Visual + Material Culture Research Seminar Series – Fall 2024
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).
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 2024 series
September 12: “Preserving Particulates: Settler Anxieties, Stabilizing Soil, and the Crisis of Erosion on the Alaska Highway.” Desirée Valadares, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, UBC
September 26: “In Praise of the Grotesque: Bitumen, Soil, Tools, and Animal Traces.” Marina Roy, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
October 10: “Teaching more-than-human seeing: implicated views and photographic place-making.” Jillian Lerner, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
October 24: “Separation’s Geography: Suturing Connections Across the India-Pakistan Border.” Fahad Naveed, PhD Student, Department of Asian Studies, UBC
November 7: “Learning from Hebron: Resistance Through Built Heritage Rehabilitation.” Rana Abughannam, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture , UBC
November 21: “Migrant Girls, Sound, and Remaking Space.” Rosanne Sia, Assistant Professor, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC.
Dust. Photo by Stephen Rosenshein.
September 12: “Preserving Particulates: Settler Anxieties, Stabilizing Soil, and the Crisis of Erosion on the Alaska Highway.”
Speaker: Desirée Valadares, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, UBC
Why did someone seal and sell dust from the Yukon in the 1970s? How did this end up over 3,000 miles away in San Diego, California, on an e-commerce platform? In this talk, Valadares performs a close reading of this satirical souvenir – a can of Alaska Highway dust that monetizes and miniaturizes the regional airspaces for the Alaska Highway, a 1,387 mile (2, 232 km) bi-national route and former military road that traverses northern British Columbia, Yukon, and Alaska. By centering elemental geographies – rust, dust, and air – along the route, she speculates on broader technologies of containment, (dis)repair, and particle pollutants. The speaker shows how post war anxieties of land loss and erosion manifest in northwestern Canada, despite infrastructure’s promise of stability and permanence.
September 26: “In Praise of the Grotesque: Bitumen, Soil, Tools, and Animal Traces.”
Speaker: Marina Roy, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
Marina Roy will present on her most recent artwork and research, which has gravitated toward tools, wood, bitumen, soil, and animal traces/behaviour. The register of her art making is GROTESQUE, a contemporary translation of an historical style. Roy’s talk will focus on a recent animation, bricolage experiments using recycled wood (2024), a sculpture installation Flog and Pelt (2023), the painting installation Dirty Clouds (much in you is still worm) (2017/2018), and the outdoor mural/installation, Your Kingdom to Command (2016).
October 10: “Teaching more-than-human seeing: implicated views and photographic place-making.”
Speaker: Jillian Lerner, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
Precisely because of its more-than-human agency and complicity in the harms of coloniality and unsustainability, photography is a good medium for thinking and teaching with. Lerner explores intersections between visual pedagogy and reparative history, in case studies of negatives and prints made by French photographers in the 1840s and 50s. She considers urban views and images of dwelling(s) as non-innocent object-lessons about the capitalist reorganization of shared worlds, entangled naturecultures, place-making, social erasure, and human decentering.
Image: Henri Le Secq, [Small dwelling in mushroom cave], 1851. Salted paper print from a paper negative, 35.1 × 22.7 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Public domain image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
October 24: “Separation’s Geography: Suturing Connections Across the India-Pakistan Border.”
Speaker: Fahad Naveed, PhD Student, Department of Asian Studies, UBC
Separation’s Geography is an ongoing anti-war project featuring collaborative works by Pakistani and Indian artists attempting to suture connections fractured by a border. First drawn in 1947 by the British exiting India, the border separating present-day Pakistan and India remains one of the most militarized in the world. Through an online exhibition and an artist book in print, the contributors reflect on how the border is made, remade, and maintained; how people, objects, connections, and ideas crossover; and, finally, how histories are divided, told, and retold. In this seminar, Fahad Naveed, a curator and participating artist in Separation’s Geography, discusses the collective’s defiantly loving attempt to challenge the loud warmongering on both sides of the divide, and how the cross-border project builds on the rich tradition of Pakistani and Indian artists creating space for dialogue.
November 7: “Learning from Hebron: Resistance Through Built Heritage Rehabilitation.”
Speaker: Rana Abughannam, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture, UBC
The old city of Hebron in Palestine, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Danger, is home to a plural architectural legacy with religious significance for all the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Israeli military presence and the establishment of settlements in the old city have fragmented the urban fabric through checkpoints, watchtowers, and restricted areas. These measures have not only altered the physical landscape but have also disrupted the social and economic life of the Palestinian community, destroying the sense of urbanity within the city. In 1996, the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC) was created to revitalize and repopulate the old city. Looking specifically at the work of the HRC, this presentation discusses built heritage rehabilitation as resistance tactics and strategies of restoration, reclamation, and emancipatory architectural practice.
November 21: “Migrant Girls, Sound, and Remaking Space.”
Speaker: Rosanne Sia, Assistant Professor, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC
How have migrant girls used sound to transform the everyday spaces they inhabit? This talk considers how migrant girls have materialized sonic imaginaries in their daily environments, altering the social relations that sought to constrain them. Drawing on oral histories, it explores the rich contributions of Mexican American girls to the sonic cultures of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the 1930s to 1960s. Mexican American girls developed creative ways to bring song into their daily environments. They repurposed spaces ranging from the domestic home, the street, the bus station, the pecan sheller workroom, and the church for the joy and pleasure of song. By developing a sonic borderlands imaginary through genres as varied as flamenco, bolero, and tango, they asserted their presence as Mexican American girls in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. They powerfully remade the spaces they navigated in their daily lives, opening up new possibilities for self-making and community formation.