Mardi 7 november 2023 à 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, site Saint-Charles, salle 126.

Séminaire inaugural. Intervention de Valérie Morisson.

Valérie Morisson will present her volume Locating the Self: Welcoming the Other in British and Irish Art, 1990–2020 (Peter Lang, 2022). This volume addresses how spatialized identities, belongingness and hospitality are interrogated in British and Irish contemporary art (painting, installation, video, photography, new public art) at a time when economic and political crises tend to encourage individual or exclusive usages of space. It sketches a cartography of encounters encompassing the home, the neighbourhood, the village or city, and the nation. Artists interrogate how intimacy is both facilitated and threatened by spatial devices, how space fashions our perception of gender, social or ethnic identity and activates power relations. They explore the need for a home or a homeland and the various forms exile or placelessness can take. They may also take part in the restoration of the Commons and the constitution of alternative communities. Whether the analyses focus on the private sphere (in urban, suburban or rural contexts), or on shared communal spaces, they ponder the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at work in human encounters and shed light on how artistic apparatuses make the tensions between openness to the other and rejection or withdrawal perceptible. The approach, borrowing from art history as well as anthropology, lays emphasis on context, situationality and field work; it proposes to repoliticize relational art and concludes on the dialogical positionality which lies at the core of art.

Valérie Morisson is a Professor of British and Irish Studies at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and a member of EMMA. She has studied Irish contemporary art and its relation with post-nationalist culture extensively and has published many academic texts on British contemporary art. Though firmly anchored in art history, her approach stresses the relevance of context in the understanding of visual culture and the arts and borrows from anthropology to shed light on the position of the artist as well as the role of art in society. Her publications focus on a wide range of subjects (feminist art, memory and the commemoration of history, the Northern-Irish situation, postcolonial art, lens-based art) and consistently emphasize field work and praxis in art as key vehicles for expression, analysis and critique.