Visual + Material Culture Research Seminar Series – Winter/Spring 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.
Winter/Spring 2026 series
January 15: “Community-engaged exhibit making and restorative justice in museums“
Yasmin Amaratunga, Curator of Collections, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC and Sherri Shinobu Kajiwara, Director|Curator, Nikkei National Museum
January 29: “A Hair’s Breadth: Repatriation and Ceremony“
Aaron LaMaskin, PhD student, Department of Anthropology, UBC
February 12: “Lapidary Media“
Laura U. Marks, Professor, School of Contemporary Arts, SFU
February 26: “Italy’s Chinese Migrant Fast Fashion in the Visual Arts“
Gaoheng Zhang, Associate Professor of Italian, French, Hispanic and Italian Studies, UBC
March 26: “A shimmering black rectangle“
Sadia Shirazi, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC (Please note: this session will take place in Room 213)
April 2: “Return of the House of Laay’ Pole“
Sue Rowley, Director, Museum of Anthropology and Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, UBC and Heidi Swierenga, Senior Conservator, Museum of Anthropology, UBC
January 15: “Community-engaged exhibit making and restorative justice in museums”
Speakers: Yasmin Amaratunga, Curator of Collections, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC and Sherri Shinobu Kajiwara, Director|Curator, Nikkei National Museum
Broken Promises is the first travelling museum exhibition to critically investigate the dispossession of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s. It illuminates the loss of home and the struggle for justice of one racially marginalized community. Developed in close collaboration with community partners, the exhibition foregrounds first-person narratives, emphasizing the heterogeneity of lived experiences and the systemic injustices imposed by the state. Reflecting on the exhibition currently on display at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg (until October 2026), this talk will examine how community-engaged exhibition making and curatorial practice can operate as a modality of restorative justice.
January 29: “A Hair’s Breadth: Repatriation and Ceremony”
Speaker: Aaron LaMaskin, PhD student, Department of Anthropology, UBC
Please note: this seminar will take place in Room 213.
Repatriation claims made to museums by Indigenous communities do not always align with their own understandings of heritage. Many claims made under NAGPRA seek to reunite communities with ceremonial heritage, while items collected to represent “everyday use” remain ineligible for return. The Tsilhqot’in qatŝ’ay (spruce root baskets) bridge the gap between “everyday use” items and ceremony. In breaking down this dichotomy, this chapter highlights new challenges, which require the Tsilhqot’in to evidence the intentionality behind their ancestors’ weaving of qatŝ’ay. The friction between NAGPRA categories and community understandings of heritage highlights the processes of evidence making required of Indigenous communities in producing repatriation claims. Through asserting their own traditional knowledge and practices as evidence, the Tsilhqot’in strengthen their claims to items held in museum collections, demonstrating how ceremony, material practice, and identity remain deeply interconnected.
February 12: “Lapidary Media”
Speaker: Laura U. Marks, Professor, School of Contemporary Arts, SFU
From deep within our Earth, minerals call out to the cosmos. In classical Indian lapidaries, or books of the astral properties of stones, each of the 360 degrees of the heavens corresponds to one earthly mineral. This science influenced the Islamic and early-modern lapidaries that Marks finds enchanting for their certainty that a practitioner could carry out healing and magic by gathering these stones when their star was in the ascendent. Minerals are integral to contemporary media, including the copper and rare-earth minerals in our devices and the fossil fuels that provide electricity. Marks develops a less extractive, more enchanted theory of how minerals work in contemporary media, in line with recent movements in elemental media and media cosmology or what Samer Akkach terms a “new postmodern geocentrism.” Marks will discuss films and artworks that embrace the correspondences between minerals and the cosmos, including Last Things by Deborah Stratman, Fern Silva’s Rock Bottom Riser, and Thiago Hersan’s Untitled Astrolabe Project.
February 26: “Italy’s Chinese Migrant Fast Fashion in the Visual Arts “
Speaker: Gaoheng Zhang, Associate Professor of Italian, French, Hispanic and Italian Studies, UBC
Prato is a Tuscan town known for its centuries-old tradition in textile production. It has been providing Italian ready-to-wear with higher-quality fabrics since the end of the WWII. Since the 1990s, the famously successful industrial district has also become a media focus and a political rallying point. The concentration of Chinese-migrant owned fast fashion garment workshops in Prato—believed to be Europe’s largest—was said to have caused a local socio-economic unrest. Thought-provoking cultural solutions have been widely proposed to address Prato’s socio-political drama. This talk analyzes important artworks about Prato’s garment sweatshops and the people associated with them. Zhang asks what convivial labor is depicted in the artworks which can help residents in Prato live together on a daily basis. In artistic representations, this conviviality is articulated both between European Italians and Chinese migrants, and among Chinese migrants themselves, to differing effects.
March 26: “A shimmering black rectangle”
Speaker: Sadia Shirazi, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
The faceted apertures of a shimmering black rectangle evoke the dark, cool spaces created by deep slits and archways found in the architecture of hot climates. From afar, Corners (1980), by the artist Zarina, resembles an architectural frieze or building fragment culled from a historic monument, akin to the objects of questionable provenance in the hold of Euro-American museums. Zarina exhibited Corners (1980) over forty-five years ago in Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists in the United States (1980). Co-curated by Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina, the trio of friends brought a coalition of Indigenous, Black, Chicanx, and Asian American artists together through the framework of the Nonaligned Movement. Starting with two shows in which this work was exhibited, this seminar considers the ways in which exhibition-making is a form of knowledge production with the potential to disrupt the regional silos of histories of art that are underwritten by colonial epistemes of modernity.
April 2: “Return of the House of Laay’ Pole”
Speakers: Susan Rowley, Director, Museum of Anthropology and Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, UBC and Heidi Swierenga, Senior Conservator, Museum of Anthropology, UBC
On September 23rd, 2023 the Nisga’a House of Ni’isjoohl and the Nisga’a Nation rematriated their pole from the National Museum of Scotland. At the feast that evening, Sim’oogit Laay’, head of the House of Laay’, announced to everyone that it was his brother’s wish for their House’s pole at the Museum of Anthropology to be returned home. On September 25th 2025 the University of British Columbia formally rematriated/repatriated the House of Laay’ pole and worked with the Nisga’a Nation to install the pole at the Nisga’a Museum at the request of the House of Laay’. In this talk Heidi Swierenga and Susan Rowley will discuss the history of this pole from the time when it came to UBC in 1947 through the rematriation/repatriation process and conclude with the installation of the pole at home on September 30, 2025.