Exhibitions on Difficult Pasts and Their Infrastructures

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel builds on the burgeoning interest in the impact of infrastructures on social, cultural and mnemonic practices. Scholars have explored the social, political, aesthetic and semantic dimensions of memory sites, institutions and exhibitions, while material, technological, administrative, or environmental contexts have tended to remain in the background of academic interest. Focusing on such infrastructural issues and how they reveal their agency, sometimes in quite ordinary circumstances, still awaits in-depth scholarly analyses. To gain a better understanding of these seemingly mundane, often invisible, and yet profoundly influential aspects of memory making, the panelists draw inspiration from infrastructure studies.

Infrastructures are material and non-material factors that enable and condition all kinds of work and action, organizing and shaping social life. Conducting an infrastructural analysis means proposing a broadened and more complex approach to memory production that challenges the narratives about the leading roles of ‘heroic actors’ (e.g. curators, museum directors, or politicians) and gives due recognition to hidden actants (e.g. architectural space, technology, legal and finacial frameworks, transport and logistics, environment) and the ‘invisible hands’ (e.g. technicians, administrative staff) that (co-)operate (with) them.

The panelists offer well-theorised analytical approaches combined with rich empirical research on cases from Poland, Romania, and the USA to explore the impact of infrastructural practicalities on the cultural memory of World War II and the Holocaust. Taken together, the papers in the panel show how this perspective can be adapted and effectively applied to exhibitions about difficult pasts considered, in turn, as infrastructures of memory production and distribution.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Magdalena Moskalewicz, Sheldon Museum of Art / U of Nebraska–Lincoln

Papers

• Logistics of Memory: YIVO’s Transnational Holocaust Exhibition in 1947 (The Jews in Europe, 1939–1946) - Agata Justyna Pietrasik, Freie U Berlin (Germany); Daniel Véri, Museum of Fine Arts Budapest (Hungary)

• Site Specific Infrastructures: Post-Memory and Photographic Evidence in the Iași Pogrom Museum - Cristian Emil Nae, George Enescu National U of Arts (Romania)

• The Infrastructural Agency of Exhibition Spaces. How Memory is Produced Through Art on Display - Tomasz Załuski, U of Lodz (Poland)

Discussant

• Adrian Cioflanca, Center for the Study of Jewish History (Romania)

Session Manager

• Liladhar R. Pendse, UC Berkeley