Annemarie DiCamillo (The Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia)
Art as Resistance: Imaginative History-Making within the Visual Work of Artist Made Bayak
The work of Artist Made Bayak of Bali, Indonesia, is a poignant example of the ability of visual art and the poetic as an act of resistance and creation within the deconstruction of post-colonial histories and the construction of decolonized ones. His work combines expressive representations of symbols from Balinese Hinduism, metaphors of past and current Balinese history, and elements of the ecological concerns of the island into indexes of visual language. He employs these indexes to shift a linear history built on propaganda, colonialism, mass tourism, and industry into a non-linear history that dismantles misrepresentations and oppression. This becomes a method of imaginative history-making, one that responds to silenced memory with the hope of an expressive future. While studying the poetic as resistance against the effects of colonialism and tourism in Balinese visual arts and religion with UGA anthropologists Peter Brosius and Sarah Hitchner in the summer of 2017, I engaged in a studio visit and personal interview with Made Bayak, followed by a series of extensive interviews made alongside Dr. Brosius’ own work. Revealed in this dialogical study of Bayak’s work and studio practice was a non-linear methodology that draws from several epistemologies to reveal archivable and non-archivable histories. These histories are images that subvert hegemonic structures while building a visual culture of Bali. These methodologies allow Bayak to embody history and memory in the visual (prioritized over the written); disrupting the linearity of power structures through the creation of non-linear histories using the poetic as epistemology through composition and metaphor, and allowing him and his surrounding community to continue to speak the un-speakable, un- silencing their experience of Balinese history through poetic methods.
Interested in tangible expressions that translate, mediate, or evoke the intangible or interior experiences within different histories, Annemarie DiCamillo is currently completing their MFA in Painting and Drawing at the Lamar Dodd School of Art within the University of Georgia. Having garnered their BA in studio art and business management from Mount Vernon Nazarene University in Ohio in 2015, they continued to pursue courses of study that would allow their studio practice to become increasingly interdisciplinary. Within this endeavor, philosophy and anthropology are relevant as each discipline handles, among other things, the mediation of poetic spaces between the internal histories of humans and communities and the external orders and systems of the political and physical world.
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Amanda Figueroa (Harvard University) and Ravon Ruffin (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Re-Curating History in Contemporary Art
Curatorial practice has a history that is deeply rooted in colonial domination: the removal of cultural objects from their original context, in order to display them as evidence of the strength of empire in European metropoles. These practices have become responsible for the organization of objects into a historical narrative of the world. Two contemporary artworks from Renee Stout, “Black Wall with Bitches Brew” (2010), and Amalia Mesa-Bains, “New World Wunderkammer” (2013), challenge curatorial practice through the assemblage of distinct artworks and artifacts, that as a collection display an alternate narrative to undo an imagined colonialist history. As women of color artists, Stout and Mesa-Bains offer a different history, one rooted in the same collection of objects from the New World, but challenges the dominant narrative through alternate methods of acquiring and displaying these objects. Paradoxically, these different identities and practices in these artworks occupy the same location as traditional museum practices: the gallery floor. Through analysis of these artworks, this paper examines what happens to the history-making practice of curation when its history and the history it presents are both contested. This work takes up exhibition design, black and chicana feminisms, and theories of decolonization to identify and consider the opportunities for the future of contemporary art and curatorial practice offered by Stout and Mesa-Bains.
Amanda Figueroa is a PhD student at Harvard University. Her work takes a phenomenological approach to representations of trauma and violence in Latina and Chicana art, focusing primarily on the roles of grief and memory in artistic processes and exhibition practices. She also works with museums and other public art institutions to attract underrepresented audiences through public programming and community engagement.
Ravon Ruffin is a Social Engagement Producer at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. She received her M.A. in American Studies from the George Washington University, and a degree in Anthropology from VCU. Urban sustainability, digital culture and Black Feminism are the lenses through which she seeks to redefine the museum as a community space. She is interested in the acts of self-preservation that social and digital media platforms inspire. She can be found @afroxmericana.
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Thom Jeffrey Garcia (OCAD University)
Relic, Reliquary, Reliquarium: The role of Experimental Preservation in the generation of speculative design and architecture
Experimental Preservation is an inclusive endeavour that solicits the expertise of designers, architects, artists, curators, historians, conservationists, and archeologists. It posits the “future anterior”, a circumstance that simultaneously queries the designation of what is considered to be historical whilst proposing opportunities for the present in anticipation of the future. Experimental Preservationists consider what they cannot imagine future generations living without. This thesis asserts the importance of expanding the discourse within Experimental Preservation by advocating for the importance of archiving intangible and ephemeral content. The project is framed as a case study that will propose a strategy for how data can be preserved by materializing a contemporary conceptualization of relics and reliquaries through the use of digital fabrication. It will also provide an opportunity to envision a new building typology - a Reliquarium - that can produce, display, and archive these artifacts.
Thom Jeffrey Garcia is a designer and educator currently investigating the contemporary field of Experimental Preservation and emerging practices of representation in architecture and design. His primary research interest is a theory and practice-based exploration of speculative design as a critical research methodology. Jeffrey's academic and professional experience includes architecture and design competitions, graphic design and publication, industrial design, curatorial projects, and exhibit design. Prior to enrolling in the Interdisciplinary Master's in Art, Media, and Design (IAMD) Program at OCAD University, Jeffrey was a sessional instructor for over 10 years in the undergraduate Environmental Design Program at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Architecture. His focus was in foundation design education including studio work, design theory, contemporary history, and visual communication. He was a recipient of the Faculty of Architecture Carl Nelson Teaching Award and received a University of Manitoba Students’ Teacher Recognition.
