CAA News Today
International News: Letters from Asia Art Archive Under Lockdown (Part I)
posted by Allison Walters — November 10, 2020
The following article was written in response to a call for submissions by CAA’s International Committee. It is by John Tain, Congyang Xie, Michelle Wong, Cici Wu, and Noopur Desai, all researchers at Asia Art Archive.
Introduction, John Tain, Head of Research, Asia Art Archive
In the first few months of this year, one thing that became clear was how deeply divided the world remained and remains, even as globalization brought us all closer physically and virtually. There have been of course the many overt racist acts around the world, and also the less visible but no less insidious effects of structural racism on individuals and communities of color. There also remains plain ignorance reinforced by geography. In long distance calls and video meetings, it became clear that what people across Asia recognized right away as a cataclysmic life-or-death disaster remained literally and figuratively a faraway concern for many people in the United States and Europe—until it wasn’t anymore.
At Asia Art Archive (AAA), we have seen the drama unfolding firsthand in both Asia and North America. Our colleagues in Shanghai went into lockdown almost as soon as the news came out of Wuhan, with our main office in Hong Kong soon to follow. For those first few weeks, outpourings of concern, sympathy, and sometimes curiosity accompanied the daily news and dreaded case tallies. Then, as the pandemic spread, it was our colleagues in New York and then New Delhi who were hit, along with the rest of the world, and it became our turn to send support and supplies when possible. We had already been in the habit of meeting regularly on Zoom as a way to work across distances, but throughout these months, talking with one other online became about more than work. It became a way to bridge the chasms keeping us apart all the more now. It is in the spirit of those conversations that I have asked my colleagues to share their thoughts, as reminders that whatever the disparities, we must deal with this together.
The Pandemic and Politics, Congyang Xie, Research Associate, Asia Art Archive, Shanghai
In early February, two weeks after the shutdown of Wuhan due to the outbreak of the coronavirus, an article was published by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek titled “Clear Racist Element to Hysteria over New Coronavirus.” Translated into Chinese and circulated through the social media platform WeChat, it quickly became one of the most widely shared texts among contemporary art practitioners in Mainland China. Žižek, who has built a large readership in China over the last decade, began by saying that “Some of us, including myself, would secretly love to be in China’s Wuhan right now, experiencing a real-life, post-apocalyptic movie set.” (https://www.rt.com/op-ed/479970-coronavirus-china-wuhan-hysteria-racist/)
More challenging statements followed. Unsurprisingly, there were all kinds of reactions within the art world, which amplified when more articles were published and circulated via WeChat by other Western thinkers who are more or less known to Chinese art practitioners, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, and especially Giorgio Agamben (Fig. 1). But the controversies around Žižek were particularly interesting. If Žižek’s text, as many have pointed out, disregarded the local context in China, the reading and sharing of the article in Chinese was also decontextualizing. The (re-)awareness of the very existence of intellectual borders that so many people tried hard to ignore may be one of the by-products of COVID-19.
Figure 1. Left: A WeChat account publishing translated articles by various Western philosophers regarding the pandemic. Middle: Screenshot of Žižek’s article published in Chinese. Right: Screenshot of an article by Chinese poet Xiao Yin, titled “The Wuhan City That Žižek Cannot Understand”. Photo provided by the author.
Reading the text in a literal way, Žižek’s fiercest critics denounced the philosopher as naïve, if not delusional, for saying the situation in Wuhan was desirable, for ignoring the real tragedy in Wuhan, and for being indifferent to the dead and to those who were still suffering. Such opinion is based upon a humanistic attitude. The most extreme camp, however, went so far as to reach a nationalist point of view, concluding that Westerners never understand what is happening in China, and that Western theories are irrelevant and not applicable to China’s problems.
Another group of critics, non-nationalists, with a more liberal mindset, were thus highly attentive to Žižek’s call for “a new form of what was once called Communism.” Based on modern and contemporary history of China, this group considers Communism as just the flip side of the coin of authoritarianism. Taking individual freedom as a priority, this group worried that the activity-monitoring technologies used by the government in the name of containing the epidemic would eventually normalize and strengthen total governmental control over society, even after the epidemic ends.
This critical attitude towards authority was shared by a third group of people, who would agree at least partially with Žižek, citing his words that “If there were people in China who attempted to downplay epidemics, they should be ashamed.” In fact, during the first days of the coronavirus outbreak, transparency from authorities was the strongest demand from all of China’s social groups. The protest reached a peak when Li Wenliang, the whistleblower doctor who was forced to keep silent by authorities, was reported to have passed away from the deadly disease on February 7. That night, lit-candle emojis were all over social media. In response to the event, artist Zhang Peili designed a minimalist set of two T-shirts, which are worn frequently by artists and visitors to exhibitions (Fig. 2).
Figure 2. Online shop selling T-shirt designed by Zhang Peili. The text means “I understand.” Photo provided by the author.
The debates highlight the ideological conflicts in China that have only intensified under the pandemic, though more space would be needed to map the full spectrum of opinions. Perhaps what makes Žižek’s text so appealing to art practitioners in China in the first place is the claim that “there is, however, an unexpected emancipatory prospect hidden in this nightmarish vision,” even if people may have (mis)understood it in a thousand different ways.
Separate yet Together, Michelle Wong, former Researcher, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong
Figure 1. Screenshot of news livestream, July 1, 2020. Photo provided by the author.
One evening in March 2020, when Hong Kong’s first wave of COVID-19 cases was subsiding, we sat in a friend’s studio to look at the image archive of an artist-run space. “100 Square Feet Park,” or the Park, as we affectionately call it, was once a storefront on Lai Chi Kok Road, facing busy traffic. The image we were looking at was of a documentary exhibition from the Umbrella Movement of 2014. A monitor was placed on a table facing the street level. Pedestrians walking by wondered whether the images shown in the monitor were live or documentary images. It struck me at that 2020 moment, as we looked at the image five years on, that I had forgotten how it felt when livestreaming news—of marches, of roads puffing with smoke, of sparks flying out from long tubes, of people in all sorts of uniforms running—was not yet a norm. I remember an inexplicably overwhelming feeling of looking at the nine images on the split-screen livestreaming for the first time, and I thought my simmering anger would rise to the boiling point if I saw one more Instagram post that attempted to theorize this over-mediation.
For some time now I have pondered the morbidity that is part and parcel of my vocation as a researcher at AAA. It is only half a joke when I describe my job as “talking to old(er) people and working on dead people stuff”. On various occasions I have described archives as haunted and haunting, trains for zombies, and repositories for art that could be undead. I still think about these things when I peer and squint at my computer screen while on Zoom/Jitsi/Skype. During the time leading up to the pandemic, and perhaps also during it (i.e. now), I think often about a generation of practitioners, many of them friends and colleagues who I have met through my work at AAA. I think of how these people, myself included, have knowingly or unknowingly committed ourselves to remembering other people’s lives. Everyone who tells stories of other people’s lives, in this case through dealing with their archives, is learning how to do so along the way, much like writers learning how to write. And as we remember these lives and tell these stories, our stories can become entangled with theirs. Sometimes, it is nice to know you can choose not to do it alone.
International News: The Treasures of the Punjab Archives, Lahore, Pakistan
posted by CAA — September 28, 2020
The following article was written in response to a call for submissions by CAA’s International Committee. It is by Kanwal Khalid, Director of the Punjab Archives, Lahore, Pakistan, and an alumna of the CAA-Getty International Program.
Figure 1. The Punjab Archives, housed in the Tomb of Anarkali, a building from the reign of Mughal Emperor Jahangir (1605-1627). (All photographs in this article provided by the author)
Having spent my career as a university professor, I recently was appointed the director of the Punjab Archives in Lahore. This rich collection is one of the best in South Asia and I am pleased to share a description of the institution, which also includes a library and museum, with readers of CAA News, who will soon be able to access many of the collection’s materials online.
