Visual + Material Culture Research Seminar Series – Fall 2023
This interdisciplinary seminar series is for anyone with interests in visual and material culture across different departments at UBC and beyond. The seminar provides an opportunity to share research and exchange ideas, usually followed by conversations over a drink at Koerner’s Pub. Open to students, staff, faculty and community members in and around UBC.
The seminars will be held in-person at MOA.
Participation is free and no registration is required.
Where: MOA’s Community Lounge (Near the administration reception and opposite the MOA Library and Archives).
Note: The Museum will be closed to the public due to seismic upgrades, but the administration area remains open. Please enter through the administration entrance, which is past the courtyard on your right, facing the Museum’s main entrance.
When: Select Thursdays, 4 – 5 pm
Conveners: Dr. Fuyubi Nakamura, MOA Curator, Asia and UBC Asian Studies, Dr. Nuno Porto, MOA Curator, Africa + South America and UBC Art History, Visual Art & Theory and Dr. Yasmin Amaratunga, Curator of Collections, UBC Art History, Visual Art & Theory.
Fall 2023 series
September 14: “Next Episode: The Story of Video Streaming Viewership in India.“
Sai Diwan, Independent scholar/recent PhD graduate, Department of Asian Studies, UBC
September 28: “Anishinaabe Materialities and Resurgent Epistemologies in Waaaswaaganing.“
Tim Frandy, Assistant Professor, Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, UBC
October 12: “A Finer and More Certain Mirror: Painting the Body in the Nineteenth Century.“
Nikki Georgopulos, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC.
November 9: “Graphic Historiography: Comics and/on Historical Writing.” Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, UBC
November 23: “Re-Materializing the Printed Image: The Case of Early Modern Copper.” Tim McCall, PhD Student, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
September 14: “Next Episode: The Story of Video Streaming Viewership in India.”
Speaker: Sai Diwan, Independent scholar/recent PhD graduate, Department of Asian Studies, UBC
In 2020, India had the highest amount of video streaming consumption in the world. So, what does this popular video streaming or over-the-top (OTT) viewership in India entail? Through a study of YouTube comments written by viewers on YouTube videos uploaded by three OTT platforms, Hotstar, Netflix and Zee5, Diwan examines what viewers watch, why and when they watch it and how they choose their methods and tools of. She sketches how viewers build and maintain viewership practices based on their preferences, resources, identities, language choices etc. Diwan then uses this analysis of OTT viewership in India conducted through a study of YouTube comments to argue that interactivity or sharing ideas about OTT media is a key aspect of OTT viewership. As viewers reach across their personal screens and interact with each other, we listen. In doing so, we renew our understanding of what viewership means.
September 28: “Anishinaabe Materialities and Resurgent Epistemologies in Waaaswaaganing.”
Speaker: Tim Frandy, Assistant Professor, Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, UBC
This presentation delves into the deep intersection of traditional arts, cultural worldview, and decolonization within the Anishinaabe community of Waaswaaganing (Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin). Currently in the midst of a cultural renaissance, the community has used traditional arts not merely as a tool to transmit cultural heritage, but also as a powerful vehicle to drive the revival of epistemological and ontological systems through embodied practice and strategic recontextualization. This talk explores the best practices of this work in Waaswaaganing, and it unveils the transformative potential of traditional arts in education. This intricate relationship between creative materialities and resurgent epistemologies reveals the potency of the traditional arts as catalysts for decolonization and cultural renewal.
October 12: “A Finer and More Certain Mirror: Painting the Body in the Nineteenth Century.”
Speaker: Nikki Georgopulos, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
While seemingly ubiquitous throughout the history of art, the mirror took on a new potency in European painting in the mid-nineteenth century. The advent of the Industrial Revolution and the boom of consumer capitalism meant that mirrors were more readily available than ever before, at larger scales and with greater clarity. Artists responded in kind, exploring the mirror as both a visual and symbolic device across media, mobilizing it to probe the limits of representation. Concomitant with these developments was an upheaval in collective thinking about the nature of bodies: questions of mind-body dualism, the culture of dress, and the corporeal legibility of race, gender, and class were but some of the ways in which the body became central to scientific, psychological, and social paradigms of thought. This talk considers the profusion of mirrors and mirror imagery in nineteenth-century European painting within the context of this modern corporeal culture.
November 9: “Graphic Historiography: Comics and/on Historical Writing.”
Speaker: Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, UBC
Since Art Spiegelman’s Maus, comics and the representation of German history have been irrevocably linked. But while global comics have continued to engage with histories of the Holocaust and WWII, German-language comics have focused on a different era of German history: the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Among these fiction and nonfiction comics on East German history, there is a subgroup of graphic novels that explicitly seeks to engage with more traditional forms of narrating history, such as documentary photography, archival collections, and museum exhibition. These graphic historiographies not only adopt some of the strategies of these institutional forms of memory culture, but they also comment on the way in which history and memory is shaped through them. This presentation looks at three comics on East German history as case studies to demonstrate how graphic historiography reveals the essential processes of the writing of history while intervening in debates about historical truth and authenticity.
November 23: “Re-Materializing the Printed Image: The Case of Early Modern Copper.”
Speaker: Tim McCall, PhD Student, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
Contemporary discourses on media can be traced back to issues that arose from early modern prints. Intaglio printmaking played a determinant role in historical episodes that have come to characterize modern visual culture such as the decoupling of image and material, the formation of intellectual property law, and the mechanical reproduction of art. Each one of these discourses takes the multiplied image on paper as its point of departure or dematerializes the image altogether. But how do our historical perspectives shift when the printed page’s other side, the copper matrix, is scrutinized? A complex array of historical actors – medieval craftspeople that imbued copper with abstract “virtues”, Europe’s most powerful banking family that monopolized Hungarian copper mining at risk of Ottoman invasion, the self-trained hand of the engraver that worked among proto-industrial machinery – converged on the early modern copper plate even before paper received its image.