FALL 2024
October 24, 2024
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
Deanna Bowen: 鈥淭hey Tried to Destroy Us: Disproving Myths About Black Absence in Canada鈥�
Bowen will talk about her decades-long research-creation practice, an anti-Black petition from 1911, and recent projects that make critical/historical links between Bowen鈥檚 family history of enslavement in the US and migration to Canada, Creek Negroes & the Trail of Tears, British Imperialism under Queen Victoria and the white supremacist ambitions of the National Gallery of Canada鈥檚 collection circa 1888-1943.
About the Speaker: Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen鈥檚 family history guides her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary work. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. The artistic products of her research were presented most recently at Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Vancouver Art Gallery, Mackenzie Gallery, OBORO, and the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery. Deanna has also received numerous awards in support of her practice including the 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, 2020 Governor General Awards in Media and Visual Arts, 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize.
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November 21, 2024
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
Abigail E. Celis: 鈥淚n the Manchineel Tree鈥檚 Shadow: Thinking with Toxicity in Julien Creuzet鈥檚 Toute la distance鈥� (2018) and La pluie a rendu cela possible鈥� (2018)鈥�
The toxic endurance of colonialism, as a burden borne by bodies and by lands, has been deftly theorized by scholars such as Vanessa Agard-Jones and Malcolm Ferdinand. Julien Creuzet鈥檚 two-part installation, Toute la distance de la mer 鈥� ( 2018) and La pluie a rendu cela possible鈥� (2018) similarly speaks to a multi-species French Caribbean landscape marred by colonial toxicity. This lecture investigates the references to the fruit-bearing manchineel tree in Creuzet鈥檚 installation, arguing that the fruit tree expands and complicates what toxicity can do in the afterlives of colonization. A trickster fruit, the poisonous manchineel activates a set of stories that brings together colonial history and decolonial possibilities, thinking through entangled, porous relationships between bodies and environments.
About the Speaker: Abigail E. Celis is an assistant professor in Art History and Museum Studies at the Universit茅 de Montr茅al, and received her PhD in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on the afterlives of colonialism and decolonial imaginaries as witnessed through contemporary visual culture, artistic practice and museum norms in the French-speaking world, with a focus on France, Francophone Africa, and the work of Afro-diasporic artists. Her most recent articles appear in African Arts and Contemporary French Civilization, and she has received grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Quebec Research Funds for a collaborative digital humanities project titled Cartographier l鈥檃rt noir. Dr. Celis has received several awards and fellowships for her research, including a Camargo Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and a FRQSC Louise-Dandurand Prix de publication for outstanding French-language publication. This winter, the next installment of The Catalogue of Speculative Translations, her research-creation project with artist Cosmo Whyte, will be exhibited at la Galerie de l鈥橴niversit茅 de Montr茅al.
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November 26, 2024
Tuesday, November 26, 2024, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Leacock 232
Sandrine Colard "Life and Death of an Image: A Model(ed) Congo (1885-1908)"
This talk revisits the now well-known group of 鈥渁trocity photographs鈥� that precipitated the downfall of the Congo Free State (1885 - 1908), from the neglected perspective of its epicenter, Congo, and its then quasi-metropole, Belgium. It examines the initial moment when the use of the 鈥渕odel colony鈥� slogan first attracted positive international attention and fired the imagination of West African migrants, including the photographer Herzekiah Andrew Shanu (1858鈥�1905), in the colonial capital of Boma. Using photos and self-portraits, the talk will situate Shanu鈥檚 championing of the city鈥檚 exemplary image and cultivation of his own respectability in it alongside the marked ambivalence (Hayes and Minkley 2019) that yet pervades them. The talk stems from a larger research project r, designed as a transformative intervention in the exponential literature about King Leopold II鈥檚 regime amidst Europe鈥檚 final moment of imperial expansion, and in the story of early studio portraiture, propaganda and anti-colonial photography from an African perspective.
Sandrine Colard is Assistant Professor of Art History at Rutgers University, and curator-at-large at the Kanal-Pompidou Museum in Brussels. She is a historian of African, modern and contemporary arts, as well as a historian of photography. Her research has been published internationally and supported by grants from the Mus茅e du Quai Branly, the Institut National d鈥橦istoire de l鈥橝rt, the Ford Foundation and by the Getty/ACLS. Among other exhibitions, Sandrine Colard curated the 6th Biennale of Lubumbashi, Future Genealogies: Tales from the Equatorial Line in 2019.
Organized by 成人VR视频's African Studies Program, with the co-sponsorship of the African Studies Student Association and the Department of Art History and Communication Studies.
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November 28, 2024
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts 230
Bobby Benedicto: 鈥淭he Form of Non-Meaning: Race, Suicide, and the Art of Ren Hang鈥�
In this paper, I examine the burden of meaning imposed on the racialized body through a reading of the work of Chinese queer photographer Ren Hang. Thinking through the insistent ascription of political significance to Ren鈥檚 images鈥攄espite his professed indifference to politics and interpretation鈥攖he paper exposes the limits of frameworks that bind the aesthetic works of minoritized subjects to narratives of recovery and repair. These frameworks reflect a desire to celebrate practices that enable those marked by 鈥渄ifference鈥� to endure social negation, yet they often efface the radical alterity that renders the subject resistant to coherence, assemblage, and determination. Popular readings of Ren鈥檚 work overlook the negativity in his aesthetic operations, which leave the body disarticulated, castrated, reduced to form and geometry, and disappeared into metonymic chains. In doing so, they miss how sexuality in Ren鈥檚 work emerges not as the expression of liberated desires but as the effect of a meaningless cut, a loss that accumulates. It is this sense of loss, I suggest, that also ties sexuality in Ren鈥檚 work to that which is absolutely heterogenous to the subject: death. Reflecting on Ren鈥檚 public battle with depression and his suicide in 2017, I consider the shared interpretive pressures placed on the racialized body and queer death, and reassert the importance of addressing the violence inherent in the structures of meaning-making on which contemporary analyses of race and sexuality have come to depend.
