The
Asian Art and Performance Consortium (AAPC) of the Academy of Fine Arts (KuvA)
and the Finnish Theatre Academy (TeaK) of the University of the Arts Helsinki jointly
hosted a symposium focused on documenting and archiving Asian and
trans-cultural performance and fine arts. This is the third and
final symposium organized under the Shifting Dialogues - Asian Performance
and Fine Arts research project, funded by the Academy of Finland in
2011-2014.
Issues
raised at the symposium included embodied, iconographic and electronic transfer
of performance traditions in Asia related to live performance and traditional
pedagogies. These include the use of moving image, photography, web-based
presence and new media, historical and theoretical writings, the construction
of archives, museums and libraries.
Cuneyt
Cakirlar, in his paper “Mediation of Document: Ethnographic Turns and Art
as Methodological Object in Critical Humanities”, examined relations of ethnography,
contemporary art practice, globalisation and scalar geopolitics with particular
reference to a selection of artists including Kutlug Ataman, Ming Wong, Akram
Zaatari, Slavs & Tatars. Concentrating on these artists’ engagement with
ethnography, Cuneyt’s paper analyzed a selection of videos and gave an account
of different scalar aspects of their artworks as well as the ways in which
conceptual art-objects bear the potential of forming transient archives in
academia to exemplify critical methodologies of ‘dealing with data’. Rather
than addressing scale as a differential concept, this paper aimed to
demonstrate the ways in which these artworks produce self-scaling,
self-regioning subjects that unsettle the hierarchical constructions of scale
and facilitate a critique of the scalar normativity within the global art world’s
documentary regionalisms and internationalisms.
