W.G. Sebald's Artistic Legacies

When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of – as W.G. Sebald puts it – the “natural history of destruction”, comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald’s most prolific interpreters – as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant’s story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has – as this book attests – also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today’s migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.

Leonida Kova. is a professor at the University of Zagreb, Academy of Fine Arts and former vice president of the International Association of Art Critics. Her research interests include contemporary art, critical theories and feminist theories. She has published nine books and numerous academic articles, and curated over forty exhibitions. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes.is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, and previously Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, University of Amsterdam. She has curated exhibitions internationally and her books include.Post-War Germany and “Objective Chance”: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean (Steidl, 2011). Ilse van Rijn teaches in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Amsterdam, Gerrit Rietveld Academie and DAS Graduate School. Her research is situated at the crossroads of literature and visual art. She has published in various journals is currently working on The Artists’ Text as Work of Art (Brill). Ihab Saloul is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Narrative, founder and Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), University of Amsterdam. His interests include heritage and memory studies, cultural studies, narrative theory and semiotics, postcolonialism, aesthetics, and diaspora and exile in contemporary cultural thought in Europe and beyond. His latest publications include W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies: Memory, Word and Image (2023), and Diasporic Heritage and Identity (2023).