About the Speaker:
Bobby Benedicto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at 成人VR视频. He is the author of Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene (University of Minnesota Press) and has published widely in journal such as differences, Postmodern Culture, GLQ, Society & Space, and Social Text, among others. He is currently completing his second monograph, Fatal Sex: Queer of Color Negativity and the Erotics of Death. At 成人VR视频, Dr. Benedicto also serves as the convenor of the working group and annual lecture.
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听WINTER 2025
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January 16, 2025
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
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Steven Sawbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay: 鈥淣egative Life鈥�
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About the Speakers: Steven Sawbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton. Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an assistant professor of environmental humanities at York University. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics.
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听January 30, 2025
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
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Alexa Greist: 鈥淢aking Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800鈥�
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Introducing new artistic heroines, Making Her Mark at the Art Gallery of Ontario brings together more than 230 objects from royal portraits to metal work, ceramics, textiles, and cabinetry, to demonstrate the many ways women contributed to the visual arts of Europe. Featuring the work of well-known artists Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Luisa Rold谩n, Rosalba Carriera, Rachel Ruysch, and Elisabeth Vig茅e-LeBrun alongside female artisanal collectives, talented amateurs, and women working in factory settings and workshops, the exhibition invites us to reconsider what we think we know about European art history. Co-curated by Dr. Alexa Greist, AGO Curator and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints & Drawings and Dr. Andaleeb Banta, BMA Senior Curator and Department Head, Prints, Drawings & Photographs, the decision to exclusively display objects made by women makes this exhibition unique, and among the first to put women makers of various levels of society in conversation with each other, across centuries and a continent, through their artworks.
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About the Speaker: Alexa Greist is Curator & R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints and Drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Prior to joining the AGO in 2016, Greist held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. She holds a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania focused on Italian printed drawing books, and a Master鈥檚 degree, also from the University of Pennsylvania, with a M.A. thesis on the early drawings of Joseph Stella. Greist鈥檚 area of specialty is Italian Renaissance and Baroque prints and drawings.
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February 21, 2025
Friday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
Lisa Yin Han: 鈥淒eepwater Alchemy: Ocean Ultrasounds and Pacemakers鈥�
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How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? We often take for granted the sensing and imaging processes that have made deep sea human activities such as offshore drilling, deep sea mining, and nautical archaeology possible today. Yet media technologies such as sonar-based surveys, underwater cameras, digital modeling, and more have played a key role in both representing the seafloor as a space of potential profits, even when they are also used for environmentalist aims. Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor makes the case that the historical development of deep sea media technologies has been complicit in perpetuating logics of extraction, exploitation, and militarism in our global oceans. From towed hydrophones to networked seafloor observation, the hunt for resources has driven the imaging of the ocean floor and vice versa, imperiling fragile deep ocean ecosystems in the process.
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Reflecting on how underwater imaging and sensing techniques impact nonhumans, this talk will delve further into the book鈥檚 exploration of the interspecies intimacies fostered through techniques such as petroleum seismology and marine mammal telemetry. From desires to take 鈥渦ltrasounds of the earth鈥� to the production of a 鈥渇itbit鈥� for the oceans as a whole, emerging deep sea media techniques are indebted to terrestrial knowledge regimes, colonial notions of the frontier, and anthropocentric perspectives on environment. Han contests the narratives that cast depth as a problem that can be solved through the technologization of nature, arguing that a multispecies perspective on underwater mediation dismantles our existing hierarchies of knowledge and sense.
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About the Speaker: Lisa Yin Han is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, in the Claremont Colleges Intercollegiate Media Studies Field Group. She has previously worked as an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Arizona State University and received her PhD in Film and Media Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Situated at the intersections of environmental media studies, critical ocean studies, and science and technology studies, Lisa鈥檚 work attends to social, environmental, and technological histories of media infrastructure. Her book, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), examines how media operations in deep ocean environments pave the way for extractive industries. Lisa is an affiliate of the Humanities for Environment North American Observatory, and works as a reviews editor for the Journal of Environmental Media.
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听February 27, 2025
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
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AHCS Faculty Work in Progress
Sara Grimes
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March 13 2025
Date and Venue TBA
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Sex and Theory Lecture
(co-sponsored with the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies)
David Marriott:听from the impossibility anything follows
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About the Speaker: David Marriot was born and educated in England, where he taught at the Universities of London and Sussex. His most recent publications include Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford, 2018) and Duppies (London Materials, 2017). He is also completing a new book, titled X: On the Matter of Black Life, a critical study of racial concepts of life.
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听March 25 2025
Date and Venue TBA
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Reynolds Atelier Lecture
(co-sponsored with the English Department)
Meg Onli
About the Speaker: Meg Onli is curator-at-large at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Onli was previously codirector and curator of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. She also served as associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia. While there, Onli curated Speech/Acts (2017), Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents (2019), Jessica Vaughn: Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful (2021), and cocurated Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (2021).
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March 27, 2025
Thursday, 4:30-6:00 pm
Arts W-215
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AHCS Faculty Work in Progress
Matthew Hunter
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April 24-26, 2025
Venue TBA
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Critical Perspectives on Machine Learning Symposium
(co-sponsored)
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