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Stephane Gaulin-Brown (McGill University)
The Legibility of Place: Robert Smithson and the locus of logos
Imagine you’re a medieval peasant who time travelled to the year 2018 and came across a computer. When you saw it for the first time you would perceive it blankly, perhaps it would show up to you as simply a chunk of metal. However, once you acquired the concept of “computer” suddenly and from then on computers would show up as “computers”. The philosopher Alva Noe has argued that concepts are “skills for taking hold of what there is.” Therefore, a modification, or acquisition, of conceptual knowledge changes both our ability to access the world and handle it. Of significance for architects is the concept of space. This concept underwent a radical re-formulation during the late Renaissance. Specifically, with the work of Galileo and Descartes, space came to be regarded as homogenous, quantitative geometric void, viewed objectively from a beyond. As a skill, this stance on the concept of space was incredibly well suited for the emerging science and ensuing technological project, which allowed for greater control and instrumentalization of nature. This has given us incredible power over the forces of entropy, but has also brought us frightfully near to nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. What this world view misses is the qualitative embodied dimension of spatiality, the dimension where human meaning issues forth, where the significant interconnection of “place” and “self” is experienced. Place as the locus of Logos. These overlooked dimensions of existence have been articulated in a long tradition of resistance from William Blake, the Surrealists, Robert Smithson and many others. Smithson, in particular, because of his extensive interest in these issues and the thorough documentation of his experiences is, I propose, a good example for early articulations of a methodology for architects to open the site visit to accommodate the full dimensionality of place. This opening of the experience of place is, furthermore, the ground for designing architectures which participate in the shared meaning of their sites and the actions of those who inhabit it. Participating in this meaning imbues the work itself with significance that guides the lives of those who live it. Place is something experience that contains the human dimension of thought, articulated in language. This means connecting meaningfully through the work to emplaced narratives, and the pre-given significance of the world which orients our lives.
Stephane Gaulin-Brown is a recent masters of architecture graduate from McGill University. His research examines the experience of place. Specifically, Gaulin-Brown looked at the work of Robert Smithson, developing a methodology for architects to conduct site visits attuned to narrative dimension of emplacement. He is the Co-Director and contributing writer at the Canadian Academy in Rome, and a practicing designer, working and living in Montreal.
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Ido Govrin (Western University)
Philosophical Archeology
This paper unfolds Philosophical Archeology – an overarching research methodology that essentially embodies one's relation to history and historiographical research. The archeological method is a search for the arche (of a certain historical phenomenon) that in the Western tradition means both that which gives birth to something and that which commands its history. But this origin cannot be dated or chronologically situated, it is a force that continues to act in the present by leaving its signatures on the living body of history and power. Thus, one looks not for an origin but for an emergence, process rather than essence. Appearing for the first time in Kant (What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?, 1791), Philosophical Archeology researches a dimension (“point of emergence”) that is a heterogeneous fracture existing between history and prehistory, lacking a concrete time and space, immanent and inherent to the historical investigation itself. It is an “historical a priori” dimension that conditions epistemologies while at the same time being conditioned itself as it is embedded within historical constellations, thus fulfilling the paradox of an a priori condition embedded within history. Once the archeologist reaches this dimension, the past that was never really experienced (and thus remained a present) becomes a real or true present. The arche, which was covered by the long-lasting effect of tradition, becomes accessible for the first time, thus it has the temporal structure of “past anterior,” a past that will become a past in the future once the archeological work is complete.
Ido Govrin (b. 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar whose practice includes sound, installation, printmaking and text. Govrin holds a BA in philosophy from Tel-Aviv University (2012), an MFA from the University of Toronto (2014) and is currently a PhD candidate at Western University (Canada). Recent solo exhibitions include Not Quite the Highest Point (2017), I knew, but didn't believe it and because I didn't believe it, I didn't know (2017), Silent Maps (2016), To return to a place, is, like dying (2015), and Vaalbara (2014). He regularly exhibits across North America, Europe and Israel. In addition to his work as an artist, he has curated a series of five contemporary art exhibitions under the title Laptopia (2005-11) and the group exhibition Mother, Ravens! (2012). Between 2008 and 2012, he was the director of Musica Nova ensemble, which has been at the forefront of Israel’s experimental music scene since the 1980s. Govrin has released three full-length studio albums, Erratum (2017), Moraine (2010) and The Revisit (2011), as well as various other EPs. Since 2005, he has run the record label Interval Recordings. www.idogovrin.net / www.interval-recordings.com
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Julia Huynh (Ryerson University)
Navigating Multiple Histories & Discrepancies in Understanding Nineteenth Century Photography in Viet Nam
Photographs of nineteenth century Viet Nam were often the work of French photographers conducting ethnographic and geographic surveys. Their use of photography as a pseudoscience resulted in ethnographic portraits used to study and categorize Vietnamese peoples as “Other.” To disrupt this visual representation, my work investigates the potential opportunities and limitations of establishing a historical account of nineteenth century Vietnamese photography. Challenges that arose in my research include: (1) significant discrepancies between the French and Vietnamese conflicting accounts of photography in Viet Nam; (2) further complexities in the Vietnamese national narrative; (3) my reliance on the accessibility of digital collections, language barriers, and geographic limitations. As a result, my work critiques and investigates how these spaces purport and perpetuate a persistent colonial depiction of nineteenth century Viet Nam.
Julia Huynh is an interdisciplinary artist and currently studying Film & Photography Preservation and Collections Management at Ryerson University. She received her HBA from the joint Art and Art History program between the University of Toronto and Sheridan College. Through her art practice, Huynh uses personal and familial imagery such as family photographs, home videos, and iPhone footage to address her concerns of identity and cultural diaspora. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Been Here So Long at Reel Asian International Film Festival (Toronto), Photophobia: Contemporary Moving images Festival at Art Gallery of Hamilton (Hamilton), Dark Room 5.0 at 918 Bathurst (Toronto) and Video Fever at Trinity Square Video (Toronto).
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Karina Iskandarsjah (OCAD University)
Liminal Forms
Liminal Forms is a thesis project and group exhibition featuring the works of Scott Benesiinaabandan, Jawa El-Khash, Marcus A. Gordon, Qendrim Hoti, and Mariam Magsi. It explores inter-cultural and cross-medium translations in contemporary art in an effort to understand aesthetically and materially hybrid manifestations motivated by the simultaneity of cultures and beings. By engaging with art practices that are informed by interdisciplinary methods and actively acknowledging the artists’ Indigenous, third-culture and immigrant identities, Liminal Forms ultimately examines the tactics used by cultural producers to communicate issues of origin, place, survival, identity, and agency. The artworks selected encourage thinking about the complexity and ambiguity of contemporary co-existence. They offer a visual and contextual analysis of specific issues related to the following topics: ways of remembering misplaced, erased, and violent histories; forming relationships with culturally and geographically specific issues though the affect potential of inter/trans-disciplinary art practice; and the effect of pervasive information networks on meaning-making in art.
