Hantologie des colonies — Screening — Slash Paris

Past: October 8 → November 18, 2011

As an extension of the Belgian artist Vincent Meessen’s exhibition My Last Life at the Espace Khiasma (September 30 to November 12, 2011), the association Normal proposes a series of films on the subject of the resurgence of the colonial specter on the current artistic scene. Organized and produced by Khiasma, “Hantologie des colonies” will be hosted by a dozen art centers, multidisciplinary venues and cinemas in Paris and its suburbs.

With a selection of both historically rare films and recent works made by contemporary artists, the series questions the irresolute nature of colonial history. By putting back into circulation long forgotten, lost or forbidden images or choosing to relate certain colonial motifs or events, these works demand an emancipation from and a critique of colonial studies heritage. They firmly assert the bases of a sensitized awareness centered on filmic experience. The space/time of the films becomes a device for recording the ghostly motifs of History. But more than just a simple retracing of the past, Hantologie des Colonies offers a reflection on the way in which the “colonial fact” continues to be current, how it resurfaces in the present.

Joining together a generation of emerging European artists (as well as the tutelary figures of Raoul Peck and Sarah Maldoror), this cycle of films reveals the extent to which the colonial question still traverses the very foundations of Europe, as the dark face of modernity. The artists do not hesitate to interrogate their own roots, delving into the heart of their cultural and sometimes familial heritage as a way to better understand the contradictory histories that irrigate our societies and to underscore the absurdity of the denial of difference that spawns paralytic national histories.

Read more