Implications. Theories and new perspectives on art studies

Implications is a roundtable on current humanities research with an interdisciplinary orientation that PASS has been organising since 2023. We are particularly interested in recent literature where critical theory can meet insights from a wide range of disciplines and can both be informed by and inform the development of knowledge through artistic, museum and curatorial practice. We meet physically - not online - three times in spring and three times in autumn, three hours each time. The conversations are in English and always take place on Wednesdays at 13-16. The venue is the University of Copenhagen, Søndre Campus. Participants enrolled as PhD students receive ECTS points for attending three sessions. But everyone is welcome, regardless of profession and background, and we are happy when we manage to attract mixed groups where several types of professional experience and practice are present in the room. The discussions revolve around what implications the books we read might have for the way we think and work, whether we are visual artists, publishers, university researchers, consultants, urban planners or something else entirely.
In Implications, we basically read an entire non-fiction book each time. If you don't have time to read it all or just want to participate as a listener, that's fine too. But the discussions always benefit from participants bringing their own work experiences and perspectives into play so that what we read is related to specific issues and life experiences.

Target group

The seminar is open to PhD students and other early-stage researchers in the fields of art history, visual culture and practice-based research. Max. participants 15.

Purpose

• To introduce new, transdisciplinary perspectives on arts and practice-based research through shared reading and discussion of key works by authors in fields such as geography, geology, sociology, black studies, and anthropology.
• To allow participants to discuss their own research projects, considering current theoretical and analytical positions and in light of urgent issues.

Programme

Autumn 2026

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History

This semester, PASS’s reading seminar Implications, convened by Mikkel Bogh and Fatma Bucak, is dedicated to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019), read alongside excerpts from NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel Glory (2022).

Over the course of three sessions, we will engage with Azoulay’s thesis that imperialism should not merely be understood as a historical formation, but as a persistent condition embedded in the institutions, categories, and practices through which knowledge and history are produced. “Unlearning imperialism” therefore means questioning the seemingly self-evident distinctions and procedures associated with citizenship, sovereignty, art, museums, archives, documents, and historical narrative – and asking how these might be addressed in a different way.

Photography and the archive will serve as an important common thread throughout the seminar. For Azoulay, photographs are never merely documents of past events. They are produced within the relationships between the photographed subjects, the photographers, the spectators, and the institutions, and are further embedded in systems of classification, ownership, and political recognition. Her striking juxtaposition of well-documented objects and undocumented people points to a central paradox: imperial systems have created extensive archives of images and objects, while simultaneously dispossessing and displacing people and limiting their ability to emerge as political and historical subjects.

Across the sessions, we will read and discuss sections of Azoulay’s book alongside her semi-autobiographical reflections, considering how these reflections inform the broader project of unlearning imperialism and rethinking the production of history. This approach asks us to reconsider our relationships with objects, artworks, and museums in relation to the people and histories entangled with them.

Nevertheless, photographs and archives cannot be reduced to the systems that produced them. Azoulay’s concept of potential history raises the question of how images can be read in relation to inherited captions, classifications, and historical narratives, so that suppressed relationships and unrealised possibilities may once again become visible. Such forms of “unlearning” open up questions that are particularly relevant to contemporary artistic and practice-based research: How can artists work with archives without merely reproducing their categories? Can photographs become sites where people, objects, and histories separated by imperial institutions are reconnected? What might counter-archival or reparative practices look like? The seminar will explore these questions through Azoulay’s discussions of archival classification, looting, museums, photography, and “the common, not the past.”

The concluding session focuses on reparation, restitution, and return and asks what it might mean not only to unearth imperial histories but also to transform the relationships we have inherited from them.  In this sense, potential history does not simply turn toward the recovery of a past that has been suppressed; it invites us to imagine forms of historical and political life otherwise. Throughout the seminar, readings from NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory will introduce another literary register for approaching violence, independence, power, and the difficult creation and re-creation of political worlds.

Implications thus takes Azoulay’s work as a call to view images, objects, and archives not merely as evidence about history, but as active participants in historical relations that remain unfinished – and therefore potentially open to being unlearned, reshaped, and recreated.

Each session will include reading segments from 'The Glory,' a novel about the difficult birth of a new nation. This will allow us to rethink violence from a markedly different perspective and through a different literary language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Past activities

Course teacher

Professor Mikkel Bogh

ECTS credits

• 2 ECTS (for attending three times)
• 4 ECTS (for attending all six sessions)

Workload

Presence total 18 (9) hours + preparation total 94 (47) hours.

Registration

Please register via email to pass@hum.ku.dk latest one week before each session.