Karina Iskandarsjah is an artist and independent curator from Singapore and Indonesia. She is interested in non-dominant histories, digital media, cultural hybridity, the deconstruction of power structures, as well as social and environmental interventions.
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Masaki Kondo (York University)
Evoking the Archived Collective Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: The Temporality of Affectivity in Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young’s Untitled (Structures) (2012)
How can artists create artworks that epitomize an experience of collective memories that do not belong to our individual histories? If we consider histories as individual ways of tracing the present in our collective memories and moving forward to the future through them, artists can create such artworks by engaging with archival material to revitalize and restore its preserved and constructed past in the present. By doing so, artists employ their creative interpretations to release the stasis of collective memories into what I call the temporality of affectivity, or our experienced duration of emergence and incipience through our encounter(s) with something unknown, unfamiliar, or unmediated to our contemporary society. New York-based artist Leslie Hewitt is an exemplary artist who has attempted to bridge the temporal gap between collective memories and the present time through various artistic media. In this paper, I will examine Untitled (Structures) (2012), her collaborative two-channel video installation piece that was part of her 2016 Toronto exhibition titled Collective Stance. Provoked by photographic archives at Houston’s Menil Collection, Hewitt and her collaborator Bradford Young take viewers on a 17- minute medi(t)ation on the potential of collective memories of the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement. I will argue that this work reveals and challenges a way of engaging with our un-experienced collective memories of the significant past through the vibrancy emerging from their re-gained and restored creative impetus in the multiple temporalities of the present.
Masaki Kondo is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. His dissertation, “Unfolding the Temporality of Affectivity: (Con-)Temporality and Contemporaneity of the In-between Moving Image,” aims to examine the temporality of affectivity, or our experienced duration of emergence and incipience, as an essential factor in the aesthetic of contemporary moving image artworks that embody the emergence of vibrancy between stillness and movement against the dominant current of acceleration and instantaneity in contemporary society. In this dissertation research, he is examining moving image artworks by Adad Hannah, Owen Kydd, Leslie Hewitt, Pascal Grandmaison, Olivia Boudreau, and Annie MacDonell. His article, “Unfolding the In-between Image: The Emergence of an Incipient Image at the Intersection of Still and Moving Images,” appeared in Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture.
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Matters Unsettled
Crafted Strangers: Curatorial Practice to Reclaim & Reimagine Identity
The crafting of otherness is a continuous practice that permeates our society and history is a major contributing factor. History, in its Eurocentric form, is not only complicit, but an actual tool of colonization that disregards the multitude of histories that existed before and beyond the European/Western lens. In doing so, the present and future are only imagined within the Eurocentric context. As a result of this limited history, multiple aspects of everyday life are affected, from government legislature to popular media that continue to place people of color at society’s margins. In the United States and Canada, cultural restrictions and harmful stereotyping supported by a history of nationalism support misleading narratives that cast First Nations and immigrant people as perpetual strangers when in reality this is false. The contemporary craft exhibition, Crafted Strangers, is one example of how curators can challenge the limited representations of people of color by critically engaging art with politics. Framed within the First Nation and immigrant experience, Crafted Strangers explores how craft is used as a tool to regain control over the creation and assertion of individual identity for people of colour.
Matters Unsettled is an emerging curatorial collective founded by Cass Gardiner and Quizayra Gonzalez. Gardiner is an Anishinabe Algonquin curator and artist. Gonzalez is a Dominican-American artist who holds a MA from Parsons and a BFA from the University of the Arts. Together, they use the curatorial platform as a tool to challenge preconceived notions of culture, identity, and belonging. Through this lens their exhibitions function as forums for provocation, experimentation, and research. Matters Unsettled is based in Brooklyn, NY. They can be found at @mattersunsettled or mattersunsettled.com.
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Emma Sharpe (Ryerson and York University)
Feeled Recordings: An Embodied Exploration of Archival Ephemera
In the digital age, our embodied experiences with media are becoming increasingly homogeneous. The lack of variety in touch and texture offered by smooth screens has rearranged and limited our sensory relationship to the media we interact with. These rapid technological shifts have resulted in a push back: a renewed interest in full-spectrum sensations and in-person relations, prompting a resurgence in analogue processes and tangible, hands-on media. The Feeled Recordings project focuses on the archive as a timely site to explore just what gets lost in the shift towards digitization. Beginning with a workshop, printed ephemera from Art Metropole’s institutional archive was introduced to a contemporary setting, making it available for individuals to touch, feel, interact with, and respond to. Participants recorded reactions to their selected material, limiting their perceptual observations to their somatic and affective experiences. Results from the workshop were integrated into the archive’s digital storage system as searchable keywords, and published in a small-run booklet, extending the workshop’s output through both digital and physical channels. By experiencing and augmenting the archive in these ways, the project aims to explore the interplay between physical and digital cataloging, consider the role of the body in ‘reading’ printed material, and ask who and what is recorded within archival categories. Ultimately, it speaks to the inability to ever ‘complete’ an archive. Feeled Recordings looks to agitate the rigidity of the archive by activating and responding to material in an attempt to incorporate a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and feelings into the often singular narrative of an institution.
Emma Sharpe is an MA candidate in Ryerson and York University’s Communication and Culture program. She completed her interdisciplinary Fine Arts Bachelors degree in 2011 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and participated in an exchange with The Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. She received a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship to pursue her Masters thesis project based in the archives of the non-profit artist-run centre Art Metropole. Both her work and research aim to bridge the gap between creative practice and scholarship, and focus on themes of tactility, printed matter, and mediation in the visual arts.
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Amanda White (Queens University)
Can the Herbarium be Un-done?
This hybrid paper/artists’ presentation will introduce a work in progress in which the concept, method, purpose and tradition of the herbarium is under examination. The aim of this work has been to question the herbarium as a mode of species categorization and identification, historically performed by field researchers, along with other related methods including; collecting, dissecting, drawing, naming and describing. Of particular interest is how these forms of knowledge creation may assist in conservation efforts, while their traditions are also tied to economy, empire, and historically to colonialism and biological imperialism. The project itself is presented only as a case-study, an entry point from which to contemplate larger questions regarding the archiving of more-than-human life; how can artist work with/or disrupt these modes of understanding? And further to this, what is the artists’ responsibility towards more-than-human subjects?
