Sites of Reckoning Symposium: Artist Talk, Nicola Brandt

This artist talk will take place in Screening Room 306 of the CMII center at Georgia State.
About the artist:
Nicola Brandt (b. 1983) is an artist from Namibia, known for her large-scale photographs and video works of social and psychological landscapes that reflect on themes of power, memory, desire and positionality. Brandt’s work foregrounds the idea that place and identity are mutually constituted and are impacted by environmental, social and political factors. She is interested in how these experiences and effects might be communicated through innovative documentary and performance practices.
Brandt believes that art can assist in facilitating cross-cultural dialogue and social change. She is one of the first in her generation of Namibian artists who used a cross-disciplinary approach to critique the memory culture of German colonialism and how it is situated in place. Her groundbreaking exhibition The Earth Inside (2014) at the National Art Gallery of Namibia combined performance, video, photography and installation to investigate how the past continues to return into the present in various guises, and subverted traditional ideas of landscape, especially in relationship to the Namibian-German war (1904–1908) and the Namibian Genocide. Brandt’s video work Indifference was screened in a fringe exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2015 with the Golden Lion award winner, the German artist Christoph Schlingensief.
The artist has presented her work internationally including at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Yale University and the Würth Museum in Germany. She lectures on histories of photography and contemporary art and has been an artist-in-residence at a number of institutions. In 2019 she was a visiting professor at the University of Bayreuth’s Institute of African Studies and the Iwalewahaus.
Brandt has recently published a monograph Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Video and Performance Art (2020) with Bloomsbury Press, and contributed an essay ‘Performance, Space and Time’ to The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (2020), edited by Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole.
About the symposium:
This two-day symposium scheduled for March 5-6, 2020 at Georgia State University will bring together a distinguished group of U.S. and international scholars to consider memorials and museums as important sites for truth telling and accounting for past violence. It will also explore how these sites narrate violent histories in particular ways—privileging some truths over others—and with distinct intents. The ongoing controversies about removing Confederate statues across the US–and especially in the South—are obvious examples of these dilemmas. In addition, we have planned an optional field trip on Saturday, March 7, 2020 to visit The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, Alabama.
For more information, visit https://chrd.gsu.edu/events/reckoningsymposium/