Lara Fresko Madra PhD ’22 has been award a Metropolitan Museum Fellowship. Every spring The Met’s Fellows share new avenues of research in art history, visual culture, education, and cultural heritage preservation. This year’s colloquium “Research Out Loud: Met Fellows Present”, May 16-26, 2022 was held online via Zoom.
On May 25, Lara Fresko Madra, (Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow) joined Majdolene Dajani, (Chester Dale Fellow, Ancient Near Eastern Art) and Rachel Tabet, (Andrew W. Mellon Conservation Fellow) on a panel titled “Broadening Perspectives on Levantine Heritage: Preservation, Adaptation, and Interpretation.”
Fresko Madra’s paper analyzes two works in The Met collection: Rayyane Tabet’s “Orthostates” and Michael Rakowitz’s “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist.” The contemporary lens offered by these works articulates temporality through the entangled eras of ancient civilization, empires, colonialism, nationalisms, and interventionism.
The paper examines how the works offer alternative modes of engaging the past, particularly as a challenge to modern official historiography. In so doing, Fresko Madra proposes the conceptual framework of heterochronic imagination as an artistic practice, an art historical methodology, and a curatorial strategy. With a multitemporal emphasis, the presentation foregrounds the shifting significance of objects, images, and stories through a proliferation of narratives regarding the past. This paper argues that such multitemporality holds the potential for redressing not only historical violence but also the violence perpetrated by official historiography in the present.