Amanda White is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist who holds an MFA from the University of Windsor and a BFA from OCADU. She is currently a PhD candidate and SSHRC GCS Doctoral Fellow in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University where her current research interests include; interdisciplinary and collaborative art practices, art and the environment, posthumanities, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, plant studies, bio-art, and issues in agriculture and food. Her work has been exhibited in galleries such as Harbourfront Centre, The Walter Phillips Gallery, PlugIn ICA, and Modern Fuel. Recent publications include; esse- Art and Opinions (2016), Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (2017), chapters for edited collections; Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an age of Crisis (Routledge Environmental Humanities, 2017), Naturally Post-Natural (Noxious Sector Press, 2017) and Why Look at Plants? (Brill, forthcoming).
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Annie Wong
“Searching for the Past” in Henry Heng Lu’s, Far and Near: the Distance(s) between Us, an exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Art in Canada
Far and Near: the Distance(s) between Us, an exhibition curated by Henry Heng Lu, is a nuanced and incomplete canon of Chinese art in Canada. Presented at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto from September 5 to October 29, in 2017, the group exhibition featured eleven contemporary Chinese artists based or practicing in Canada between the 1990’s to the present day. The multigenerational scope of the exhibition illuminates a history of Chinese artists in Canada navigating the muddied-terrains of cultural-cum-identity constructions. As we move through the exhibition, we move along a lineage of searching for the past: beyond the discourse of state multiculturalism legislated in 1988; within ancestral histories tied to the Canadian Pacific Railway; and through hybridized spaces of belongingness in Chinese-Canadian restaurants from the 1970’s. This presentation will focus on Paul Wong’s Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain, Winnie Wu’s Iron Horse and the Pig, and Karen Tam’s Gold Mountain Restaurant Montagne d’Or, and the ways in a “search” is conducted in spaces of “inbetweenness” to recover ancestors, reconcile with the past, and perform as a community of “otherness”. These transitory positions of “in-betweenness” speak to the historical shifts in the critical environment of Chinese contemporary art in Canada, as well as locate the discursive and intermediary spaces of the diasporic Chinese.
Annie Wong is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and community organizer. Wong’s current research includes the aesthetics of social engagement, and rituals of remembrance in the Chinese Canadian diaspora. She has presented in festivals and galleries across Canada including Myseum Toronto, Intersite: Visual Arts Festival (Calgary, AL), and Third Space (Saint John, NB), and has been the recipient of residencies with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Toronto Public Library, and the Power Plant’s Power Youth program. She is currently a community artist at the Gardiner Museum. Her writing in poetry and prose has appeared most recently in Performance Research Journal, MICE Magazine, and The Shanghai Literary Review. She holds a BA in English Literature and a MA in Communication and Culture from York University.
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John Wright (PGR, University of Leeds)
The Ecology of Cultural Space: un-histories, heterotopia and artist-led collectives
The socio-cultural spaces in which contemporary artist-led collectives inhabit, are complex entanglements of competing forces. From institutional hierarchies to the individualisation of a global art market, collective modalities of artistic production are often marginalised by these power structures. Counter to this narrative there is a rich history of collectivist practices within artistic discourse such as: The Vienna Secession in Austria, 1897, Internationale Situationniste movements throughout the 1960s in Europe, the Mexican Muralist movements of the early 20th century and Group Material et al. from the 1970s-1980s, New York. Yet, theirs is an art history yet to be fully realised precisely because they are ‘un-historical’. Born in the ruptures and folds between political ideologies, class, race and gender their specific cultural ecology is a space of constant tension and precarity. There is a perceptible discursive thread which is hauntological, not confined to complete periodisation by art historical narratives. This is the discourse of social change. This paper will argue that artist-led collectives appear and re-appear as heterotopias, both in physical and increasingly virtual spaces. These appearances seem to exist as ‘other space’ momentarily disrupting the hegemony. Further, It will be argued this spectral quality, or more precisely hauntology, has framed the contemporary artist-led collective as a heterotopia within wider cultural ecology. This paper will draw upon specific case studies in order to question the nature of contemporary artist-led collectives.
John Wright is a research-led curator and co-founder of artist-led collective, The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe (2014-present). Wright has worked in a number of prominent museums and galleries including the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The National Science and Media Museum, and The British Library to develop his curatorial practice. Wright has curated freelance projects/interventional works at Leeds Art Gallery (2014), Espacio Gallery, London (2015) and with artist John Ledger at the Bowery, Leeds (2016). Wright’s current PhD research, with the University of Leeds, is centered upon investigating the nature of the contemporary artist-led collective in relation to the wider socio-cultural context.
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Andrea Yávar (University of Toronto)
How Does the Peruvian State Oppress Indigenous Women?
This paper examines how the Peruvian state oppresses Indigenous women. It argues that the Peruvian state oppresses Indigenous women by legitimizing their criminalization in order to gain control over their bodies, resources, and land. In order to do so, it will examine in detail the case study of Maxima Acuña, an Indigenous woman from Cajamarca who fought against Minera Yanacocha (the largest gold mine in Latin America) for her land. This research incorporates an intersectional approach for looking at Indigenous struggles in order to examine how women are specifically affected by state policies, and demonstrates the resistance of Indigenous women against mining corporations. Likewise, it emphasizes Indigenous women’s political agency by analyzing how they challenge the system that marginalizes them, as opposed to Western academia’s typical depoliticized portrayal of Indigenous women as victims.
Andrea Yávar is a Peruvian woman. She is completing her Masters in Political Science with a specialization in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. As a feminist activist in Peru, she has been involved in protests for the legalization of abortion, as well as “Ni Una Menos” rallies denouncing violence against women in Latin America. Andrea’s current research is centered upon investigating the interaction between the state at the local level and structures of power (colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism) at the transnational level, how they interact specifically to oppress Indigenous women in Peru. Moreover, she is a Volunteer Site Supervisor in the “On Your Mark Support Program,” which helps students of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking heritage that are struggling academically.
