Dear friends,

As one of the co-chairs of the organizing committee, I've worked for the 36th Annual UBC Art History Graduate Symposium, which will be held on March 8th & 9th at the Lillooet Room (#301), Irving K. Barber Learning Center, UBC, Vancouver. This year's theme "Eyes on Protest: Contestation and Visuality" reflects on the on-going turbulence of protests, demonstrations and upheavals around the globe, which have become more visible than ever over the last two years. We have invited Joshua Clover, a poet and professor in the English Department at UC Davis, as this year's keynote speaker and he will present a talk titled "A Story of Two Squares, or, Post-Industrial Communism.” Jaleh Mansoor, an art historian and assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory (AHVA) at UBC, will moderate his talk and the following discussion. Around this exciting talk, nine graduate student presenters from various institutions across North America will deliver their papers on different issues related to contestation, such as visuality, art, history, aesthetics, sexuality, collective action, and pedagogy. Please find the program and posters below and in the attachment. 

We hope you can join us for engaging intellectual conversation!

Please feel free to disseminate this announcement widely to students and colleagues.

Sincerely,

Anton Lee (co-chair)

On behalf of the 36th Annual UBC Art History Graduate Symposium Committee

Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

______________________________________________________________

36th Annual UBC Art History Graduate Symposium

Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory

University of British Columbia

 

EYES on PROTEST:

Contestation and Visuality

 

Keynote Speaker: Joshua Clover (UC Davis)

 

Date: March 8th and March 9th, 2013

Location: Lillooet Room (#301), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

                University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

 

In the past two years there has been a substantial rise in the visibility of protest movements, often specifically local in their demands yet global in their implications and consequences. From the ongoing social uprisings addressing democracy in the Middle East, to the concerns with direct democracy in the Québec student strike, to growing protests against austerity measures in Europe, and the Idle No More movement here in Canada, the subjects of protest are numerable and varied. In scale, location and ideology, struggle is driven by individual desires as much as by multitudinous subjects and might respond to issues of politics, economy, arts, ethics, gender, education, social justice, and other institutions of human life. The unpredictable continuity of the Occupy movement across diverse locations, temporalities and topics speaks to the mutable aspect of contestation and the potential of subversive agitation.

 

This year, the 36th Annual UBC Art History Graduate Symposium takes up this critical juncture by considering historical and contemporaneous modes of claiming dissensus, of acting and thinking against structures of power, and of transgressing the limitations already inscribed in our surroundings. The symposium consists of nine presentations by promising graduate students from across North America and a keynote presentation by Joshua Clover, poet, critic and professor of English literature and critical theory at the University of California Davis. He will address the current relation of communism to anarchism in contemporary spaces of struggle in a presentation entitled “A Story of Two Squares, or, Post-Industrial Communism.”

 

In conjunction with the academic symposium, the concurrent exhibition Resonating Existent(s) brings together eight, Canada-based artists who address contestation by questioning the material and immaterial instruments of protest. The closing reception of the exhibition is scheduled for March 8th, 4:00–6:00pm, at the AHVA Gallery (Rm 112) in the Koerner Library, and will include a performance by the Git Hayetsk Dancers.

 

You are warmly invited to our two-day long journey of intellectual dialogue and critical reflection on the issues involved in the tensions between aesthetics and politics, education in universities and activism on street. Please make our event more engaging with your presence!

 

Schedule

Friday, March 8th

10:00am: Opening Remarks

10:30am: Morning session

Maeve Hanna (MA, Université du Quebec à Montréal)

Water Rights: Rúrí and the Protest of Iceland's Waterfalls 

Katherine Jackson (PhD, University of British Columbia)

The Politics of Process: Process and Production in Jeremy Deller's ‘The Battle of

Orgreave’

12:00pm: Lunch

1:00pm: Afternoon session

Haythem Guesmi (PhD, Université de Montréal)

New Media and Aesthetics of Dissensual Politics

Michael Rattray (PhD, Concordia University)

Burning Bridges: A Brief Sojourn into Anarchist Pedagogy and the Québec

Student Direct Action

2:45pm: Keynote Speech by Joshua Clover (University of California, Davis)

             A Story of Two Squares, or, Post-Industrial Communism

             Moderator: Jaleh Mansoor (University of British Columbia)

4:30pm: Closing Reception for Resonating Existent(s) exhibition

              AHVA Gallery (#112), Koerner Library, UBC

              with a performance by the Git Hayetsk Dancers

 

Saturday, March 9th 

10:30am: Morning Session

Yi Yi Mon (Rosaline) Kyo, (PhD, University of California, Berkeley)

One, Two or None at All?  Doubles and Mirrors in the Photographic Portraits of Empress Dowager Cixi

Kailani Polzak (PhD, University of California, Berkeley)

Spain, France, Moor and Mameluke: Visual and Ideological Confusion in Goya's

Second of May 1808

12:00pm: Lunch

1:00pm: Afternoon Session

Joe Madura (PhD, Emory University)

Parallel Practices: Individual and Collective Dissent in the AIDS Crisis

Paisid Aramphongphan (PhD, Harvard University)

