User:Danielle Coghlan

Contact Info


Toronto, Ontario, Canada
 * Danielle Coghlan
 * York University

Education

 * 2008, MA in Progress, Social Anthropology, York University
 * 2007, HBa, York University, Social Anthropology and Social & Political Thought

Research interests
The performative aspects of memory within & through mixed media art, installation art, graphic novel, dance, and painting produced by exilic artists who have witnessed and experienced the political violence of dictatorship, genocide, torture, and war. This MA research looks at multi-artistic & sensuous memory in addition to the role of emotion in displacement, asylum, migration, and resettlement. This project is aspiring to track bodily experiences in multi-disciplinary arts and their relations with the roles of memory, affect, and performance. I start with certain questions: How does exilic art bring testimonial information to the public; how does it make the public think differently about the practice of memory, the body, the notion of trauma, and perception? What are the sensory and generative potentials of testimonial narrative in aesthetic form & activity? Can artistic testimonies engender representational ventures that are transformative? That is, how do they make space for transformative possibilities? How do they make emotional experiences visible and felt; specifically, to induce empathy as well as sensuous knowledge? How can sense memory related to touch, smell, sight, and kinesthesia make unspeakable experiences felt and empathized? How do sensuous memories intersect with traumatic memory, postmemory; intergenerational memory, collective & personal memory? What is the relationship between multi-artistic memory, consciousness, and time? In addressing issues of exile and historical situations in Chile, Rwanda, Iran, former Yugoslavia, and Iraq, this research follows memory as an active process of tangency and looks at time as motion.