Art as Resistance: Imaginative History-Making within the Visual Work of Artist Made Bayak
The work of Artist Made Bayak of Bali, Indonesia, is a poignant example of the ability of visual art and the poetic as an act of resistance and creation within the deconstruction of post-colonial histories and the construction of decolonized ones. His work combines expressive representations of symbols from Balinese Hinduism, metaphors of past and current Balinese history, and elements of the ecological concerns of the island into indexes of visual language. He employs these indexes to shift a linear history built on propaganda, colonialism, mass tourism, and industry into a non-linear history that dismantles misrepresentations and oppression. This becomes a method of imaginative history-making, one that responds to silenced memory with the hope of an expressive future. While studying the poetic as resistance against the effects of colonialism and tourism in Balinese visual arts and religion with UGA anthropologists Peter Brosius and Sarah Hitchner in the summer of 2017, I engaged in a studio visit and personal interview with Made Bayak, followed by a series of extensive interviews made alongside Dr. Brosius’ own work. Revealed in this dialogical study of Bayak’s work and studio practice was a non-linear methodology that draws from several epistemologies to reveal archivable and non-archivable histories. These histories are images that subvert hegemonic structures while building a visual culture of Bali. These methodologies allow Bayak to embody history and memory in the visual (prioritized over the written); disrupting the linearity of power structures through the creation of non-linear histories using the poetic as epistemology through composition and metaphor, and allowing him and his surrounding community to continue to speak the un-speakable, un- silencing their experience of Balinese history through poetic methods.
Interested in tangible expressions that translate, mediate, or evoke the intangible or interior experiences within different histories, Annemarie DiCamillo is currently completing their MFA in Painting and Drawing at the Lamar Dodd School of Art within the University of Georgia. Having garnered their BA in studio art and business management from Mount Vernon Nazarene University in Ohio in 2015, they continued to pursue courses of study that would allow their studio practice to become increasingly interdisciplinary. Within this endeavor, philosophy and anthropology are relevant as each discipline handles, among other things, the mediation of poetic spaces between the internal histories of humans and communities and the external orders and systems of the political and physical world.
~
Amanda Figueroa (Harvard University) and Ravon Ruffin (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Re-Curating History in Contemporary Art
Curatorial practice has a history that is deeply rooted in colonial domination: the removal of cultural objects from their original context, in order to display them as evidence of the strength of empire in European metropoles. These practices have become responsible for the organization of objects into a historical narrative of the world. Two contemporary artworks from Renee Stout, “Black Wall with Bitches Brew” (2010), and Amalia Mesa-Bains, “New World Wunderkammer” (2013), challenge curatorial practice through the assemblage of distinct artworks and artifacts, that as a collection display an alternate narrative to undo an imagined colonialist history. As women of color artists, Stout and Mesa-Bains offer a different history, one rooted in the same collection of objects from the New World, but challenges the dominant narrative through alternate methods of acquiring and displaying these objects. Paradoxically, these different identities and practices in these artworks occupy the same location as traditional museum practices: the gallery floor. Through analysis of these artworks, this paper examines what happens to the history-making practice of curation when its history and the history it presents are both contested. This work takes up exhibition design, black and chicana feminisms, and theories of decolonization to identify and consider the opportunities for the future of contemporary art and curatorial practice offered by Stout and Mesa-Bains.
Amanda Figueroa is a PhD student at Harvard University. Her work takes a phenomenological approach to representations of trauma and violence in Latina and Chicana art, focusing primarily on the roles of grief and memory in artistic processes and exhibition practices. She also works with museums and other public art institutions to attract underrepresented audiences through public programming and community engagement.
Ravon Ruffin is a Social Engagement Producer at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. She received her M.A. in American Studies from the George Washington University, and a degree in Anthropology from VCU. Urban sustainability, digital culture and Black Feminism are the lenses through which she seeks to redefine the museum as a community space. She is interested in the acts of self-preservation that social and digital media platforms inspire. She can be found @afroxmericana.
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Thom Jeffrey Garcia (OCAD University)
Relic, Reliquary, Reliquarium: The role of Experimental Preservation in the generation of speculative design and architecture
Experimental Preservation is an inclusive endeavour that solicits the expertise of designers, architects, artists, curators, historians, conservationists, and archeologists. It posits the “future anterior”, a circumstance that simultaneously queries the designation of what is considered to be historical whilst proposing opportunities for the present in anticipation of the future. Experimental Preservationists consider what they cannot imagine future generations living without. This thesis asserts the importance of expanding the discourse within Experimental Preservation by advocating for the importance of archiving intangible and ephemeral content. The project is framed as a case study that will propose a strategy for how data can be preserved by materializing a contemporary conceptualization of relics and reliquaries through the use of digital fabrication. It will also provide an opportunity to envision a new building typology - a Reliquarium - that can produce, display, and archive these artifacts.
Thom Jeffrey Garcia is a designer and educator currently investigating the contemporary field of Experimental Preservation and emerging practices of representation in architecture and design. His primary research interest is a theory and practice-based exploration of speculative design as a critical research methodology. Jeffrey's academic and professional experience includes architecture and design competitions, graphic design and publication, industrial design, curatorial projects, and exhibit design. Prior to enrolling in the Interdisciplinary Master's in Art, Media, and Design (IAMD) Program at OCAD University, Jeffrey was a sessional instructor for over 10 years in the undergraduate Environmental Design Program at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Architecture. His focus was in foundation design education including studio work, design theory, contemporary history, and visual communication. He was a recipient of the Faculty of Architecture Carl Nelson Teaching Award and received a University of Manitoba Students’ Teacher Recognition.
