The workshop precedes the symposium “Exhibiting Aboriginal Art” organised by the Museum Ludwig in cooperation with the Institute of Art History of the University of Basel (17-19 February 2011).
Australian Aboriginal art is known for its capacity to encode, visualise and circulate cultural knowledge. The workshop takes the exhibition “Remembering Forward: Australian Aboriginal Painting since 1960” at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig as a starting point for analysing the ways in which geographic, topographic and historical knowledge as well as cosmological and genealogical concepts have been articulated in artworks and artistic practices in Australian Aboriginal communities. It also looks at how individual artists draw on ritual and social practices as well as oral traditions and work them into e.g. “abstract paintings”.
The workshop thus focuses on key issues of Morphomata’s research programme: the materialisation and transformation of knowledge in objects of art and material culture.
Howard Morphy, Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra, and
Fred Myers, Professor of Anthropology at New York University, both experts in the field of Australian Aboriginal art, will provide a comparative perspective on the subject.
