Visual + Material Culture Research Seminar Series – Fall 2026
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 2026 series
September 17: “Structural Adjustments: Fabrications and Survival in a Postcolonial African City”
Tolulope Akinwole, Assistant Professor, Department of English language and literatures, UBC
October 1: “Cultivating a Fire Cosmology in Design Thinking”
Thena Jean-hee Tak, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, UBC
October 15: “Vancouver May Never Be: Steven Dragonn, Serial Migration, and the Aesthetics of Almost Belonging”
Su-Anne Yeo, Sessional Lecturer, Department of Asian Studies, UBC
October 29: “Klecksographies: Reading Cuts and Blots in Kafka’s Sketchbooks”
Ilinca Iuraşcu, Associate Professor, Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, UBC
November 12: “A Lagoon is a Collaborative Adventure: Helen and Newton Harrison’s The Lagoon Cycle”
Laurie White, PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, UBC
November 26: “Between Powers: Examining the Material Culture of Local Change in Southern Perú from Nasca and Wari cultural influences during the Middle Horizon (550 to 800 CE)”
Luis Manuel González, Adjunct Professor, Department of Anthropology, UBC | Research Associate, Archaeology Centre, University of Toronto
September 17: “Structural Adjustments: Fabrications and Survival in a Postcolonial African City”
Speakers: Tolulope Akinwole, Assistant Professor, Department of English language and literatures, UBC
Location: Room 213
Yellow buses are a cultural fixture of Lagos, Africa’s most populous city. As automobile and cultural objects, they yield interesting insights about survival in Africa’s largest city. This talk takes this notion of the Lagos public bus as cultural object as heuristic handle for unpacking modes of inhabiting Africa’s largest city. Taking off from AbdouMaliq Simone’s influential notion of people as infrastructure, this talk offers “fabrication” as a keyword for understanding survival modes in Africa. In this talk, Akinwole limns several photographs taken of automobile subjects in Lagos to pose questions about the promise of expansive readings of African cities and the limits of extant notions about African cities.
October 1: “Cultivating a Fire Cosmology in Design Thinking”
Speaker: Thena Jean-hee Tak, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, UBC
What does it mean to live, design, and build in a Pyrocene world? In the context of Canada and the United States, decades of colonial fire suppression have led to unprecedented conditions whereby lands that co-evolved with fire through Indigenous burning practices have been denied that relationship and medicine. Today, our relationship with fire continues to be largely informed by this culture of fire suppression, which has historically dictated that all fires are ‘bad’ as they endanger livelihoods and ‘pristine wilderness’ — an ontology rooted in fear and spun from prejudices of a guarded domestic. In service of and in hopes for a more loving environmental imaginary with fire, this talk considers how design, and design thinking, may engage both architecture and land stewardship practices to better prepare, and even welcome, our pyro futures. One that leans less on acts of wholesale resistance, and rather, turns toward a more reciprocal participation and invitation with fire itself.
October 15: “Vancouver May Never Be: Steven Dragonn, Serial Migration, and the Aesthetics of Almost Belonging”
Speaker: Su-Anne Yeo, Sessional Lecturer, Department of Asian Studies, UBC
This talk situates the recent exhibition, Steven Dragonn: Vancouver May Never Be Poetics Between Montparnasse and Mongkok in relation to the artist’s biography and to wider developments in contemporary art, in particular the development of photoconceptualism. Born in Guangzhou and educated there and in Paris, Dragonn immigrated to Vancouver and established Canton-Sardine (along with Yang Xiaoyan), a gallery based on artist-run principles, in 2018. In this talk, Yeo argues that Dragonn’s transborder, multidisciplinary practice demands further critical evaluation. By adopting and adapting the formal language of photoconceptualism, exemplified by artist Jeff Wall and others in the “Vancouver School,” Dragonn invites us to re-consider our relationship to subjects and communities which we might otherwise overlook, be these gig workers in the new economy, businesses in Chinatown facing gentrification, or migrants acclimating to life in the West.
October 29: “Klecksographies: Reading Cuts and Blots in Kafka’s Sketchbooks”
Speaker: Ilinca Iuraşcu,Associate Professor, Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, UBC
Heinz Politzer’s old quip about Kafka’s parables functioning as “Rorschach tests” may have found its ultimate expression in a recently edited volume by Andreas Kilcher, containing hundreds of previously unknown drawings and doodles by Kafka, spanning over two decades. Despite the critical attention surrounding the book, the materiality of the works themselves continues to raise questions. This talk will specifically focus on two aspects: the cuts in the sketchbooks, marking the absence of Kafka’s famous stick-figure drawings (published separately by Max Brod in 1938), and the ink blots and stains that accompany the doodles throughout. The presence of the cuts and Kleckse, Iuraşcu argues, can be best understood against the background of nineteenth-century collaborative creative practices that straddle the line between paperwork and paper play.
November 12: “A Lagoon is a Collaborative Adventure: Helen and Newton Harrison’s The Lagoon Cycle”
Speaker: Laurie White, PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, UBC
Helen and Newton Harrison were key figures in the development of the art and ecology movement in North America for over fifty years. In the mid 1970s, their work shifted significantly from experiments in food production and self-sufficiency towards speculative proposals envisioning radical possibilities for ecosystem restoration and management. Focusing on their monumental installation The Lagoon Cycle (1972-84), Laurie White argues that this transformation was influenced by the artists’ encounter with Sri Lankan eco-social systems. The resilience and indeterminacy of Sri Lanka’s lagoons, along with its ecologically sensitive pre-modern freshwater management system, challenged the Harrisons to move beyond their early work with closed, technological systems towards an investment in open, emergent ecologies. Laurie also explores how interpersonal dialogue became not merely an incidental aspect of the Harrisons’ collaborative practice but a core methodology and key metaphor for the ecological relationships they studied and supported.
November 26: “Between Powers: Examining the Material Culture of Local Change in Southern Perú from Nasca and Wari cultural influences during the Middle Horizon (550 to 800 CE)”
Speakers: Luis Manuel González, Adjunct Professor, Department of Anthropology, UBC | Research Associate, Archaeology Centre, University of Toronto
A confluence of changes occurred in the middle of the 1st millennium CE in Peru’s Nasca region. Expanding Wari state influence followed the collapse of the Nasca ceremonial center of Cahuachi (400 BC-450 AD) and resulted in large-scale changes. Recorded evidence indicates shifts in economic activities such as mining or trade, and in sociopolitical interactions as evidenced by Mina Primavera (extraction of hematite). This talk explores the way that Nasca material culture endures and transforms before, during and after external pressures from the Wari state. Drawing from more than two decades of archaeological research in the Andes, scale, resilience and interconnection between local Nasca sites are examined to trace long-term histories at the foundation of community collaborations over generations. This presentation criticizes the assumption of top-down control by foreign powers, highlighting, instead, the agency of local communities in responding to internal and external pressures.