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Stephane Gaulin-Brown (McGill University)
The Legibility of Place: Robert Smithson and the locus of logos
Imagine you’re a medieval peasant who time travelled to the year 2018 and came across a computer. When you saw it for the first time you would perceive it blankly, perhaps it would show up to you as simply a chunk of metal. However, once you acquired the concept of “computer” suddenly and from then on computers would show up as “computers”. The philosopher Alva Noe has argued that concepts are “skills for taking hold of what there is.” Therefore, a modification, or acquisition, of conceptual knowledge changes both our ability to access the world and handle it. Of significance for architects is the concept of space. This concept underwent a radical re-formulation during the late Renaissance. Specifically, with the work of Galileo and Descartes, space came to be regarded as homogenous, quantitative geometric void, viewed objectively from a beyond. As a skill, this stance on the concept of space was incredibly well suited for the emerging science and ensuing technological project, which allowed for greater control and instrumentalization of nature. This has given us incredible power over the forces of entropy, but has also brought us frightfully near to nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. What this world view misses is the qualitative embodied dimension of spatiality, the dimension where human meaning issues forth, where the significant interconnection of “place” and “self” is experienced. Place as the locus of Logos. These overlooked dimensions of existence have been articulated in a long tradition of resistance from William Blake, the Surrealists, Robert Smithson and many others. Smithson, in particular, because of his extensive interest in these issues and the thorough documentation of his experiences is, I propose, a good example for early articulations of a methodology for architects to open the site visit to accommodate the full dimensionality of place. This opening of the experience of place is, furthermore, the ground for designing architectures which participate in the shared meaning of their sites and the actions of those who inhabit it. Participating in this meaning imbues the work itself with significance that guides the lives of those who live it. Place is something experience that contains the human dimension of thought, articulated in language. This means connecting meaningfully through the work to emplaced narratives, and the pre-given significance of the world which orients our lives.
Stephane Gaulin-Brown is a recent masters of architecture graduate from McGill University. His research examines the experience of place. Specifically, Gaulin-Brown looked at the work of Robert Smithson, developing a methodology for architects to conduct site visits attuned to narrative dimension of emplacement. He is the Co-Director and contributing writer at the Canadian Academy in Rome, and a practicing designer, working and living in Montreal.
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Ido Govrin (Western University)
Philosophical Archeology
This paper unfolds Philosophical Archeology – an overarching research methodology that essentially embodies one's relation to history and historiographical research. The archeological method is a search for the arche (of a certain historical phenomenon) that in the Western tradition means both that which gives birth to something and that which commands its history. But this origin cannot be dated or chronologically situated, it is a force that continues to act in the present by leaving its signatures on the living body of history and power. Thus, one looks not for an origin but for an emergence, process rather than essence. Appearing for the first time in Kant (What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?, 1791), Philosophical Archeology researches a dimension (“point of emergence”) that is a heterogeneous fracture existing between history and prehistory, lacking a concrete time and space, immanent and inherent to the historical investigation itself. It is an “historical a priori” dimension that conditions epistemologies while at the same time being conditioned itself as it is embedded within historical constellations, thus fulfilling the paradox of an a priori condition embedded within history. Once the archeologist reaches this dimension, the past that was never really experienced (and thus remained a present) becomes a real or true present. The arche, which was covered by the long-lasting effect of tradition, becomes accessible for the first time, thus it has the temporal structure of “past anterior,” a past that will become a past in the future once the archeological work is complete.
Ido Govrin (b. 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar whose practice includes sound, installation, printmaking and text. Govrin holds a BA in philosophy from Tel-Aviv University (2012), an MFA from the University of Toronto (2014) and is currently a PhD candidate at Western University (Canada). Recent solo exhibitions include Not Quite the Highest Point (2017), I knew, but didn't believe it and because I didn't believe it, I didn't know (2017), Silent Maps (2016), To return to a place, is, like dying (2015), and Vaalbara (2014). He regularly exhibits across North America, Europe and Israel. In addition to his work as an artist, he has curated a series of five contemporary art exhibitions under the title Laptopia (2005-11) and the group exhibition Mother, Ravens! (2012). Between 2008 and 2012, he was the director of Musica Nova ensemble, which has been at the forefront of Israel’s experimental music scene since the 1980s. Govrin has released three full-length studio albums, Erratum (2017), Moraine (2010) and The Revisit (2011), as well as various other EPs. Since 2005, he has run the record label Interval Recordings. www.idogovrin.net / www.interval-recordings.com
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Julia Huynh (Ryerson University)
Navigating Multiple Histories & Discrepancies in Understanding Nineteenth Century Photography in Viet Nam
Photographs of nineteenth century Viet Nam were often the work of French photographers conducting ethnographic and geographic surveys. Their use of photography as a pseudoscience resulted in ethnographic portraits used to study and categorize Vietnamese peoples as “Other.” To disrupt this visual representation, my work investigates the potential opportunities and limitations of establishing a historical account of nineteenth century Vietnamese photography. Challenges that arose in my research include: (1) significant discrepancies between the French and Vietnamese conflicting accounts of photography in Viet Nam; (2) further complexities in the Vietnamese national narrative; (3) my reliance on the accessibility of digital collections, language barriers, and geographic limitations. As a result, my work critiques and investigates how these spaces purport and perpetuate a persistent colonial depiction of nineteenth century Viet Nam.
Julia Huynh is an interdisciplinary artist and currently studying Film & Photography Preservation and Collections Management at Ryerson University. She received her HBA from the joint Art and Art History program between the University of Toronto and Sheridan College. Through her art practice, Huynh uses personal and familial imagery such as family photographs, home videos, and iPhone footage to address her concerns of identity and cultural diaspora. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Been Here So Long at Reel Asian International Film Festival (Toronto), Photophobia: Contemporary Moving images Festival at Art Gallery of Hamilton (Hamilton), Dark Room 5.0 at 918 Bathurst (Toronto) and Video Fever at Trinity Square Video (Toronto).
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Karina Iskandarsjah (OCAD University)
Liminal Forms
Liminal Forms is a thesis project and group exhibition featuring the works of Scott Benesiinaabandan, Jawa El-Khash, Marcus A. Gordon, Qendrim Hoti, and Mariam Magsi. It explores inter-cultural and cross-medium translations in contemporary art in an effort to understand aesthetically and materially hybrid manifestations motivated by the simultaneity of cultures and beings. By engaging with art practices that are informed by interdisciplinary methods and actively acknowledging the artists’ Indigenous, third-culture and immigrant identities, Liminal Forms ultimately examines the tactics used by cultural producers to communicate issues of origin, place, survival, identity, and agency. The artworks selected encourage thinking about the complexity and ambiguity of contemporary co-existence. They offer a visual and contextual analysis of specific issues related to the following topics: ways of remembering misplaced, erased, and violent histories; forming relationships with culturally and geographically specific issues though the affect potential of inter/trans-disciplinary art practice; and the effect of pervasive information networks on meaning-making in art.