The history of every nation is important and documents that reveal a nation’s history become increasingly precious over time. The majority of these documents are held in archives—collections that are both accumulations of historical data and repositories of record. Pakistan contains many rich archival collections: The National Archives of Pakistan and the National Documentation Centre, both located in Islamabad; the Sindh Archives in Karachi; and the Baluchistan Archives in Quetta. But the oldest of them all is the Punjab Archives in Lahore, located inside the Tomb of Anarkali.
The Punjab Archives is significant both for the immense value of its holdings and for the historical importance of its building (Fig.1), which was built during the reign of Mughal Emperor Jahangir (1605-1627). It was originally a tomb attributed to a woman named Anarkali, traditionally thought to be a concubine of Jahangir’s. According to the date written on the cenotaph, the monument was completed in 1615. The building has witnessed many ups and downs in its four-hundred-year history. After the annexation of Punjab by the British in 1849, the building was used as storage for documents pouring in from all parts of South Asia that were under the control of the British Raj. Two years later it became a church used for Sunday services, but in 1891 it was declared a record office.
Figure 2. Inside view of the Archives.
Punjab Archives Collection
The Punjab Archives (Figs. 2, 3a-b) holds one of the largest repositories of documents in South Asia and it is responsible for the safekeeping of official documents and records of the Pakistan government. It houses census reports, civil and military gazettes, official files, historical documents, manuscripts, handouts, brochures, pamphlets, maps, notifications, memoranda, lithographs, research papers, journals, magazines, newspapers and periodicals. Many of these cannot be found anywhere else in the world. The archive also includes a fine collection of miniature paintings and seals.
The records in the Punjab Archives date back to the seventeenth century and cover the Mughal, precolonial, colonial and postcolonial eras in South Asia. Primarily the collection consists of:
- Persian Record of Mughal Period, 1629-1858
- Persian Record of Sikh Period, 1799-1849
- Akhbar Darbar-e-Lahore (Daily Court Proceedings of Sikh Rulers), 1835-1849
- Persian Record of British Period, 1809-1890
- Old Persian Newspapers, 1840-1845
- Colonial Agencies Record, 1804-1849
- Record of Princely States in Punjab, 1849-1947
- Record After the Annexation, 1849 to 1947
- Record After Independence, 1947
Figure 3a, b. Beautifully illuminated wooden boards used as file holders, first half of 19th century.
The Archival Library
Sir Edward Meclagan served as chancellor of University of the Punjab (1919-1924) and Governor of Punjab (1923). He was a historian whose passion for knowledge is evidenced by his donation of rare and out of print books to the Archives. This initiative led to the establishment of a small but important library that still exists today.
Figure 4. The oldest book in the Archives Library, Sir Thomas Roe’s Journal, 1616.
The collection consists of biographies, reports and travelogues. Currently the library holds more than 70,000 highly valuable reference books. The oldest book is a memoir, Journal of Sir Thomas Roe, which dates to 1616 and recounts the author’s journey to different parts of India (Fig. 4).
Figure 5. The central hall of the tomb, housing the Archives Museum.
Archives Museum
Another person who played an important role for the Archives was Lord Malcolm Hailey. He went one step beyond his predecessor and established a small museum in 1924 in the central hall of the tomb (Fig. 5). This collection, still maintained today, contains portraits of important Lahore personalities (Fig. 6), along with paintings, prints, maps and lithographs. Mughal Farmans (proclamations), important official letters, old stamps, medals, weapons, and miniatures are also on display (Fig. 7).
Digitization
Figure 7. A message from the Queen of England to the viceroy on the completion of the telegraph line to India, 1860.
Figure 6. A general of Ranjit Singh’s army, General Avitabile, early 19th century.
For the past several years, the Punjab Archives has been in the process of digitizing its collection to improve accessibility to scholars. Approximately 500,000 pages of historic documents are currently being scanned and catalogued, precluding the need to move the fragile original documents, thus minimizing their wear and tear. A web portal will make these digitized documents accessible under the authorization of the Punjab Archives. This project is a first step towards a long-term strategy of modernizing the Punjab Archives and Libraries. To date, more then 120,000 pages have been digitized. Although the project was scheduled to be completed by June 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought all activities to a standstill. Once completed, the archives online services will be a primary resource for scholars throughout the world. In the meantime we are providing information to any researcher who contacts the Archives Department by email at archivesdirectorate@gmail.com.
International News: “My World Now Is Black in Color:” Pandemic-Era Programming, Anti-Racist Activism, and Contemporary Art in Italy
posted by CAA — August 11, 2020
The following article was written in response to a call for submissions by CAA’s International Committee. It is by Tenley Bick, Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Art, Department of Art History, Florida State University, and the 2019–20 Scholar in Residence at Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, New York. A related essay, “Ghosts for the Present: Countercultural Aesthetics and Postcoloniality for Contemporary Italy,” will be included in an edited volume forthcoming from Lexington Books.
Figure 1. “Indro Montanelli, imbrattata la statua a Milano” (Indro Montanelli, statue smeared in Milan). Corriere della Sera, June 13, 2020 (https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_giugno_13/indro-montanelli-statua-imbrattata-81a5c120-adad-11ea-84a7-c6d5b5b928b0.shtml). Photo: AP
June 13, Milan. The 2006 monument to Italian journalist Indro Montanelli was found covered in red paint and tagged “razzista, stupratore”: racist, rapist. The intervention targeted the statue of Montanelli and the journalist’s past as a colonial soldier in East Africa. In 1935, Montanelli bought a twelve-year-old Eritrean girl, Destà, to serve as his wife under the practice of madamismo. Montanelli never apologized. The intervention ignited public debate in Italy on racism and public monuments, bringing the country popularly known for apathy toward its colonial and fascist histories, pervasive associated monuments and street names into renewed transatlantic debates on these topics. Four days prior, Italian-Somali writer Igiaba Scego, writing on anti-Black racism, Black Lives Matter, and monument debates in the United States and Europe in the Italian weekly Internazionale, made a call for Italy to confront the “uncomfortable traces of our past.” Citing an earlier intervention at the Montanelli monument in 2019, Scego noted the absent memorialization of Destà: “It would be nice if someone, whether a street artist or a municipality, dedicated a statue, a drawing, a memory to that distant child” (trans. Bick). Street artists and activists responded (Figs. 2–3). Cities did not. The Montanelli monument was cleaned and, by mayoral decision, remains in place.
Figure 2. In Milan, Italian street artist Ozmo’s mural depicts a fictional monument to Destà, the Eritrean child “bride” of Indro Montanelli, when the famous journalist was a colonial soldier. Working specifically in response to Igiaba Scego’s call, the artist used a photo of a contemporary Eritrean girl of approximately the same age as Destà upon her “marriage,” to stand defiantly in place of Montanelli on the base of his monument, relabeled in memory to “Montanelli’s child bride” (IG @ozmone, June 15). The mural was vandalized within two days. Inkjet on blueback paper, measurements to site (dimensioni ambientali). Photo by Gianfranco Candida, @wallsofmilano. Courtesy of Ozmo.
Figure 3. In Palermo, artists Mr. Cens, Betty Macaluso, and Ulrike conceived the mural depicting the vandalized monument to Montanelli and a portrait of Destà. Mr. Cens executed the large public mural. Acrylic on tissue paper, 9.8 x 9.8 ft. (3 x 3 m). Palermo, June 16, 2020. Courtesy of Mr. Cens. The mural builds upon a 2018 work by Wu Ming 2 (Giovanni Cattabriga) and Palermo-based artist collective Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, Roberto Romano), Viva Menilicchi!, which temporarily renamed via Montanelli “via Destà.”