Baroque Contamination: Jack Smith, circa 1960

Gabriel Mindel Saloman (MFA, Simon Fraser University)

On Hiatus: The Imminent Impossibility of the Art Strike

3:30pm: Closing Remarks

Contact:

Anton Lee and Jayne Wilkinson

36th Annual UBC Art History Graduate Symposium Committee 

ahva.gradsymp@gmail.com

 

For the full schedule and further information: www.ahva.ubc.ca

 

EYES on PROTEST: https://www.facebook.com/events/427623250649559/

RESONATING EXISTENT(s): https://www.facebook.com/events/217299238408892/

 

The 36th Annual UBC Art History Graduate Symposium Committee proudly thanks our donors for their generous contributions: Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies, Canadian Studies Program (UBC), Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory (UBC), Department of History (UBC), Faculty of Arts HSS Grant (UBC), Faculty of Graduate Studies Dean’s Office (UBC), First Nations Studies Program (UBC), Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Museum of Anthropology (UBC), Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic (UBC).

Posters.pdf

Eyes on Protest:
Contestation and Visuality

March 8th and 9th, 2013
Vancouver, Canada

36th Annual University of British Columbia,
Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory Graduate Symposium


“Art is infinite contestation.” – Maurice Blanchot
“I contest in the name of contestation.” – Georges Bataille

In the past two years there has been a substantial rise in the visibility of protest movements, often specifically local in their demands yet global in their implications and consequences. From the ongoing social uprisings addressing democracy at the state level in the Middle East to the concerns with direct democracy in the Quebec student strike, to growing protests against austerity measures in Europe, the subjects of protest are numerable and varied. In scale, location and ideology, struggle is driven by individual desires as much as by multitudinous subjects and might respond to issues of politics, economy, arts, ethics, gender, education, social justice, and other institutions of human life. The unpredictable continuity of the Occupy movement across diverse locations, temporalities and topics speaks to this mutable aspect of contestation and the potential of subversive agitation. The 36th Annual Art History, Visual Art and Theory Graduate Symposium will take up this critical dialogue of our contemporary moment by considering historical and contemporaneous modes of claiming dissensus, of acting and thinking against structures of power, and of transgressing the limitations already inscribed in our surroundings.

Historically, forms of contestation have been the impetus for artistic practices whose urgency and relevance is motivated by political concern, even if the visibility of contestation is caught in the tension between two different yet equally active impulses: the promotion and the curtailment of visual representations. In 1961 Maurice Blanchot, the philosopher of “the power of contestation,” noted the inextricable relation between art and contestation: “Art is infinite contestation, contestation of itself and contestation of other forms of power – not simple anarchy, but the free search of the original power that art and literature represent (power without power).” Now in the 21st century, amidst the growth of protests, demonstrations, revolts, and widespread political upheavals, we seek to interrogate this infinite contestation of art. How does “power without power,” or the “contestation with no bottom,” find manifestation in visual forms and where are the intersections with the subjects of political struggles?

Understood a different way we might also ask: is there a visual literacy of protest? How might such a visuality emerge around contested events, whether historical or contemporary, and how have aesthetics and politics been theorized together around the historical and contemporary contestations? In the intersection between art practices, activism, and the scholarship on both, how might subjectivity and cultural politics play a substantial role? We seek papers that explore and question the tensions around visuality and contestation; the intersections between the urge to form an aesthetics of contestation in contemporary art discourse and a politics of the street that uses limited visibility as an active strategy of protection are rich for debate.

Presentations may respond to a number of topics or themes, for example:

• the role of documentation, iconic images, and image dissemination in situations of resistance or protest
• contesting archives, collective memory, radical histories
• contestation and affect
• academic and artistic labor, cultural work and resistance within the art world
• the antagonistic and/or symbiotic relationship between activism and academia
• digital networks, virtual organizing, transnational circulation of contested images and information
• issues of democracy and free market economy in the art world
• body and gender politics around individual or collective image makings
• visuality of contestations in the post-colonial context
• the visual language of protest and protest ephemera (posters, texts, drawings etc.)
• media representation and/or repression of protest events
• investigations, critiques, or contestations of the relationship between aesthetics and politics
• social, ethical, political aspects of photographic images and practices
• technological development and its influence on the strategies of political art practices
• urban spaces, cartography, architecture, gentrification and protest art practices
• iconoclasm and iconophilia in contested situations

The 36th Annual AHVAT Graduate Symposium organizing committee invites proposals for twenty-minute-long papers that address these and issues related to the intersection of aesthetic practices, politics, and contestation from across the humanities, social sciences and interdisciplinary studies. Current and recently graduated M.A., M.F.A., Doctoral and Post-doctoral scholars are encouraged to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words by January 4, 2013. To submit please send your abstract and a one page C.V. to ahva.gradsymp@gmail.com.

The 36th Annual AHVAT Graduate Symposium includes a two-day symposium on March 8 and 9, 2013 and a concurrent exhibition, dates to be confirmed. For more information please visit www.ahva.ubc.ca.