Art as Research: Microhistory as Method
Thurs 20 Oct 2022, 06 pm
Online via the Event page
From the organizer:
Called the ‘science of real life’ by historians Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, microhistory describes an approach to studying history that employs what we could think of as a microscopic lens, focusing on seemingly irrelevant details, habits and routines, and underlying mentalities. Such studies can serve as ‘histories from below’, giving voice and representation to subjects made silent or abstract in prevailing master narratives.
In this webinar, historian Mark E. Frank and artist Magnus Bärtås will discuss how the concept of microhistory has developed as a research method within their respective fields of study. Mark E. Frank will elaborate on the origins of microhistory in the discipline of history, and will share how artistic visualization has supported his own research in Sino-Tibetan history. Magnus Bärtås will discuss how a mutual exchange can come about between the historical perspective/approach used in microhistory, and visual art, especially the video essay genre, with examples from his own moving image practice.
This program is part of an inter-institutional research exchange between Fulbright University Vietnam and Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design, funded by a Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) Mobility Grant for Internationalization. It also joins the educational programming for ‘Illuminated Curiosities’, an exhibition presented by Nguyen Art Foundation.
* Language: English only (video documentation of the event will be subtitled in Vietnamese and published online at a later date)
* Guest speakers: Mark E. Frank & Magnus Bärtås; Respondent: Nora Taylor; Moderator: Pamela Corey & Bill Nguyen
Mark E. Frank is an Assistant Professor of History and Coordinator of the History major at Fulbright University Vietnam. He has published several articles about the Sino–Tibetan borderlands, including the microhistories of Chinese weather stations and experimental farms on the Tibetan plateau in the early 20th century. His book in progress, The Rooted State: Plants and Power on the Chinese Frontier, shows how ideas about agrarian colonization traveled between different settings on the Chinese frontier during the Republican era, when the state itself was deeply fractious. It combines micro- and macro-perspectives to illustrate that the experiences of individuals and communities often reverberate with those of distant strangers in surprising ways.
Magnus Bärtås is a Professor of Fine Arts, and Head of Research at Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden. He works foremost with text; in film, essay and assemblage/installation. His works have been exhibited at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 1990, 2006 and 2010, and he is the winner of the Grand Prize at Oberhausen International Film Festival in 2010. Bärtås participated in Platform, Seoul, South Korea, 2009; the 9th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea, 2012; and the Real DMZ Project, Art Sonje, Seoul, South Korea, 2013 and 2015. Gothenburg Konsthall presented a larger retrospective exhibition of his work in 2016. In 2011, his book All Monsters Must Die (together with Fredrik Ekman) was shortlisted for The August Prize – an annual Swedish literary prize awarded to the best Swedish book of the year.
Dr. Nora Annesley Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Interim Provost at Fulbright University Vietnam. She received her PhD from Cornell University. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art, published by Hawaii Press in 2004 and reprinted by NUS press in 2009; co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, An Anthology, Cornell SEAP Press, 2012; as well as numerous articles on Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian and Vietnamese art. In 2014, she was the recipient of a John Solomon Guggenheim Fellowship for a study on the politics of performance art in Southeast Asia.