One of the first hotspots in the COVID-19 pandemic, Italy was then emerging from a three-month lockdown. During that time, Italian museums (public and private) became leaders in innovative arts programming for a pandemic-era world. The Museo Madre launched an #iorestoacasa “call to action” campaign, publishing artists’ responses to the pandemic online; the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna invited and posted videos about its permanent collection; the Fondazione Prada produced podcasts and alternative exhibition encounters through its #innerviews and #outerviews programs, using social media as a “laboratory” for “new formats and codes” (@FondazionePrada, Mar. 18). This innovation has since extended to safety technology. Florence’s Museo dell’Opera del Duomo introduced wearable sensors to ensure social distancing—technology subsequently implemented by institutions of Italian art outside of Italy. Magazzino Italian Art Foundation (New York) is the first museum in the United States to use the technology, reopening with Homemade (cur. Vittorio Calabrese with Chiara Mannarino), an exhibition of work made during the pandemic by New-York-based Italian artists.
While the Montanelli debate coincided with a moment of reckoning for institutions in the United States and Western Europe, the overwhelming majority of art museums in Italy have not announced such programming, policy changes, or statements of solidarity. This inattention is not due to a lack of anti-racist social justice activism in Italy (Black Lives Matter Roma, Neri Italiani, the Stati Popolari movement, among others), nor is it due to an absence of Black Italians in Italian popular culture, especially in literature (Scego), cinema (Fred Kuwornu, Amin Nour), and music (Ghali).
A few exceptions demonstrate the potential for institutionally supported, sustained, collaborative programs to counter anti-Black racism in Italy. The Uffizi has partnered with Black Lives Matter Florence on a series of virtual programs to address “the presence of black culture in European art, told through the works of the Gallerie degli Uffizi” (https://www.uffizi.it/video-storie/black-presence). Organized by Justin Randolph Thompson, co-founder and director of Black History Month Florence (BHMF), in collaboration and partnership with the Uffizi as part of their On Being Present program, the eight-week series entitled “Black Presence” debuted July 4th with Thompson’s video discussion of a Piero di Cosimo work and continues with concerts and video tours on representations of Black Africans in Renaissance art. MAXXI, one of Italy’s major contemporary museums, launched a short-lived social media initiative: #MAXXIforblacklivesmatter. The campaign “aims in raising awareness and consciousness of the @blklivesmatter movement through art” (@museomaxxi). With eighteen tagged Instagram posts (most recently dated June 17), the museum posted images of BLM protests in Italy and works by African and African diaspora artists Robin Rhode, John Akomfrah, and Yinka Shonibare from MAXXI’s 2018–19 exhibitions. The initiative was highlighted on June 12 by Italian-Haitian-Ghanaian cultural curator and Griot founder Johanne Affricot in an essay for Artribune as a “necessary” if late action amidst the generally delayed response from arts and culture in Italy to BLM in comparison to the global context (“Black Lives Matter ma non in Italia. Il ritardo dell’arte e della cultura nel paese,” June 12). Program information is notably no longer available on MAXXI’s bio.
Beyond these varied efforts, Black artists have been included in major museum and gallery exhibitions, and Black curators have curated exhibitions at prominent museums, but these figures are almost always non-Italian artists and art workers. While Italy is becoming increasingly multi-ethnic (and multi-racial), the country does not track ethno-racial statistics (Reynolds 2018, BBC; Ambrosetti and Cela 2015). Instead, citizenship and place of birth serve as “proxies” for race and ethnicity (Ambrosetti and Cela 2015). This is one of many reasons—from racial laws under fascism to renewed racism in response to cross-Mediterranean migration—why Blackness in Italy is most associated with foreign identity (with populations of African migrants, immigrants, and residents) rather than with Italian identity as well.
Two Afro-Italian artists—Jem Perucchini (b. 1995) and Luigi Christopher Veggetti Kanku (b. 1979), both based in Milan—are making inroads that might change that. Perucchini made a series of portraits of Black Italians in history for Vogue Italia during Black History Month (see Jordan Anderson, Mar. 12, 2020) (Fig. 4).
Figure 4. Jem Perucchini’s Alessandro Sinigaglia (2020) depicts a little-known Black, Jewish Italian member of Italy’s anti-fascist resistance during World War II. Oil on linen, 15.75 x 12 in. (40 x 30 cm). Courtesy of Jem Perucchini.
Harper’sBazaarTV followed with a “visual interview” in mid-July. When asked “What colour is your world, these days?” the Ethiopian-Italian artist responded: “Certainly my world now is black in color. I think it is the color that is most suited to represent the situation that the whole world is experiencing, in terms of sanitary, economic, social problems” (interview by Laura Taccari, trans. Bick). At the end of lockdown, Perucchini had completed a large painting of the Stele of Axum: the ancient obelisk that Italy returned to Ethiopia in 2005, nearly seventy years after stealing it as war spoils (Zoom interview with Bick, Fig. 5).
Figure 5. Jem Perucchini, Axum, 2020. Oil on linen, 55 x 43 in. (140 x 110 cm). Courtesy of Jem Perucchini. Completed during the lockdown, Perucchini’s Axum depicts the fourth-century stele that was taken as war spoils during Italy’s second colonial invasion of Ethiopia. The stele remained on display in Rome for nearly seventy years.
Veggetti Kanku (represented by Galleria Rubin, Milan) has confronted the institutional and cultural marginalization of Black people in Italy directly. In late June, the Congolese-Italian artist held a soft opening of a new exhibition space in Milan’s center for Afro-Italian artists (Zoom interview with Bick, Jun. 29). Entitled The Office, the evenings-and-weekends-only arts space is a legal office during regular business hours. Veggetti Kanku’s monumental portraits of Black women (Fig. 6), intended to bring Black figures into (white) Italian bourgeois homes (Griot, Mar. 25; Zoom interview with Bick), hang in the space, to be inaugurated this fall with his solo show SOTTOPELLE: “A show dedicated to black women, inclusive of social status, a show that destabilizes and puts up for discussion the canons of strictly Western beauty in an ever-increasing multi-ethnic Italian reality” (Veggetti Kanku, email correspondence with the author, July 16, trans. Bick).
Figure 6. Luigi Christopher Veggetti Kanku, Untitled, 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 65 x 39 in. (165 x 100 cm). Veggetti Kanku’s monumental portraits of Black women will be exhibited in his solo show, SOTTOPELLE (UNDERSKIN) at his new space for Afro-Italian artists, The Office, located in the center of Milan.
The museum complex now perhaps most directly engaged with Italy’s colonial history, the Museo delle Civiltà (home to Italy’s national ethnographic museum and partial repository of Italy’s colonial collection, formerly at the Museo Coloniale di Roma and various iterations that followed), has announced plans for a new museum (in development since 2017) dedicated to Italian colonialism in Africa (including postcolonial periods and an engagement with contemporary art): the Museo Italo-Africano Ilaria Alpi, to open in 2023. (See Scego, and Giulia Grechi and Viviana Gravano’s interview with colonial collections’ curator and cultural anthropologist Rosa Anna Di Lella in Roots–Routes). As Italy begins to address the presentness of its colonial past, the absence of Black Italian artists in Italy’s museums and galleries persists. What might a Perucchini or Veggetti Kanku exhibition look like at MAXXI or the Galleria Nazionale? What might happen if the innovation of Italian arts programming and centrality of the arts to Italian identity made space for the multi-ethnicity of Italy today? It remains to be seen if and how the country’s art museums and galleries—leaders in arts programming in many ways—will address racial inequity in their own collections.
The Getty Foundation to Fund the CAA-Getty International Program for a Tenth Year
posted by CAA — June 25, 2020
CAA-Getty Scholars at the 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago. Photo: Stacey Rupolo
The Getty Foundation has awarded CAA a grant to fund the CAA-Getty International Program for a tenth consecutive year. Unlike previous years, the 2021 program will take place virtually, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges of bringing international scholars to New York to attend the 2021 Annual Conference. CAA is especially grateful to the Getty Foundation for sustaining its support during these uncertain times, when maintaining contact with our international colleagues is more important than ever. Turning this crisis into an opportunity, the twenty participants in next year’s program will spend the time between now and February exploring the advantages of online technology for enriching scholarly research and building global bonds. Meme Omogbai, CAA’s new executive director, stated “We appreciate not only the Getty Foundation’s ongoing support, but also its faith in the CAA-Getty program to pursue scholarly excellence and innovation in an acutely challenging time. We believe the participants in this program will help lead the way for CAA’s future growth in international programs and membership.”
