In Order to Know, We Must Imagine for Ourselves: How Artworks by Penny Siopis and Anton Kusters Re-present Traumatic Histories for Participatory, Open-Ended Re-imaginings

Abstract

There are historical events that remain charged with trauma, thereby resisting the logic of causal progress conventionally ascribed to historical narratives. As obstacles to cohesive representations of history and national identities, these events remain ambiguous and problematic. Prompted by art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman’s proclamation “In order to know, we must imagine for ourselves” (Images in Spite of All. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012, p. 3), I argue that art, by not being intent on resolution or certitude, can offer opportunities to re-present, re-imagine, and re-think traumatic histories. In this article, I bring a selection of films by South African artist Penny Siopis, namely Obscure White Messenger (2010), The Master Is Drowning (2012), and Communion (2011), into conversation with the installation The Blue Skies Project (2018) by Belgian photographer Anton Kusters. I investigate how they engender affective encounters that probe the limits of the known. This is made possible by the artworks’ tangential approach to the events, activating the viewer’s imagination. The imagination facilitates a subjective, contingent, and indeterminate inquiry into the unknown, which the discipline of history often precludes. As viewers are tasked with the work of making meaning, I argue for the unique potential of art and the imagination as highly generative sources for engendering varying and differing expressions of knowledge that remain open-ended. Central to my argument is the way in which the artworks discussed grapple with the dialectics of the image, with the imbrication of the evidentiary and the imagination—knowing and un-knowing.