice, from embroidery to digital book and photography, graphic design and museum curation, all in their different ways partake in that negotiation. The issue of materiality is brought up here as a tool of critical reflection locating points of friction of individual and collective identities, their political, i.e. relational embodiment within the contemporary dynamic cultural space. The location of the colloquium, the Czech Memorial Scrolls Museum in London, housing more than 200 Torah scrolls and ceremonial textiles from the period of WWII, urges such reflection in light of the problematic histories presented in its artifacts, and the necessity to find ways of transposing those histories into contemporary narratives of loss and regeneration.