Art Is As And Against History: A Conversation on Telling Stories in the Present About the Past

Claire Bishop is a Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY). She is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History (2005), Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), and Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (2013). She is a regular contributor to Artforum. Bishop’s current research addresses the impact of digital technologies on history and temporality in contemporary art and performance.



Elias Khoury is the author of thirteen novels, four volumes of literary criticism, and three plays. He was awarded the Palestine Prize for Gate of the Sun, which was named Best Book of the Year by Le Monde Diplomatique, The Christian Science Monitor, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and a Notable Book by The New York Times. Khoury’s Yalo, White Masks, Little Mountain, The Journey of Little Gandhi, and City Gates are also available in English. Khoury is a Global Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern and Arabic Studies at New York University. As Though She Were Sleeping received France’s inaugural Arabic Novel Prize.



Jayce Salloum has worked in installation, photography, drawing, performance, text, and video since 1978, as well as curating and conducting a vast array of cultural projects. He has recently worked in Afghanistan, China, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, the former Yugoslavia, France, Kamloops, Cumberland House, Galapagos Islands, and other locations in the Americas. His practice exists within and between the personal, quotidian, local, and transnational. In one sense, it has consistently been about mediation. A monograph, Jayce Salloum: History of the Present, was published in 2009. Salloum is a recipient of the 2014 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.



Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a contributing editor of Bidoun and writes regularly for Artforum and Frieze. She has written for many newspapers, magazines, and journals, including Afterall, Camera Austria, and Parkett. She has contributed essays to numerous anthologies, monographs, and catalogues, covering subjects such as Sufism and Surrealism, feminism and formalism, experimental music, video production, and public space in postwar Lebanon, as well as the work of artists such as Etel Adnan, Eric Baudelaire, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Iman Issa, Rabih Mroué, Wael Shawky, and Akram Zaatari. She lives and works in Beirut, where she teaches criticism in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut.



This panel is a cross-disciplinary conversation on telling stories in the present about the past, and a practitioners’ debate on the uses of history in novels, videos, installations, exhibitions, and history itself.