Visiting artist and lecture series winter–spring 2019

The Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia is pleased to announce a series of free public lectures and programs in winter and spring 2019. For full event details as they become available, please visit ahva.ubc.ca.

Marianne Nicolson, Koerner Artist in Residence
Marianne Nicolson continues her residency as Koerner Artist in Residence with the presentation of work as part of Hexsa’a̱m: To Be Here Always at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery from January 11 to April 7.

Simultaneously research, material, media, testimony and ceremony, Hexsa’a̱m: To Be Here Always, challenges the Western concept that the power of art and culture are limited to the symbolic or metaphoric, and that the practices of First Peoples are simply part of a past heritage.

The Koerner Artist in Residence Program is made possible by the generous support of the Koerner Foundation and a private foundation.

February 8
Wu Hung: “The Inscribed Studio Photos as I-Portrait: Photographing a New Self in Early Twentieth-Century China”
Portraiture and self-portraiture are two standard genres in visual art, including photography. A self-portrait is a likeness whose subject is the artist him/herself; a portrait is a representation of a person made by someone else. This lecture investigates some photographs that disrupt this seemingly self-evident classification of images. These examples belong to a group of studio portraits that bear the sitters’ inscriptions. Wu Hung suggests that when an inscription is imbued with a distinct “I” voice and expresses the sitter’s personal experience and aspiration, it transforms the anonymous portrait into an I-portraits.

Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the University of Chicago. Wu Hung’s lecture is presented through the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series.

March 1
Yoshiko Shimada: “Art That Makes You Uncomfortable”
Artist Yoshiko Shimada is a proponent of feminist art in Japan. In this talk, Shimada presents a selection of her artworks that reflect on cultural memory and the role of women in the Asia-Pacific War. In exploring legacies of war, violence, and occupation, Shimada proposes a practice of feminism and art-making as a tool for self-examination, and a means to complicate the victim versus oppressor divide.

Shimada’s visit is presented by the Rennie Collection Distinguished Visiting Artist Program.

March 7, 8
Merray Gerges & Jennifer Kennedy
Keynote speakers, Violentia: Representing Bodies and Violence (42nd annual Graduate Symposium)
This symposium will investigate the various ways violence is inflicted, read, and embodied through its association with the “body” as both a physical and abstract concept. Considering the importance of the body—as an object, a community of people, a measure of land, an immaterial model, a metaphorical representation, etc.—we encourage a re-evaluation of how the relationship between violence and the body has come to shape art history.

Merray Gerges studied art history at NSCAD, and journalism at King’s in Halifax. She was the 2015 writer-in-residence at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the 2016 editorial resident at Canadian Art, where she is now assistant editor.

Jennifer Kennedy is an artist and scholar who specializes in contemporary art history and theory with an emphasis on feminisms, transnationalism, new media and digital art, and the intersections between art, mass media, and politics since the 1950s. She was a Bader Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s from 2015 to 2017.

March 29
Guillaume Faroult, Curatorial lecture
Guillaume Faroult is a senior curator of eighteenth-century French paintings as well as British and American paintings at the Louvre Museum. He curated Turner et ses peintres (Grand Palais, 2009), L’Antiquité rêvée. Innovations et résistances au XVIIIe siècle (Louvre Museum, 2010), Fragonard amoureux. Galant et libertin (Paris, Luxembourg Museum, 2015), and Hubert Robert. Un peintre visionnaire (Louvre Museum, 2016). He will be presenting his research and forthcoming book on the erotic nature of François Boucher.