Over the coming months, the participants—all alumni of the program—will work in small online groups to workshop their conference papers, originally planned to be presented in person at the 2021 Annual Conference. What can be gained by geographically-distanced scholars collaborating regularly over the next six months, discussing and critiquing each other’s work? How will ideas evolve and change from early conversations to completed presentations?
The 2021 CAA-Getty program participants will also explore opportunities provided by online exchanges to produce resource materials for other scholars. Using recordings of the online discussions and the conference presentations, the group will initiate a virtual archive containing video and text documentation of the year’s work, including podcasts, bibliographies, and references related to the themes of the conference sessions. Although this virtual program breaks with the patterns established by the first nine years of the program, its forward-looking experiment in online scholarship is a fitting way to celebrate the tenth anniversary of a program that promises new models for robust scholarship in the post-COVID world.
“We applaud CAA for a taking a bold step to reimagine the international program online,” says Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation. “This thoughtful approach to digital engagement will teach us all a great deal about how to maintain international perspectives and connections in this new post-pandemic reality.”
The CAA-Getty International Program was established in 2011-12 to increase international participation in CAA and the CAA Annual Conference. The program fosters collaborations between North American art historians and curators and their international colleagues and introduces visual arts professionals to the unique environments and contexts of practices in different countries. Since the CAA-Getty International Program began, it has brought 135 first-time attendees from 49 countries to CAA’s Annual Conference. Historically, the majority of international registrants at the conference have come from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Western European countries. The CAA-Getty International Program has greatly diversified attendance, adding scholars from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and South America. The majority of the participants teach art history, visual studies, art theory, or architectural history at the university level; others are museum curators and researchers.
About the Getty Foundation
The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. Through strategic grant initiatives, it strengthens art history as a global discipline, promotes the interdisciplinary practice of conservation, increases access to museum and archival collections, and develops current and future leaders in the visual arts. It carries out its work in collaboration with the other Getty Programs to ensure that they individually and collectively achieve maximum effect.
2021 CAA-Getty International Program Participants
Danielle Becker, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Federico Freschi, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand
Georgina Gluzman, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Richard Gregor, Trnava University, Slovenia
Alison Kearney, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Sandra Krizic Roban, Institute of Art History, Croatia
Peju Layiwola, University of Lagos, Nigeria
Daniela Lucena, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Priya Maholay-Jaradi, National University of Singapore
Ana Mannarino, Federal University of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
Parul Mukherji, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Cristian Nae, George Enescu National University of Arts, Romania
Marton Orosz, Museum of Fine Arts, Hungary
Ceren Ozpinar, University of Brighton, United Kingdom
Dasha Panaiotti, Hermitage Museum, Russia
Valeria Paz Moscoso, Universidad Católica Boliviana San Pablo, Bolivia
Judy Peter, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Horacio Ramos Cerna, City University of New York
Nora Veszpremi, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Giuliana Vidarte, Pontifical Catholic University, Peru
CAA-Getty International Program at CAA 2020
posted by CAA — March 17, 2020
2020 CAA-Getty International Program Participants, photo by Stacey Rupolo.
Front row, left-right: Julia Waite (New Zealand), Saurabh Tewari (India), Daria Jaremtchuk (Brazil), Ali Mahfouz (Egypt), Akande Abiodun (Nigeria), Aleksandra Paradowska (Poland), Iro Katsaridou (Greece), Priya Maholay-Jaradi (Singapore), Giuliana Vidarte (Peru); Back row, left-right: Valeria PazMoscoso (Bolivia), Nora Veszpremi (Hungary/UK), Eiman Elgibreen (Saudi Arabia), Pedith Chan (Hong Kong), Mariana Levytska (Ukraine), Daniela Lucena (Argentina), Katarzyna Cytlak (Poland), Daria Panaiotti (Russia), Jean-Arsène Yao (Côte d’Ivoire), Irene Bronner (South Africa); Not pictured: Ganiyu Jimoh (Nigeria)
One for the Scrapbook! The 2020 CAA-Getty International Program participants—twenty scholars from nineteen countries—arrived in Chicago on the Sunday before the conference to get ready for a busy week of meetings, sessions, and one-on-one conversations. With this year’s participants, the program now includes 135 scholars from 48 countries, adding for the first time representatives from Bolivia, Singapore, and Côte d’Ivoire.
The preconference colloquium on February 11 was held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and featured papers on indigenous artists and contemporary art, the politics of cultural heritage, new subjects for art history, artistic exiles, and critical pedagogies.
Eleven US-based CAA members served as hosts for the international visitors, introducing them to scholars in their fields, taking them to Chicago-area museums, and attending their preconference colloquium.
Toward the end of the week, five alumni added their voices to the annual Global Conversation session, this year addressing Art History and the Politics of Vision.
As Julia Waite, from New Zealand, summarized the week: “Attending the CAA conference was hugely stimulating, and I left feeling excited about the future of art history. It reminded me of the strengths of deep art historical research in providing a more complex and nuanced understanding of art and society.”
Meet the 2020 Travel Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — January 29, 2020
CAA offers Annual Conference Travel Grants to graduate students in art history and studio art and to international artists and scholars. Meet this year’s recipients below.
CAA GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE TRAVEL GRANTS
CAA awards Graduate Student Conference Travel Grants to advanced PhD and MFA graduate students as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to the Annual Conference.
Maureen Burdock, University of California, Davis
Josephine Lee, Parsons School of Design
Brantly Hancock Moore, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Nicole Winning, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth
CAA INTERNATIONAL MEMBER CONFERENCE TRAVEL GRANTS
CAA awards the International Member Conference Travel Grant to artists and scholars from outside the United States as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to the Annual Conference.
Alex Burchmore, Australian National University
Panos Kompatsiaris, National Research University Higher School of Economics,Moscow
Stephen Adéyemí Folárànmí, Rhodes University, South Africa
CAA TRAVEL GRANT IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD CASON EDWARDS, SENIOR, AND SARAH STANLEY GORDON EDWARDS
Established by Mary D. Edwards with the help of others, the CAA Travel Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards supports women who are emerging scholars at either an advanced stage of pursuing a doctoral degree or who have received their PhD within the two years prior to the submission of the application.
Kristen Nassif, University of Delaware
Paper: Seeing Through Blindness: Disability, Tactile Relief Maps, and Geography
Session: Disability in the Arts: The Active Participation of People with Disabilities in the Arts
Shirlynn Sham, Yale University
Paper: The Eighth Wonder of the World: Design and Danger in Marc and Isambard Brunel’s Thames Tunnel Project
Session: Topographical Drawing
SAMUEL H. KRESS FOUNDATION CAA CONFERENCE TRAVEL FELLOWSHIP FOR INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARS
Recognizing the value of first-hand exchanges of ideas and experience among art historians, the Kress Foundation is offering support for international scholars participating as speakers at the 2020 CAA Annual Conference. The scholarly focus of the papers must be European art before 1830.
Sophie Ong, Rutgers University
Paper: ‘I pray…that I may have sommethyng for my nekke’: Understanding Jewelry and Its Popularity in the Late Middle Ages and Today
Session: Kitsch and Craft in the Middle Ages: Making Medieval Art Popular
Bruno Ligore, Nice University, France
Paper: Embodying the Antique in the Early 19th Century: Ballet Masters’ Drawing Practices
Session: Dancing in the archives: choreographers’ drawings as resources for art historians (19th-20th centuries)
Halyna Kohut, Ivan Franko National University of Liviv, Ukraine
Paper: Is it the Rug or the ‘Other’?
