TY - GEN
T1 - Images of Coevalness
T2 - Paper presented at Not this time: Temporalities of ending, editing, and enduring, University of Copenhagen
AU - Bergs, Steyn
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - “The radical contemporaneity of mankind is a project,” wrote anthropologist Johannes Fabian in his seminal Time and the Other, from 1983. But in fact, Fabian much preferred the term ”coevalness” over “contemporaneity.” The former term, for him, better expressed the complex confluence of different historical temporalities that together constitute the present. Fabian alleges that his discipline has been structurally engaged with the denial of such coevalness, and as such has furthered the universalising and normative character of dominant linear and developmentalist accounts of history, rooted in colonial and imperialist expansion. The same, it must be observed, has often been true for art history. In my presentation, I want therefore to discuss two contemporary artworks that, as I will argue, concretize and lend content to the notion of coevalness: Laura Huertas Millán’s video Aequador (2012) and Juan Caloca’s installation Indio NAFTEADO (2019). Both works, I will demonstrate, provide images of coevalness—of how divergent temporalities clash as well as coil together in the present we collectively inhabit. In so doing, these works do not merely illustrate or serve as particular “examples” of the notion of coevalness, but in fact expose its complications and challenges.
AB - “The radical contemporaneity of mankind is a project,” wrote anthropologist Johannes Fabian in his seminal Time and the Other, from 1983. But in fact, Fabian much preferred the term ”coevalness” over “contemporaneity.” The former term, for him, better expressed the complex confluence of different historical temporalities that together constitute the present. Fabian alleges that his discipline has been structurally engaged with the denial of such coevalness, and as such has furthered the universalising and normative character of dominant linear and developmentalist accounts of history, rooted in colonial and imperialist expansion. The same, it must be observed, has often been true for art history. In my presentation, I want therefore to discuss two contemporary artworks that, as I will argue, concretize and lend content to the notion of coevalness: Laura Huertas Millán’s video Aequador (2012) and Juan Caloca’s installation Indio NAFTEADO (2019). Both works, I will demonstrate, provide images of coevalness—of how divergent temporalities clash as well as coil together in the present we collectively inhabit. In so doing, these works do not merely illustrate or serve as particular “examples” of the notion of coevalness, but in fact expose its complications and challenges.
M3 - Conference contribution
BT - University of Copenhagen
ER -