Karina Iskandarsjah is an artist and independent curator from Singapore and Indonesia. She is interested in non-dominant histories, digital media, cultural hybridity, the deconstruction of power structures, as well as social and environmental interventions.
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Masaki Kondo (York University)
Evoking the Archived Collective Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: The Temporality of Affectivity in Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young’s Untitled (Structures) (2012)
How can artists create artworks that epitomize an experience of collective memories that do not belong to our individual histories? If we consider histories as individual ways of tracing the present in our collective memories and moving forward to the future through them, artists can create such artworks by engaging with archival material to revitalize and restore its preserved and constructed past in the present. By doing so, artists employ their creative interpretations to release the stasis of collective memories into what I call the temporality of affectivity, or our experienced duration of emergence and incipience through our encounter(s) with something unknown, unfamiliar, or unmediated to our contemporary society. New York-based artist Leslie Hewitt is an exemplary artist who has attempted to bridge the temporal gap between collective memories and the present time through various artistic media. In this paper, I will examine Untitled (Structures) (2012), her collaborative two-channel video installation piece that was part of her 2016 Toronto exhibition titled Collective Stance. Provoked by photographic archives at Houston’s Menil Collection, Hewitt and her collaborator Bradford Young take viewers on a 17- minute medi(t)ation on the potential of collective memories of the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement. I will argue that this work reveals and challenges a way of engaging with our un-experienced collective memories of the significant past through the vibrancy emerging from their re-gained and restored creative impetus in the multiple temporalities of the present.
Masaki Kondo is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. His dissertation, “Unfolding the Temporality of Affectivity: (Con-)Temporality and Contemporaneity of the In-between Moving Image,” aims to examine the temporality of affectivity, or our experienced duration of emergence and incipience, as an essential factor in the aesthetic of contemporary moving image artworks that embody the emergence of vibrancy between stillness and movement against the dominant current of acceleration and instantaneity in contemporary society. In this dissertation research, he is examining moving image artworks by Adad Hannah, Owen Kydd, Leslie Hewitt, Pascal Grandmaison, Olivia Boudreau, and Annie MacDonell. His article, “Unfolding the In-between Image: The Emergence of an Incipient Image at the Intersection of Still and Moving Images,” appeared in Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture.
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Matters Unsettled
Crafted Strangers: Curatorial Practice to Reclaim & Reimagine Identity
The crafting of otherness is a continuous practice that permeates our society and history is a major contributing factor. History, in its Eurocentric form, is not only complicit, but an actual tool of colonization that disregards the multitude of histories that existed before and beyond the European/Western lens. In doing so, the present and future are only imagined within the Eurocentric context. As a result of this limited history, multiple aspects of everyday life are affected, from government legislature to popular media that continue to place people of color at society’s margins. In the United States and Canada, cultural restrictions and harmful stereotyping supported by a history of nationalism support misleading narratives that cast First Nations and immigrant people as perpetual strangers when in reality this is false. The contemporary craft exhibition, Crafted Strangers, is one example of how curators can challenge the limited representations of people of color by critically engaging art with politics. Framed within the First Nation and immigrant experience, Crafted Strangers explores how craft is used as a tool to regain control over the creation and assertion of individual identity for people of colour.
Matters Unsettled is an emerging curatorial collective founded by Cass Gardiner and Quizayra Gonzalez. Gardiner is an Anishinabe Algonquin curator and artist. Gonzalez is a Dominican-American artist who holds a MA from Parsons and a BFA from the University of the Arts. Together, they use the curatorial platform as a tool to challenge preconceived notions of culture, identity, and belonging. Through this lens their exhibitions function as forums for provocation, experimentation, and research. Matters Unsettled is based in Brooklyn, NY. They can be found at @mattersunsettled or mattersunsettled.com.
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Emma Sharpe (Ryerson and York University)
Feeled Recordings: An Embodied Exploration of Archival Ephemera
In the digital age, our embodied experiences with media are becoming increasingly homogeneous. The lack of variety in touch and texture offered by smooth screens has rearranged and limited our sensory relationship to the media we interact with. These rapid technological shifts have resulted in a push back: a renewed interest in full-spectrum sensations and in-person relations, prompting a resurgence in analogue processes and tangible, hands-on media. The Feeled Recordings project focuses on the archive as a timely site to explore just what gets lost in the shift towards digitization. Beginning with a workshop, printed ephemera from Art Metropole’s institutional archive was introduced to a contemporary setting, making it available for individuals to touch, feel, interact with, and respond to. Participants recorded reactions to their selected material, limiting their perceptual observations to their somatic and affective experiences. Results from the workshop were integrated into the archive’s digital storage system as searchable keywords, and published in a small-run booklet, extending the workshop’s output through both digital and physical channels. By experiencing and augmenting the archive in these ways, the project aims to explore the interplay between physical and digital cataloging, consider the role of the body in ‘reading’ printed material, and ask who and what is recorded within archival categories. Ultimately, it speaks to the inability to ever ‘complete’ an archive. Feeled Recordings looks to agitate the rigidity of the archive by activating and responding to material in an attempt to incorporate a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and feelings into the often singular narrative of an institution.
Emma Sharpe is an MA candidate in Ryerson and York University’s Communication and Culture program. She completed her interdisciplinary Fine Arts Bachelors degree in 2011 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and participated in an exchange with The Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. She received a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship to pursue her Masters thesis project based in the archives of the non-profit artist-run centre Art Metropole. Both her work and research aim to bridge the gap between creative practice and scholarship, and focus on themes of tactility, printed matter, and mediation in the visual arts.
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Amanda White (Queens University)
Can the Herbarium be Un-done?
This hybrid paper/artists’ presentation will introduce a work in progress in which the concept, method, purpose and tradition of the herbarium is under examination. The aim of this work has been to question the herbarium as a mode of species categorization and identification, historically performed by field researchers, along with other related methods including; collecting, dissecting, drawing, naming and describing. Of particular interest is how these forms of knowledge creation may assist in conservation efforts, while their traditions are also tied to economy, empire, and historically to colonialism and biological imperialism. The project itself is presented only as a case-study, an entry point from which to contemplate larger questions regarding the archiving of more-than-human life; how can artist work with/or disrupt these modes of understanding? And further to this, what is the artists’ responsibility towards more-than-human subjects?
