Visual + Material Culture Research Seminar Series – Winter/Spring 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: 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.
Winter/Spring 2025 series
January 16: “Tales from the Under-nation: Luk’Luk’I and/as Canadian National Cinema“. Willam Brown, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre and Film, UBC with a response from director Wayne Wapeemukwa
January 30: “The Atmospheres of Romance“. Camille Georgeson-Usher, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
February 13: “Nettle, “the fibre of the landless” and the future?” Germaine Koh, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
February 27: “The Predicament of (Korean) Diasporic Cinema: An Exploration of Past Lives (2023)“. Ji-yoon An, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Studies, UBC
March 13: “Archiving Memories: Intergenerational Conversations in the Peripheral Landscape of 1965 Anti-Communist Massacres in Indonesia“. Nila Utami, PhD student, Department of History, UBC
March 27: “Measina in Motion: Decolonizing Perspectives on German-Pacific Colonial Collections“. Mitiana Arbon, Curator, Pacific, Museum of Anthropology at UBC
January 16: “Tales from the Under-nation: Luk’Luk’I and/as Canadian National Cinema”
Speaker: Willam Brown, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre and Film, UBC with a response from director Wayne Wapeemukwa
Luk’Luk’I (Wayne Wapeemukwa, Canada, 2017) tells the intersecting stories of several characters living in Vancouver’s East Side during the 2010 Winter Olympics, especially in the build-up to and aftermath of the men’s ice hockey final between Canada and the USA. In staging a film that looks at Indigenous, disabled, queer and other marginal peoples against the backdrop of the Winter Olympics, especially its moment of chief national pride, Wapeemukwa (Michif) offers up a searing critique of Vancouver, Canada, and the concept of the nation more generally. Indeed, the Games’s vision of able-bodied and sporting masculinity as representative of Canada stands in stark contrast to the barely mobile and traumatised bodies that inhabit Wapeemukwa’s film. With its emphasis on transport/mobility, access (or lack thereof) to both actual and virtual spaces, and the commodification of the body, Luk’Luk’I presents a critique of Canadian nationality that stands in stark contrast to the Games as a would-be progressive flagship of Canada in the aftermath of Truth and Reconciliation.
January 30: “The Atmospheres of Romance”
Speaker: Camille Georgeson-Usher, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
Looking to visual, audible, and sensory responses to the ocean, this talk outlines the beginning of a current research question that stems from a romance story that takes place at the edges of the Pacific Ocean. The question being: how might the Pacific Ocean, and other bodies of water, influence how we understand joy, love, and pleasure? The romance story acts as a prompt to further question how specific nations from around the Pacific practice romance and prioritize Indigenous pleasure. This talk outlines early inquiries for a curatorial research project that is currently in development, focusing on romance, pleasure, and joy through the lens of contemporary art.
February 13: “Nettle, “the fibre of the landless” and the future?”
Speaker: Germaine Koh, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
Featured in fairy tales and used since the Bronze Age, but supplanted by industrial textiles, Stinging Nettle fibre has returned from folklore to signal a slow textile future. Growing abundantly in disturbed and nitrogen-rich soil and available for gleaning, nettle has been dubbed “the fibre of the landless,” and stands as a symbol of resilience. As a nutritional source of both food and fibre, used by Indigenous and colonial cultures here and around the world, nettle is one low-impact type of material to which we could look as we consider the complex problems of textile waste and fast fashion. This presentation ruminates on nettle, flax, hemp and other bast fibre plants as materials which hold promise for rebuilding integrated food-and-fibre systems.
February 27: “The Predicament of (Korean) Diasporic Cinema: An Exploration of Past Lives (2023)”
Speaker: Ji-yoon An, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Studies, UBC
When Celine Song’s semi-autobiographical directorial debut Past
Lives premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, critical acclaim
poured in from major film critics and auteurs alike. Yet, as it enjoyed
worldwide theatrical release, the response on social media among viewers starkly contrasted the rave reviews, particularly among the Asian American community who were angered by the film’s lines like “Korea is too small a country for your ambition” that conformed to the trite immigrant narrative of white hegemony. The conflicting reactions to—and traits found within—Past Lives provide fertile grounds for examining the predicament of diasporic cinema today. Scholars have argued the category of Asian American cinema to be obsolete in the current “post-racial era,” where films may be “desired” (as means of reaching/representing a demographic group) but are simultaneously “disavowed” (devoid of actual racial difference to not accentuate the continuing histories of discrimination). However, this seminar argues these very characteristics to,
in fact, represent a shift in diasporic identities within postcolonial modern lives.
March 13: “Archiving Memories: Intergenerational Conversations in the Peripheral Landscape of 1965 Anti-Communist Massacres in Indonesia”
Speaker: Nila Utami, PhD student, Department of History, UBC
How do people remember violence? How does memory of violence make itself present and what form does it take in the everyday? By focusing on the memories of those who are neither victims nor perpetrators, this talk explores the hidden transcripts of memories and witnessing of the widespread killings and systematic violence directed against Communist and/or Communist sympathizers in 1965-66 in Indonesia. It questions the workings of the ecology of fear around 1965 and considers when and what it means to re-member unpleasant memories through intergenerational conversations and the craft of storytelling as transformative memory practices. Few have explored the people woven into this history and the way targeted violence against Communist sympathizers may have been engraved on their memory. This work, performed as a series of virtual conversations with the help of geobrowser with my parents, examines how memories of 1965 violence are mapped and embodied in the everyday. This digitally mediated intimacy enables difficult storytelling, explores the potentially transformative power of intergenerational conversations, and opens ways to be together in difficult conversations and memories.
March 27: “Measina in Motion: Decolonizing Perspectives on German-Pacific Colonial Collections”
Speaker: Mitiana Arbon, Curator, Pacific, Museum of Anthropology at UBC
TBA