Something you should know

For this new session of Something you should know, meet Griselda Pollock, art history specialist .

Griselda Pollock is the most eminent of those who, since the 1980s, have revolutionized art history by subjecting it to feminist questioning. Far beyond the now classic question of the art-historical “canon”, she has devoted a dozen works to a radical re-elaboration of the very framework of the discipline, informed by political theory, psychoanalysis and anthropology. These include Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (1999), Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (2003), Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time Space and the Archive (2007), After-Affects I After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2013)...

Professor at the University of Manchester and then at Leeds University, Pollock directed the Centre for Cultural analysis, Theory and History at Leeds University. In 2020, she was awarded the most prestigious international prize for the humanities, the Holberg Prize. In 2023, outlining an entirely new approach to historiography, she edited a volume of studies devoted to Helen Rosenau, art and architecture historian and author of the pioneering Woman in Art: From Type to Personality (1944). In 2024, the classic of classics, her first feminist intervention in history, will finally be published in French.

Created in 2006, Something you should know aims to welcome contemporary art into an institution of higher education and research, by placing itself firmly on the side of the practice of today's artists and producers.

At a time when globalization is overturning the flows and polarities of the art world, giving rise to new forms of activism and new collective ambitions, questioning the space and forms of political representation or the constitution of new national references stemming from the communist world and decolonization, reinscribing utopia at the heart of collective projects, questioning majoritarian legitimacies and the blind spots of democracy : These are just some of the issues that the seminar aims to explore, by giving a voice to artists, curators, critics, heads of institutions and activists working outside France, who come to EHESS/FMSH to share their experience with us.

Seminar organizers

• Patricia Falguières, Centre Georg Simmel | EHESS-CNRS
• Elisabeth Lebovici, critic and curator
• Natasa Petresin-Bachelez | Cité Internationale des Arts