Session: Different Shades of Othering: Orientalism/Occidentalism in the World of Art
Elisa Antonietta Daniele, University of Verona, Italy
Paper: Performing Bodies, Dancing Trifles: Drawing New Worlds in Il Tabacco, Commemorative Album for the Courtly Ballet Staged in Turin (1650)
Session: Early Modern Animation: Mascarades, Ballet, Automata
Estefanía López-Salas, Universidade da Coruña, Spain
Paper: Towards a Web-Based Representation of Spatial Change Over Time at San Julián de Samos
Session: Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D (Geo)Spatial Networks
Elena Granuzzo, Independent Scholar, Italy
Paper: The Cicognara Library and Michelangelo Buonarroti: A Historiographical Reading through the Sources
Session: Historic Libraries and the Historiography of Art (II)
CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
Every year since 2012, the CAA-Getty International Program has brought between fifteen and twenty art historians, museum curators, and artists who teach art history to attend CAA’s Annual Conference. This program is funded on an annual basis by the Getty Foundation. Click here to meet the CAA-Getty International Program participants.
CAA Affiliate ACSAA Condemns the Assault on Democratic Institutions and Intellectual Freedoms in India
posted by CAA — January 17, 2020
The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), a CAA Affiliate Society, has condemned the ongoing assault on democratic institutions and intellectual freedoms in India. Read their statement below.
The American Council of Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), a non-profit organization and a community of academics and humanists, condemns the ongoing assault on democratic institutions and intellectual freedoms in India.
Both the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), signed on 11 December 2019, and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) Act, to be implemented in 2021, are openly discriminatory laws. We denounce any attempt at exclusion based on religion, caste, gender, race, or sexual identity, and find both laws to be antithetical to the Indian constitution and its democracy. In particular, as researchers and teachers of India’s art and architecture across millennia, we are committed to preserving the rich contributions of Muslims to its visual culture and intellectual life. We see this commitment as directly threatened by the violent, often state-sanctioned, erasure of such contributions, in instances such as the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the occupation of Kashmir, the renaming of cities, and the rewriting of academic curricula along Hindutva lines.
We stand in full support of the students and teachers at Aligarh Muslim University and the Jamia Millia Islamia, following the events of 15 December 2019; at Jawaharlal Nehru University, following events there on 5 January 2020; and everyone currently participating in peaceful protests and demonstrations across the country. We see the brutal attack at JNU—organized and executed by members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student faction of the Hindutva organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and, with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a member of the Sangh Parivar—as one more instance of a widespread denial of the rights of Indian citizens to critique their government peacefully and openly.
The accusations of “anti-nationalism” directed at marginalized communities at these confrontations – particularly Muslims, Dalits, and women – are reminders of the extent to which extremists will go to erode the secular principles on which the country was founded.
To date, there have been no arrests or investigations into the identity of the attackers at JNU, despite indisputable evidence. We deplore the negligence of the Delhi Police, who looked on as the attacks happened, and call for both an immediate investigation and the resignation of JNU’s Vice Chancellor, M. Jagadesh Kumar. Following as it does the instances of police violence at Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia, as well as long-term interventions including cuts to funding and fee hikes, the JNU attack urgently increases our concern, as part of the global academic community, for public higher education and critical thought in India.
The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) is dedicated to advancing the study and awareness of the art of South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayan regions, spanning all periods and forms of artistic production.
Related reading: In Photos: The World’s Largest Democracy Is in Upheaval (Quartz India, December 15, 2019)
Police Fire Tear Gas as Delhi Protesters Decry Citizenship Law (Al Jazeera, December 15, 2019)
I Saw Police Stand by as Masked Men Attacked Students at a Top Delhi University. It Was Yet Another Assault on India’s Intellectuals (Time, January 8, 2020)
Behind Campus Attack in India, Some See a Far-Right Agenda (New York Times, January 10, 2020)
International Review: The Many Faces of Human Impacts in The Seventh Continent, 16th Istanbul Biennial
posted by CAA — December 17, 2019
THE MANY FACES OF HUMAN IMPACTS: Exhibition Review of The Seventh Continent, 16th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, September 14–November 10, 2019.
The following article was written in response to a call for submissions by CAA’s International Committee. It is by Madeleine Kelly, an artist based in Sydney, Australia.
When artists work with archaeology and anthropology it is easy to imagine their work as a labor entrenched in the past. Yet, in the 2019 Istanbul Biennial—an enormous exhibition in three venues that presented the work of fifty-six artists and art collectives from twenty-six countries—artists engaged with the descriptive capacity of archaeological methods by reinvesting them in the metaphorical dimension of imaginative artifacts and languages. New and complex ways of signifying humanity’s traces, marks, and interactions with the non-human universe emerged, blurring the traditional separation between nature and culture. Following from this, the division between subjects and objects also breaks down, granting subjective agency to stones, plants, and other non-human voices. The most powerful works invented an “inter-subjective relation” (see discussion below) that proceeded by way of the form of the face. As othered subjects are often faceless, the mediums in which they are embodied configure them as anthropological concepts. Entitled The Seventh Continent after the drifting mass of plastic waste that contaminates the world’s oceans, this year’s Istanbul Biennial explored the complex entanglements of anthropogenic climate change and the human impact on the planet.
French curator and art historian Nicolas Bourriaud is known for his controversial book, Relational Aesthetics (1998, English translation 2002), which revitalized the discussion on aesthetics at the time. In it, film critic Serge Daney suggested that the invention of “inter-subjective relation” proceeds by way of the form of the face, an exchange that denotes the consideration we have towards others. Further, to produce a form is to partake in a transitive ethic in which an image mediates the longing to be looked at. He states that “all form is a face looking at me.” In the biennial, Bourriaud drew attention to “the primacy of encounter over form,” arguing that dynamic encounters between different types of beings–and by extension forms–constitute relational formations. I propose that an echo of his early citation of inter-subjective relation is present in forms with subject-like qualities–in particular faces– and that these especially address our relation to dwindling diversity and mounting waste generated by industrial capitalism.
Figure 1: HaZaVuZu art collective, Worlbmon, 2019, installation view and details; Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture (photograph provided by the author)
In the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, located in the heart of the city, the Istanbul-based HaZaVuZu art collective presented an alluring grotto-like installation of animated surfaces and faces inspired by everyday packaging, inkblots, and grotesque figures that “look back at us” (Fig. 1). The myriad images recall the semiotic wonderland of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia Museum, weaving its historical thread of the iconophilic and iconoclastic, but the HaZaVuZu seems to riff on this legacy with forms that oscillate between iconic, indexical, and symbolic sign systems. Bourriaud’s statement (in an introduction to the exhibition) that “the work of art is a signal, akin to those all living organisms emit” seems to crystalize in these works where the artists breathe life into inanimate materials composed of matter seemingly evolving into being.
Figure. 2: Hale Tenger, Appearance (detail), 2019, mixed-media and sound installation, black obsidian mirrors, iron, epoxy resin based paint, water, audio-spotlight speaker, Büyükada Island (photograph provided by the author)
Along with the trope of the living work is that of art as a mirror to the world, reflecting the ineffable operations of nature. Yet in the context of the exhibition, an ideal nature is displaced to expose, as Bourriaud states, “the reverse mirror-image of our societies, the seventh continent is the country we don’t want to inhabit, made up of everything we reject.” On the island venue of Büyükada, a ferry ride from town, Istanbul-based artist Hale Tenger presented a mixed-media and sound installation entitled Appearance (Fig. 2). The viewer entered an apple orchard on the grounds of the dilapidated Sophronius Palace in which round black obsidian mirrors and pools of water reminiscent of black oil reflected skyscapes and trees. A voice from the house hoarsely whispered a poem by the artist: “I was a fruit tree . . . I gave, without expecting reciprocity . . . can you be by not doing?” And when we saw our faces reflected in the black mirrors we felt caught up in the quotidian complicities conjured by the question.
