Art Histories
2018/ 2019

Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier

Ghosts in Transition: For a Spectro-Aesthetics of Contemporary Art in Postconflict Societies

is an art historian and associate researcher at the Centre for Historical Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research interests are visual arts and memory in global politics, culture, and human rights. Stéphanie received her PhD at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (Images of Khmer Rouge Atrocities, 1975-2015). She received her master’s degrees in art history from the Université La Sorbonne Paris I. She also works as curator and has organized exhibitions in Israel, France, Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Thailand. She is a recipient of a Leon Milman Memorial Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC (2012), a recipient of a fellowship at the Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois (2010), and was a researcher in the Theory Department at Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands (2005-2006). Stéphanie is the co-founder of the international research group DK-Memosis, dedicated to the study of memorialization in Cambodia. She has published in Dapim, Mémoires en Jeu, Journal of Perpetrator Studies, Kunstlicht, and Media, Culture & Society among others.

Ghosts in Transition: For a Spectro-Aesthetics of Contemporary Art in Postconflict Societies

In the past decades, artists and curators have been increasingly concerned with questions of memory and intervention in the context of massive human rights violations. Yet, scholarship on contemporary art in postconflict situations remains limited. How do artists and curators in affected countries articulate aesthetic, moral, and political demands in their work? How do they relate to healing and cultural revival? What forms of visibility and participation do they create for the public at home and abroad? How do postconflict conditions affect the field of art history/theory itself? To answer these questions, the project brings art history into dialogue with spectrality studies as it has developed across disciplines (literature, international relations, critical geography). It takes the figure of the spectre or ghost as framework for analyzing in a comparative fashion the ways artists and curators from countries such as Cambodia, Iraq, and Colombia, address the complexities of transition and challenge the local/global divide. The notion of hauntology will also help rethink the relation of art history and catastrophe beyond the Holocaust and in response to conflicts worldwide.