Amanda White is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist who holds an MFA from the University of Windsor and a BFA from OCADU. She is currently a PhD candidate and SSHRC GCS Doctoral Fellow in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University where her current research interests include; interdisciplinary and collaborative art practices, art and the environment, posthumanities, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, plant studies, bio-art, and issues in agriculture and food. Her work has been exhibited in galleries such as Harbourfront Centre, The Walter Phillips Gallery, PlugIn ICA, and Modern Fuel. Recent publications include; esse- Art and Opinions (2016), Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (2017), chapters for edited collections; Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an age of Crisis (Routledge Environmental Humanities, 2017), Naturally Post-Natural (Noxious Sector Press, 2017) and Why Look at Plants? (Brill, forthcoming).
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Annie Wong
“Searching for the Past” in Henry Heng Lu’s, Far and Near: the Distance(s) between Us, an exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Art in Canada
Far and Near: the Distance(s) between Us, an exhibition curated by Henry Heng Lu, is a nuanced and incomplete canon of Chinese art in Canada. Presented at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto from September 5 to October 29, in 2017, the group exhibition featured eleven contemporary Chinese artists based or practicing in Canada between the 1990’s to the present day. The multigenerational scope of the exhibition illuminates a history of Chinese artists in Canada navigating the muddied-terrains of cultural-cum-identity constructions. As we move through the exhibition, we move along a lineage of searching for the past: beyond the discourse of state multiculturalism legislated in 1988; within ancestral histories tied to the Canadian Pacific Railway; and through hybridized spaces of belongingness in Chinese-Canadian restaurants from the 1970’s. This presentation will focus on Paul Wong’s Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain, Winnie Wu’s Iron Horse and the Pig, and Karen Tam’s Gold Mountain Restaurant Montagne d’Or, and the ways in a “search” is conducted in spaces of “inbetweenness” to recover ancestors, reconcile with the past, and perform as a community of “otherness”. These transitory positions of “in-betweenness” speak to the historical shifts in the critical environment of Chinese contemporary art in Canada, as well as locate the discursive and intermediary spaces of the diasporic Chinese.
Annie Wong is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and community organizer. Wong’s current research includes the aesthetics of social engagement, and rituals of remembrance in the Chinese Canadian diaspora. She has presented in festivals and galleries across Canada including Myseum Toronto, Intersite: Visual Arts Festival (Calgary, AL), and Third Space (Saint John, NB), and has been the recipient of residencies with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Toronto Public Library, and the Power Plant’s Power Youth program. She is currently a community artist at the Gardiner Museum. Her writing in poetry and prose has appeared most recently in Performance Research Journal, MICE Magazine, and The Shanghai Literary Review. She holds a BA in English Literature and a MA in Communication and Culture from York University.
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John Wright (PGR, University of Leeds)
The Ecology of Cultural Space: un-histories, heterotopia and artist-led collectives
The socio-cultural spaces in which contemporary artist-led collectives inhabit, are complex entanglements of competing forces. From institutional hierarchies to the individualisation of a global art market, collective modalities of artistic production are often marginalised by these power structures. Counter to this narrative there is a rich history of collectivist practices within artistic discourse such as: The Vienna Secession in Austria, 1897, Internationale Situationniste movements throughout the 1960s in Europe, the Mexican Muralist movements of the early 20th century and Group Material et al. from the 1970s-1980s, New York. Yet, theirs is an art history yet to be fully realised precisely because they are ‘un-historical’. Born in the ruptures and folds between political ideologies, class, race and gender their specific cultural ecology is a space of constant tension and precarity. There is a perceptible discursive thread which is hauntological, not confined to complete periodisation by art historical narratives. This is the discourse of social change. This paper will argue that artist-led collectives appear and re-appear as heterotopias, both in physical and increasingly virtual spaces. These appearances seem to exist as ‘other space’ momentarily disrupting the hegemony. Further, It will be argued this spectral quality, or more precisely hauntology, has framed the contemporary artist-led collective as a heterotopia within wider cultural ecology. This paper will draw upon specific case studies in order to question the nature of contemporary artist-led collectives.
John Wright is a research-led curator and co-founder of artist-led collective, The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe (2014-present). Wright has worked in a number of prominent museums and galleries including the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The National Science and Media Museum, and The British Library to develop his curatorial practice. Wright has curated freelance projects/interventional works at Leeds Art Gallery (2014), Espacio Gallery, London (2015) and with artist John Ledger at the Bowery, Leeds (2016). Wright’s current PhD research, with the University of Leeds, is centered upon investigating the nature of the contemporary artist-led collective in relation to the wider socio-cultural context.
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Andrea Yávar (University of Toronto)
How Does the Peruvian State Oppress Indigenous Women?
This paper examines how the Peruvian state oppresses Indigenous women. It argues that the Peruvian state oppresses Indigenous women by legitimizing their criminalization in order to gain control over their bodies, resources, and land. In order to do so, it will examine in detail the case study of Maxima Acuña, an Indigenous woman from Cajamarca who fought against Minera Yanacocha (the largest gold mine in Latin America) for her land. This research incorporates an intersectional approach for looking at Indigenous struggles in order to examine how women are specifically affected by state policies, and demonstrates the resistance of Indigenous women against mining corporations. Likewise, it emphasizes Indigenous women’s political agency by analyzing how they challenge the system that marginalizes them, as opposed to Western academia’s typical depoliticized portrayal of Indigenous women as victims.
Andrea Yávar is a Peruvian woman. She is completing her Masters in Political Science with a specialization in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. As a feminist activist in Peru, she has been involved in protests for the legalization of abortion, as well as “Ni Una Menos” rallies denouncing violence against women in Latin America. Andrea’s current research is centered upon investigating the interaction between the state at the local level and structures of power (colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism) at the transnational level, how they interact specifically to oppress Indigenous women in Peru. Moreover, she is a Volunteer Site Supervisor in the “On Your Mark Support Program,” which helps students of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking heritage that are struggling academically.
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