Another compelling work, this time the face of the deep, was also on the island. Armin Linke’s investigative film Prospecting Ocean (2018) transported viewers to the world of deep-sea politics where activists organize protests against seabed mining and the technocratic entanglement of industry, science, politics, and the economy. In the accompanying installation of documents related to Italian and Turkish marine history, a book chapter entitled “Ion by Ion,” by marine scientists Bruce Heezen and Charles Hollister, beautifully describes the evolution of mineral gardens comprised of manganese nodules. These polymetallic rock concretions accumulate daily in atomic layers and correlate with species abundance. Like strata that accumulate in the layers of a painting, the nodules embody an enlivening vitality.
Figure 3. Mika Rottenberg, still from Spaghetti Blockchain, 2019, 4K color video installation with 7.1 surround sound, 18:15 min.; Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture (artwork © Mika Rottenberg; photograph provided by the artist and Hauser & Wirth)
Artist Mika Rottenberg’s rapid-edit video Spaghetti Blockchain presents more strata, but hers are of oozy plastic modelling compounds, cakes that accumulate in layers of artificially coloured jelly, and molecular models scaffolded from skewers and marshmallows (Fig. 3). The film cuts to a potato-processing plant that rips through tree branches and thousands of potatoes in granular form. The agency of the hand appears as a critical element, often framed by hexagonal kaleidoscopic apertures that “blink” us through the brilliantly edited comic nightmare of her “organic chemistry.” Bourriaud proposes, “today’s artists practice a type of anthropology that one could call molecular.”
Figure 4: Eloise Hawser, Feathering, 2019, video sculpture, 76 x 101 x 20 in. (193.6 × 257 × 50 cm), steel, laminated and repurposed glass panels, Pera Museum (photograph provided by the author)
Another work, The Tipping Hall by London-based artist Eloise Hawser, takes the “petal claw” as its subject. These mechanical fists, with their twenty-six foot (eight meter) talons, do a vital job of aerating the waste of tipping halls to prevent the build-up of toxic gases. This work was displayed in the biennial’s third venue, the Pera Museum, as was Hawser’s Feathering (2019), a mesmeric kinetic sculpture made from waste and showing, at high magnification, the intricate and fine-toothed handling of e-waste (Fig. 4).
Figure 5: Jonathas de Andrade, still from O Peixe (The fish), 2016, 16mm transferred to 2K video, 5.1 sound, screen ratio 16:9 (1.77), 23 min.; Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture (photograph provided by Pedro Urano)
In Brazilian-based artist Jonathas de Andrade’s film O Peixe (The fish) (Fig. 5), Amazonian fishermen ceremoniously embrace and caress their slowly suffocating catch. While stylistically a pastiche of early ethnographic films, the intimate gesture between man and dying fish is an invention of the artist. Pertinent here is the aesthetic encounter between humans and animals being slaughtered, generating uneasy discussions and making this a challenging work.
In many ways, The Seventh Continent was an aestheticizing of the anthropogenic environmental tragedy. These artists translated notions of subjectivity into forms that document and/or question human impact–their forms look back at us, urging us to explore the complex entanglements of anthropogenic climate change and holding us to account for our impact on the planet.
CAA Endorses ACASA’s Statement Concerning Destruction of Cultural Patrimony in Bafut
posted by CAA — December 16, 2019
On September 24, soldiers from the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) attacked and looted the Royal Palace, in Bafut, North-West region. © Creative Commons/ShareAlike 3.0, via Human Rights Watch
CAA endorses its affiliate society, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), in condemning recent reports of theft, property damage, as well as violence at the Palace of Bafut in Cameroon.
The site is an important part of the history and culture of the Bafut population in the northwest region of Cameroon, and continues to function as a center for religious rites and ceremonies. The violence and destruction to the Bafut Palace threatens the safety and identity of the Bafut people and the maintenance of their distinctive cultural traditions. As such it deserves protection from the Republic of Cameroon and pressure from organizations and governments to restore damaged structures and return stolen artifacts.
Read ACASA’s statement below.
Statement Concerning Destruction of Cultural Patrimony in Bafut
20 November 2019
The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA)—an independent professional association which exists to facilitate communication among scholars, teachers, students, artists, museum specialists, collectors, and all others interested in the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora—condemns the violent aggression perpetrated by the Republic of Cameroon against the Palace of Bafut, a site included on UNESCO’s Tentative List of World Heritage Sites since 2006. Human Rights Watch reports that “On September 24 [2019], soldiers from the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) attacked and looted the Royal Palace in Bafut, North-West region.” (https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/10/11/world-heritage-site-attacked-cameroon#) Fon Abumbi II of Bafut protested the aggression in a letter dated September 24, 2019 and addressed to the Governor of North West Region. In addition to causing damage to buildings within the palace and perpetrating violence against those who had been neither charged nor tried in a court of law, these troops representing the authority of the State shamelessly stole historical objects from the palace museum.
According to the World Monuments Fund, the palace “embodies Bafut cultural identity and remains a center for religious rites and traditional ceremonies. Over 50 houses are clustered around the site’s spiritual core, Achum Shrine, and are used by the Fon (king), his wives, and the royal court.” (https://www.wmf.org/project/bafut-palace) The palaces and museums of the North West Region of Cameroon serve as invaluable repositories of the long-standing traditions and material cultures of these vibrant kingdoms. These palaces and associated sites—where ritual practices have long been performed—foster and house the heritages, both tangible and intangible of these communities. The violent destruction and looting of such a site may be understood as an attempt to erase the cultural identity of the Bafut population. As a site listed on the Tentative List of World Heritage Sites, Bafut Palace is recognized as holding even greater than just local significance, constituting a primary locus of cultural heritage for the entirety of Cameroon, and indeed the world. The Cameroonian State must treat these places as the internationally significant cultural heritage sites that they are.
ACASA calls on the Republic of Cameroon to protect sites of cultural heritage as required by being party to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property. According to Article 4(3) of the aforementioned convention, it is the obligation of the State “to prohibit, prevent and, if necessary, put a story to any form of theft, pillage or misappropriation of, and any acts of vandalism directed against, cultural property….” In light of this international obligation, the Cameroonian State must bring to justice and punish appropriately those responsible for this heinous act. Furthermore, every effort must be taken to return looted items of cultural heritage to the palace museum of Bafut.
CC:
Paul Biya, President of the Republic of Cameroon
Henri Etoundi Essomba, Ambassador of the Republic of Cameroon to the US
Peter Henry Barlein, US Ambassador to the Republic of Cameroon
Narcisse Mouelle Kombi, Minister of Arts and Culture for the Republic of Cameroon
UNESCO
World Monuments Fund
Meet the 2020 CAA-Getty International Program Participants
posted by CAA — November 14, 2019
We’re pleased to announce this year’s participants in the CAA-Getty International Program. Now in its ninth year, this international program supported by the Getty Foundation will bring fifteen new participants and five alumni to the 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois.
The participants—professors of art history, curators, and artists who teach art history—hail from countries throughout the world, expanding CAA’s growing international membership and contributing to an increasingly diverse community of scholars and ideas. This year we are adding participants from four countries not included previously—Bolivia, Saudi Arabia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Singapore—bringing the total number of countries represented by the program to fifty. Selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants, the participants will receive funding for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, conference registration, CAA membership, and per diems for out-of-pocket expenditures.
At a one-day preconference colloquium, to be held this year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the fifteen new participants will discuss key issues in the international study of art history together with five CAA-Getty alumni and several CAA members from the United States, who also will serve as hosts throughout the conference. The preconference program will delve deeper into subjects discussed during last year’s program, including such topics as postcolonial and Eurocentric legacies, interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies, and the intersection of politics and art history.
This is the third year that the program includes five alumni, who provide an intellectual link between previous convenings of the international program and this year’s events. They also serve as liaisons between CAA and the growing community of CAA-Getty alumni. In addition to serving as moderators for the preconference colloquium, the five alumni will present a new Global Conversation during the 2020 conference titled Things Aren’t Always as they Seem: Art History and the Politics of Vision.
