The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society presents a talk by Dimitris Papanikolaou, University Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies, University of Oxford, and Visiting Fellow, Remarque Institute, NYU.

Open to the public.

Dimitris Papanikolaou engages with recent cultural work produced in Greece in the context of (and as a response to) the current economic and socio-political crisis – specifically, what can be seen as a ‘turn to archive’ in recent site-specific performance and conceptual art produced in Greece. Even though not a new trend in global art, the ‘turn to archive’ in Greece is taking a much more radical and more readily political dimension.

Combining reflections on archival poetics, biopolitics and precarity, while also taking theoretical cues from Derrida’s Archive Fever and Athens Still Remains, and Butler’s Gender Trouble, Papanikolaou argues that what we see emerging in Greece at the moment is a larger, conscious and embattled cultural politics of Archive Trouble. The lecture will include examples from recent Greek films, novels, and works of visual art and performance.

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Dimitris Papanikolaou is University Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies, Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford and currently Visiting Fellow art the Remarque Institute, New York University. His research focuses on the ways Modern Greek literature is in conversation with other cultural forms, especially Greek popular culture) as well as social and political problems. He is the author ofSinging Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (2007), and of numerous essays on queer theory, Greek cultural studies, and the poetics of C.P. Cavafy.