About the Project
This project will consider how contemporary artworks deal with the ethical and aesthetic complexities that attend the representation of war or conflict today. More specifically, it will address how an institutional collection of such works might contribute to an understanding of sites of conflict and contestation in the contemporary world. There have been a number of signal artworks and many significant critical publications related to such matters over recent years. Artists have been prompted to interrogate anew the links between war and visual culture, and to contest mainstream representations of violent conflict, in responding to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the wars and conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia, to genocide in Rwanda, to drone warfare and the visual technologies of contemporary warfare, for instance. Books such as Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (2012), Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2006) and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009), Rosalyn Deutsch, Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War, Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2005), and Eyal Weizman’s The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (2012) have all shaped new debates around the particular forms of violence today and their impact on the world. These works and these critical interventions provide the background for this PhD project.
In recent years the Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow (GoMA) has, via the financial support of the Art Fund, acquired significant artworks by a range of renowned international artists that speak to these issues. These acquisitions include works by leading international artists such as Omer Fast, Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Hito Steyerl, and Fiona Tan, amongst others. Many of these works present a globalised perspective, many also deal with war, violence and political memory in specific times and places. The relationship(s) of Glasgow and of GoMA’s audiences to the sites represented in the international contemporary art collected will be a key focus of inquiry. Dr Katrina Brown (Director of The Common Guild, Glasgow), who worked as Associate Curator with GoMA on the Art Fund International acquisitions, will contribute to the supervision of the project.
The objectives of the research will be (amongst others):
• To develop detailed critical understanding of key contemporary artworks in the collections of Glasgow Museums pertaining to war and conflict.
• To research the extant critical literature on the aesthetic and ethical issues raised by artworks which represent war.
• To examine the strategies by which artists question the political and epistemological status of photographic and filmic images of war and conflict.
• To address the specific constellation of works in GoMA’s collection and what it means for them to co-exist in that context.
• To contribute to Glasgow Museums’ research and interpretation material on key works.
• To consider how new militarised visual technologies and cultures are informing the production of art that takes war as its subject matter.
Applications are welcome from students with interests in, variously: modern and contemporary visual art; aesthetics; war and conflict studies; critical theory. Applicants must have an undergraduate degree in History of Art, Film Studies, Fine Art, or Visual Studies (2:1 or better), and a Masters degree in History of Art or a cognate subject area in the social sciences, or arts and humanities. Applications will be considered from individuals holding an undergraduate degree in a relevant subject (2:1 or better), and a professional career history in that would be likely to compensate for research training at Masters level.
This project belongs to the Ethical thematic cluster. The successful candidate will be supervised by Dr Dominic Paterson (History of Art) and Dr Vassiliki Kolocotroni (English Literature), with Katrina Brown (Director, The Common Guild)
Application Process – Candidates interested in applying for funded PhD study on this project are encouraged to make informal contact with the Supervisor(s) in the first instance.
For full details please visit our website:
http://www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/arts/graduateschool/fundingopportunities/leverhulmetrustscholarships/#d.en.389826
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