The goal of the CAA-Getty International Program is to increase international participation in the organization’s activities, thereby expanding international networks and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. CAA currently includes members from sixty countries around the world. We look forward to welcoming the following participants at the next Annual Conference in Chicago.
2020 Participants in the CAA-Getty International Program
Irene Bronner is a senior lecturer with the South African Research Chair in South African Art History and Visual Culture, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her doctorate (DLitt et Phil), titled “Representations of Domestic Workers in Post-apartheid South African Art Practice,” was conferred by the University of Johannesburg in 2016. She then held a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship with the same institution, during which time she received a Postdoctoral Research Fellows’ Excellence Award. Her research interests center on feminist studies in the visual arts, with a focus on contemporary southern Africa. She works principally with feminist, queer and postcolonial cultural theory as well as issues of memory, affect, gender, and the aftermath of trauma. She has published in local and international journals, recently in Woman’s Art Journal and Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture.
Eiman Elgibreen is an artist and an assistant professor of art history at the Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She obtained a PhD in art history from the University of Sussex (UK) for her research on “Image Making: Representations of Women in the Art and Career of Safeya Binzagr 1968-2000.” Since 2011 Elgibreen has also been a freelance writer for Al-Riyadh Daily Newspaper and Al-Jazirah Daily Newspaper, and an art consultant for organizations that are concerned with preserving the legacy of Saudi pioneer artists such as Darat Safeya Binzagr (a museum devoted to the artist’s work), and Saudi Arts House (a family foundation devoted to the work of Mohammed Alsaleem). In addition, she has curated a number of art exhibitions, including the Saudi National Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. Elgibreen is interested in exploring the forgotten and/or misrepresented aspects of Saudi and Arab culture through her research and her art. A goal of her work is to encourage acceptance of cultural differences.
Dária G. Jaremtchuk is an associate professor of art history at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on contemporary art. As Fulbright Brazil Distinguished Chair at Emory University in 2019, she taught a course in the art history department about Brazilian contemporary visual arts. In 2018, she was a visiting scholar at Georgetown University and at Brown University in 2011. In 2010, she edited the book Arte e política: situações (Art and politics: situations) (Alameda Editora) and in 2007 she published Anna Bella Geiger: Passagens Conceituais (Anna Bella Geiger: conceptual passages) (C/Arte and Editora da Universidade de São Paulo). She is currently researching the relocation of Brazilian artists during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1960s and 70s and the artistic exchange between Brazil and the United States at that time. She has published on this topic in journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters.
Ganiyu Jimoh received a PhD in art history from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, where he is also a lecturer. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Arts of Africa and Global Souths research program in the Department of Fine Art at Rhodes University in South Africa. His research, which focuses on contemporary art, new media, satire, and cartoons has attracted major awards, including the prestigious University of Lagos Best Researcher Award in Arts and Humanities in 2011. In 2015 he received a grant to conduct research for his PhD dissertation at the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. Jimoh is also a recipient of the 2019 African Studies Association Presidential fellowship. As a scholarly writer who is also a practicing political cartoonist, Jimga (his cartoon signature) has several local and international exhibitions to his credit and currently serves as the secretary of Cartoonists Association of Nigeria (CARTAN).
Mariana Levytska is a research associate in the Department of Art Studies of the Ethnology Institute at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Lviv. She received a PhD in the history of art from the Lviv National Academy of Arts in 2003. Based on her thesis, she published a monograph about Ukrainian portrait painting as an artistic and memorial phenomenon of the long nineteenth century. In addition, she has worked as a senior lecturer from 2005–14 and associate professor in 2015 at the Department of Architectural Environment Design in the Faculty of Architecture of the Lviv National Agricultural University. Levytska’s current area of research is Ukrainian religious art of the eighteenth century (late Baroque-Rococo period), focusing on the concept of cultural transfer according to “peripatetic works of art (such as engravings and albums)” as well as peripatetic artists. She is also interested in issues of Ukrainian historiography of the art of the twentieth century.
Daniela Lucena holds a PhD in social sciences from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and specialize in the sociology of art and culture. A researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Buenos Aires, she teaches sociology of art courses at UBA, where she is also head of a research team. Since 2003 she has studied various aesthetical projects where art, culture, and politics are intertwined. Her books include Contaminación artística. Arte concreto, comunismo y peronismo en los años 40 (Artistic contamination: concret avant-garde, communism and Peronism in the 40s) (Biblios, 2015) and Modo mata moda. Arte, cuerpo y (micro)política en los 80 (Form kills fashion: art, body and [micro]politics in the 80s), coauthored with Gisela Laboureau, (EDULP, 2016). In addition to her work as researcher, since 2007 she has collaborated with PH15, a foundation that organizes photography workshops for children of vulnerable populations, assessing programs and community work linked to art.
Ali Mahfouz is the director of the Mansoura Storage Museum, part of the Ministry of Egyptian Antiquities. He received a BA in 2010 and an MA in Egyptology in 2017, both from Mansoura University. He is currently working on his PhD. Mahfouz began working as an inspector of antiquities at the Ministry of Antiquities in 2012. In August 2015 he was appointed the supervisor of the Mansoura Storage Museum and in October 2018 he became its director. With colleagues, Mahfouz founded Save Mansoura, a volunteer organization dedicated to raising public awareness about the value of cultural heritage and the restoration of historic sites. He is also the cofounder of the Documentation of Architectural and Urban Heritage of Mansoura City Project, which aims to document, digitize, and archive that city’s cultural history. His greatest concern is the fate of archaeological sites damaged or destroyed because of political conflicts and the need to preserve his country’s cultural heritage in the wake of that destruction.
Priya Maholay-Jaradi is the founding convenor of a new art history academic program, a collaboration between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the National Gallery Singapore. She earned an MA in art history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (2001); a PhD from NUS (2012), and a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden (2013). A former curator at the Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore, she has curated Portrait of a Community (National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2002), Beauty in Asia (Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore, 2007) and Tautology of Memory (NUS Museum, Singapore, 2012). Jaradi’s monograph, Fashioning a National Art: Baroda’s Royal Collection and Institutions (1875-1924) (Oxford University Press, 2016), mobilizes provincial archives to reveal links between princely modernities and nationalisms in South Asia. She is the volume editor of Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition (Marg Foundation, 2015). Her current research examines India-Singapore museological imaginations within the context of cold war diplomacy, the Non-Aligned Movement, and decolonization.
Valeria Paz Moscoso specializes in modern and contemporary Bolivian art history. She is the academic coordinator and advisor in the Department of Culture at the Universidad Católica Boliviana (La Paz), where she is also a temporary lecturer and editor of the journal Ciencia y Cultura (Science and culture). Her PhD dissertation examined the concept of repression and emancipation in the work of Bolivian artist Roberto Valcárcel. Currently, she is researching the disruption of the narrative of Indigenism in contemporary art. Additional research interests include gender, humor, critical theory, postcolonial studies, and arts-based research. She has curated exhibitions in Bolivia and the United Kingdom, and published in journals such as ESCALA Research Papers, Ciencia y Cultura, Bisagra (Hinge), Terremoto (Earthquake), and in the books Corrosión y Anomalía: escenas del arte contemporáneo boliviano (Corrosion and anomaly: scenes from contemporary Bolivian art) (2019) and Bolivia: Los caminos de la escultura (Bolivia: the paths of sculpture) (2009), a publication selected for the Bicentennial Library of Bolivia.
Daria Panaiotti is a photography curator and research associate in the Contemporary Art Department of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. She graduated with honors from the European University in St. Petersburg (EUSPB), where she is currently completing her PhD with a dissertation on the history of Soviet documentary photography in Brezhnev’s era. She is also a member of the program committee of the After Post-Photography international conference, the only annual conference on photographic theory and history in Russia. Previously she was involved in the project In Support of Photography in Russia, funded by the IRIS Foundation, Moscow, where she was a member of the curatorial team that organized exhibitions of Russian photography for FotoFest 2012—an international photography festival held every two years in Houston, Texas—and where she also participated in an international portfolio review for Russian photographers at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow in 2011.
