In an expansive conversation, Cree artist Kent Monkman and Nathan Young, a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, revisit some of the foundational narratives of the so-called United States of America, centering Indigenous figures, events, and narratives that have been erased and denied as part of the settler-colonial project. VLC Borderlands Curatorial Fellow Larissa Nez (Diné) introduces and moderates the conversation. This event also features a celebratory opening reception.

 The phrase correct history has many meanings. An early, sardonic use can be found in Naeem Mohaiemen’s 2014 exhibition and book Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Prisoners of Correct History), presented at the Kunsthalle Basel and curated by Adam Szymczyk. For the VLC Forum 2024, Mohaiemen revisits this project in the present, inviting us to think about the corrosive state-enforced obedient and hagiographic history being churned out of universities and publishing houses—a form of historiography that insists on a single narrative at every bend of Bangladesh's journey since the partition of British India—while considering the power-pleasing mania for enforcing “shothik itihash” (correct history).

Each year, the VLC Forum is anchored by the Community Dinner. The Community Dinner gathers program participants, the VLC and New School communities, and the public for a free dinner and celebration for all. This year’s dinner features music and a special performance by Selfless Abandon (Miriam Parker and Luke Stewart).

There is queer history, that is, the history of sexuality, gender, and nonnormative identities, and there is queering history, a methodological engagement with how knowledge about the past is generated in the first place. Andrea Geyer, Adam HajYahia, and Carlos Motta discuss their work as artists, researchers, and curators to explore approaches to recuperating and rehistoricizing the obscured and erased pasts of women, queer people, and sex workers. More than simply rewriting inclusive histories and expanding the canon, queer approaches to historiography question the very construction of history as a singular, linear, universal experience that undergirds both the creation and the dismantling of empire, nationhood, and heteropatriarchy.

Thinking through and beyond historical relatedness, relations, and relativism of past and ongoing colonial erasure, imperial violence, and genocide, Palestinian architectural scholar and urbanist Mahdi Sabbagh and writer and genocide scholar Zoé Samudzi take on the coloniality of the museum, the ethnographic archive, and architecture. Their conversation oscillates between their work as scholars and researchers in institutional settings as well as their personal and bodily experience within them, grappling with the challenges and opportunities for intervening, altering, and amending archives, museums, and other history-bearing institutions, with the awareness that they are already revisionist accounts of the past. Speaking to individual and communal practices and legacies, they discuss the role of objects and rituals in reckoning with history, narrating counter histories, and the potential for solidarity and liberation across past and ongoing struggles.

Since 2022, artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle Morillo have researched Puerto Rican collections and holdings at the Smithsonian Institution, examining their histories of accession, how they live in off-site storage, and the possibilities of mediating their return to the people and places they belong to. On occasion of the VLC Forum 2024, the artists' performance lecture, Tactics of Transmission, reflects on their experiences as unruly colonial subjects navigating the imperial archive, as well as on the historical gossip, findings, and revelations from their research process. A series of films emerging from this project are exhibited in Cooper Hewitt’s Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial, on view November 2, 2024, through summer 2025. This is immediately followed by a festive closing reception.