Keynote Lecture | Liliana Gómez (Kassel) | Witnesses in Art: Aesthetics, archives, and (non)institutional practices in transition

This talk forms part of the opening of the 2025 Leibniz ScienceCampus Conference: Navigating Epistemic, Cultural and Legal Translations on 23 April 2025.

No registration is required to attend this keynote talk. However, if you would like to remain for the reception after the event then please complete the registration form on the conference website by 31 March to help us plan numbers.

Abstract | This keynote talk addresses the role of the archive and the courtroom as normative sites of historical memory in situations of (post)conflict and transition from violent pasts, as they interlock the levels of the state, civil society, and the individual. Both, the archive and the courtroom act and create new political subjects, normative narratives, and state practices that are involved in the dispute over historical memory. By examining how justice and, in particular, testimony are staged in contemporary visual art, for example from the Balkans and Latin America, the presentation addresses emerging artistic and (non-)institutional practices that critically reflect on the judicial space, its transfer and translation in post-conflict situations. How do artists and other civil society actors intervene in and engage aesthetically with the courtroom both as a real space and as a forum? Why do they imagine and demand alternative spaces of justice? Following the concepts of transfer and translation as transposition and resemantization of meanings, institutions, and norms, the presentation will elaborate on what is referred to as ‘juridical humanity.’

Liliana Gómez is Professor of Art and Society at the University of Kassel with a secondary affiliation at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and the documenta Institute. Since June 2023 she has been Director of CELA (Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos) at the University of Kassel and on the Board of Directors of CALAS Centro Regional Andes (Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies).

She studied philosophy and architecture in Berlin and Paris. She completed her doctorate at the Free University of Berlin with a thesis on modernism in Latin America and habilitated at the University of Zurich with a study on the theory and history of photographic archives. She has been a guest lecturer and researcher at Columbia University, Harvard University, NYU, Universidad del Rosario Bogotá and the Orient Institute Beirut, among others. From 2017-2021, she was an SNSF professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich and has since headed the SNSF research project "Contested Amnesia and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South" (Swiss National Science Foundation).Her research focuses on contemporary literary, cultural and media theory, theory and history of modernity in a global context, theory and history of the archive, aesthetics and postcolonial studies, memory studies, literature, art and human rights, visual cultures and environmental humanities.