Aleksandra Paradowska is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Art History and Philosophy, Faculty of Art Education and Curatorial Studies, at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland. After receiving a PhD from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in 2013, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wrocław from 2014–17. Her research focuses on architectural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the relationship between architecture and politics. For the past five years she has studied Nazi architecture in Polish territories during the Second World War in relation to different perspectives of the humanities, that is, interdisciplinary views of postcolonial and heritage studies. Paradowska has published widely on Polish interwar architecture and received several scholarships: from DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) in 2010, START by the Foundation for Polish Science in 2014, and a scholarship for leading young researchers in Poland by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in 2017–19.
Saurabh Tewari received a BArch in 2008 from the Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Gurgaon/GGSIP University, Delhi (India), and a MDes in 2010 from the Industrial Design Center, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. As a doctoral candidate in the Design Program at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, he is attempting to map out and understand the shifting role of design in postcolonial India within the broader narrative of national development. Currently an assistant professor of design in the School of Planning and Architecture in Bhopal, Tewari has developed a curriculum that includes design history, design culture, and design studies. Ultimately, his goal is to develop South Asia’s first postgraduate program in design history and studies. He views his role in two ways: as a design historian in South Asia exploring and constructing scholarly approaches to design history, and as a South Asian scholar in the design history community voicing the potential of decolonized approaches to the field.
Giuliana Vidarte received a BA in Latin American literature and an MA in art history from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. In 2013 she was part of a curatorial intensive course in Northern Ireland organized by Independent Curators International (New York). In 2014 she received a travel grant to participate in the annual meeting of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) in Qatar. Between 2015–18, she was the curator of Bufeo: Amazonía+Arte, a project for the research and dissemination of Amazonian art. Vidarte has developed exhibition projects about the relationship between visual arts and literature, the rewriting of history based on the recovery of unofficial discourses, and artistic production in the Peruvian Amazon. Currently, she is chief curator and head of exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Lima (MAC Lima) and curatorial assistant for the Peruvian pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.
Julia Waite is the curator of New Zealand art at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand’s largest art museum. She has worked on a number of large-scale exhibitions including the fifth Auckland triennial, If you were to live here . . . (2013) and Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America (2016). Her research interests are focused on the development of modern art in New Zealand and its connections with other peripheral modernisms. In 2015 she curated the exhibition Freedom and Structure: Cubism and New Zealand Art 1930–1960, which toured throughout New Zealand, and published an associated catalogue. She cocurated the major survey of New Zealand’s preeminent abstract painter Gordon Walters: New Vision, which opened at Auckland Art Gallery in 2018. Most recently, Waite has cocurated Louise Henderson: From Life, the first comprehensive retrospective of French-born New Zealand artist Louise Henderson. She has an MA in art history (First Class) and an MA in museum and heritage studies.
Jean-Arsène Yao received a PhD in Latin American history from the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain) in 2002. His scholarship focuses on teaching Spanish in the African Diaspora, particularly with blacks in Argentina. Currently professor of Latin America and Caribbean studies at the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Côte d’Ivoire) and visiting professor at the Universidad de Alcalá and the Universidad de Granada (Spain), his teaching interests include Hispanic American culture and civilization; race, class, and ethnicity in Latin America; and Afro-Hispanic history. He has a special interest in the visual representation of people of African descent in art history and visual studies. Yao has conducted research in Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Uruguay. He has published widely, including five books, several book chapters, and over twenty articles in juried journals of research. Since 2016 he has been the founder-coordinator of the Group of Latin American Studies and Research (https://grelat-ufhb.org/).
Participating Alumni
Abiodun Akande is a senior lecturer at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, where he teaches painting, art education, and art history. Akande earned a BA in fine arts from the Obafemi Awolowo University and received an MA and PhD in the visual arts of Africa from the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. In 2013, he participated in the first Basel Summer School in African Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland; he also attended a graduate symposium hosted by the School of Arts at Peking University in Beijing, China. Akande first participated in the CAA-Getty International Program in 2016 and returned the following year to participate in the 2017 CAA-Getty reunion program. His current research focuses on knowledge systems in the art and cultural practices of indigenous communities in Nigeria. A recent publication, “Ará òrun kìn-ìn kin-in: Òyó-Yòrùbá egúngún Masquerade in Communion and Maintenance of Ontological Balance,” (Genealogy, 3(1), 7, 2019) explores the Yòrùbá belief in life after death, and how the powers and spirits of the deceased are harnessed for the benefit of the living.
Pedith Chan is an assistant professor of Cultural Management in the Faculty of Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in Art and Archaeology from SOAS, University of London. Before joining the Chinese University of Hong Kong Chan was an assistant curator at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and an assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on the production and consumption of art and cultural heritage in modern and contemporary China. Recent publications include The Making of a Modern Art World: Institutionalization and Legitimization of Guohua in Republican Shanghai (Leiden: Brill, 2017), “Representation of Chinese Civilization: Exhibiting Chinese Art in Republican China,” in The Future of Museum and Gallery Design (London: Routledge, 2018), and “In Search of the Southeast: Tourism, Nationalism, Scenic Landscape in Republican China,” (Twentieth-Century China, 2018). She is currently researching the making of scenic sites in modern China. Chan was a participant in the 2019 CAA-Getty International Program.
Iro Katsaridou has been the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki, Greece since 2005. She studied art history at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Université Paris I-Sorbonne, and also pursued museum studies at the City University of New York. Her doctoral dissertation focused on contemporary Greek photography (Aristotle University, 2010). For the past six years Katsaridou has been researching photography and art in World War I and II, during which time she has curated exhibitions on the subject and edited related catalogues. For the last four years she has been teaching as an adjunct faculty member at several Greek universities. She has co-edited two books about photography during the Nazi Occupation of Greece (1941-1944) and written articles and book chapters on photography, exhibition display policies, as well as the relationship between contemporary Greek art and politics. In 2019, she participated in the CAA-Getty International Program.
Cristian Nae is an associate professor at the George Enescu National University of Arts in Iași, Romania, where he teaches courses on contemporary art history, critical theory, visual and exhibition studies. He has benefited from scholarships and research grants from the Erste Foundation (Vienna), National Research Council, Romania (CNCS-UEFISCDI) , the CAA-Getty International Program, the Getty Foundation (Los Angeles), and New Europe College (Bucharest). His latest studies have appeared in collective volumes published by Wiley-Blackwell (2019, forthcoming) and Routledge (2018). Nae is the co-editor of Rethinking the Image of the World: Projects and Sketches. Contemporary Romanian Art 2010-2020 (Hatje Cantz, 2019, forthcoming). As a curator, he is the co-organizer of the exhibition Rethinking the Image of the World: Projects and Sketches (Musée Mill, La Louvrière, Belgium, 2019), which was part of the Europalia Arts Festival. Nae also curated Unfinished Conversations on the Weight of Absence, the exhibition marking Romania’s participation in the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). Nae participated in the first year of the CAA-Getty International Program, in 2012.
Nóra Veszprémi is a research associate for the European Research Council-funded project Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918–1939 (CRAACE) at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic). She is also an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham (UK), where she recently completed a project on museums in Austria-Hungary between 1867 and 1918. In 2014–15 she taught at the Institute of Art History at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (Hungary), where she also received her PhD in 2013. Veszprémi specializes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Central European art. A former curator at the Hungarian National Gallery, she is the author of a monograph on romanticism and popular taste in mid-nineteenth century Hungary (in Hungarian) and co-author (with Matthew Rampley and Markian Prokopovych) of two forthcoming volumes on museums in Austria-Hungary: An Empire on Display: The Art Galleries and Museums of Austria-Hungary (Penn State University Press, 2020); and Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire: Museums of Design, Industry and the Applied Arts (Routledge, 2020). She is currently working on a monograph about historical memory in Central Europe after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Veszprémi was a 2015 participant in the CAA-Getty International Program.