Visual + Material Culture Research Seminar Series – Fall 2025
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: The Community Lounge or Room 213 at MOA (Near the administration reception and 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 2025 series
September 11: “Curatorial Co-Imagination and Interculturality: Learnings from Chile for a Dialogue”. Felipe Armstrong, archaeologist and curator and Claudio Alvarado Lincopi, Mapuche historian and curator at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino (Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art).
September 25: “Kurota: Experiments in Curatorial Dreaming and Making”. Lennon Mhishi, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, UBC
October 9: “Taking Care of Memory and Imagination”. David Ng and Alejandra Gaviria-Serna, PhD Candidates, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC
October 23: “Out of Time, Out of Space, Out of Place: The Many Visual Incarnations of Qissa Sohni Mahiwal”. Kiran K. Sunar, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Studies, UBC. Please note: this seminar will take place in Room 213.
November 6: “Othering in the News: Recognizing and Resisting Marginalizing Frames”. Saranaz Barforoush, Assistant Professor of Teaching, School of Journalism, Writing and Media, UBC
November 27: “Place, Indigenous Protest, and Architectures of Resistance in Contemporary Mexico”. Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, UBC
September 11: “Curatorial Co-Imagination and Interculturality: Learnings from Chile for a Dialogue”
Speakers: Felipe Armstrong, archaeologist and curator and Claudio Alvarado Lincopi, Mapuche historian and curator at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino (Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art).”
This presentation shares reflections and learnings from the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino on building intercultural curatorial practices—understood as processes of mutual affect between people, memories, and knowledge systems. Armstrong and Lincopi understand curatorial co-imagination as a situated practice that begins with acknowledging historical and structural asymmetries and seeks to transform them by forming relationships capable of unsettling and expanding the meanings of a common and plural humanity. At this museum, several projects have worked toward this direction. The speakers will be collectively revisiting critical questions: How do we recognize and repair historical fractures? How do we open spaces for dialogue between academic disciplines and Indigenous knowledge systems? And how can the vitality of Indigenous languages be embraced as a source of reflection and innovation across the arts, humanities, social sciences—even the natural sciences?
Presented with the support of the Consulate of Chile in Vancouver
September 25: “Kurota: Experiments in Curatorial Dreaming and Making”
Speaker: Lennon Mhishi, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, UBC
In this discussion, Mhishi explores the idea of Kurota, the word for dreaming amongst those identified as the Shona of Zimbabwe. Kurota, as Indigenous cosmology, chivanhu, also relates to the traditions of divination, prophecy and casting possible futures. In the context of the project “Reconnecting Objects” and collaborative work with artist Fungai Marima, Kurota becomes a way of reimagining material and belongings in museums as well as bringing to the fore practices of making and remaking life. Kurota also contends with what it means to work at/to the limits of institutional legibility, and what the boundaries and borders make possible and constrain – what Mhishi has called infrastructures of containment. What other dreams are possible, for museums and cultural institutions alike, as well as for how we inhabit and relate in and to, these spaces.
October 9: “Taking Care of Memory and Imagination”
Speaker: David Ng and Alejandra Gaviria-Serna, PhD Candidates, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC
In this presentation, we think through questions and considerations raised when developing a decolonial curatorial approach for a traveling exhibition on memory of political and structural violence. The proposal for a traveling exhibit emerged from a series of exchanges and collaborations that the Transformative Memory International Network (TMIN) has had in Canada, Colombia, Indonesia, Ireland and Uganda. These gatherings invited artists, activists and scholars to share and learn about memory work in different spaces, which resulted in multi-disciplinary artworks, including songs, videos, posters, installations, performances, and tapestries. We will explore the questions we considered around how to curate this exhibit. Through which ethical lenses, can we organize, include and exclude art/memory pieces? What considerations must we critically and creatively address to collaboratively curate artworks from different global latitudes? How can we make use of the form of an art exhibition – which has a history of maintaining and reproducing colonial violence – to do transformative memory work?
October 23: “Out of Time, Out of Space, Out of Place: The Many Visual Incarnations of Qissa Sohni Mahiwal”
Speaker: Kiran K. Sunar, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Studies, UBC.
Location: this seminar will take place in Room 213.
This seminar offers a foray into the proliferating visual and material lives of the South Asian Sohni Mahiwal narrative, a tragic riverine love story which has been retold and reimagined by Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu artists and tellers across its capacious early modern, colonial, and contemporary devotional forms from Punjab to Sindh to Rajasthan as well as diasporic contexts. Through a traipse across the Sohni Mahiwal tale’s many visual and material incarnations, Sunar maps out adaptation, circulation, and adornment as a messy set of constellations to consider how the visual corpus flows outside space, place, and time. Finally, the speaker looks to how the tale’s many lives push for a reconsideration of gender, sexuality, and the foreigner, alongside the self’s relation to these categories.
November 6: “Othering in the News: Recognizing and Resisting Marginalizing Frames”
Speaker: Saranaz Barforoush, Assistant Professor of Teaching, School of Journalism, Writing and Media, UBC
This seminar examines the concept of “othering”—the process through which certain groups are marked as fundamentally different or outside the mainstream. In news coverage, this manifests through choices in language, imagery, and story placement, positioning vulnerable communities as outsiders or problems to be solved. These editorial decisions, whether conscious or not, reinforce existing stereotypes. We then explore how such patterns appear in everyday reporting. Drawing on visual culture and media practice, we present practical ways to recognize and question how media frames shape our understanding, especially when they marginalize vulnerable groups. Alexandra Bell’s Counternarratives serves as a case study, illustrating how reworking news layouts and language can expose and challenge these biases. Participants will explore how these critical approaches inform both the reading and crafting of news, cultivating a more nuanced and inclusive media landscape.
November 27: “Place, Indigenous Protest, and Architectures of Resistance in Contemporary Mexico”
Speaker: Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, UBC
This research, situated in present-day Mexico, pursues a spatial reading of the practices of resistance through which Indigenous collectives protect the land, its natural systems, and the life they sustain against the extractivism of the tripartite apparatus of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Central to Gutiérrez-Monro’s research are the networks of Indigenous resistance created by the Congreso Nacional Indígena (CNI), a grassroots organization bringing together peoples across the country in the fight against corporate extractivism. Driven by the Zapatista project of Indigenous self-determination as rooted in both place and resistance, diverse peoples weave their struggles and peacefully claim spaces to manifest a cosmovision that reframes the relationship between humans and the land. In order to move hegemonic human forms of dwelling from the extractive to the nurturing, these Indigenous collectives not only combat dispossession, but also protect natural systems that colonial paradigms have misconstrued as ‘resources.’