ARTH 391 Art & its Changing Contexts: Time and Memory

• Instructor: Dr. Felicity Hamer

“The word remember (re-member) evokes the coming together of severed parts, fragments becoming a whole,” (bell hooks 1995). Memory informs our sense of identity and of belonging (or not). It constructs, maintains or severs our connection to others. Imaginatively renegotiating past impressions within the ever-changing present, memory can conjure both lived or fabricated pasts, perceived present(s), and imagined futures. As such, its connection to the ‘reality’ of what was, is and may be, is tenuous. Organized thematically by week — time travel, identity, body, environment, haunting, love and hate — in this course, we will examine artwork that confronts the passing of time and demonstrates the work of memory: recontextualization, reconsideration, re-membering.