Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization
International Academy
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
November 8-10, 2019
The 杏吧原创 University Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, in partnership with the institutional members of TrACE (Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange), is proud to present Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization, an international academy designed to collaboratively re-imagine and pluralize the ‘global’ from multiple geocultural perspectives. Working in collaboration with , the International Indigenous Art Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, the academy takes as its ethical starting point its situation on unceded Algonquin territory as well as the city of Ottawa’s entangled settler colonial, migrant, diasporic, and other transnational and transcultural histories. Bringing together local, national, and international scholars, artists, activists, and curators, the academy will facilitate a multi-pronged dialogue on the global in the arts and culture, proposing to understand our global world as a temporally constituted and open-ended process of lived interrelations and interconnections (Glissant 1997; Cheah 2016; Shih 2012).
The academy starts from an understanding of art and its related discourses as world-making practices, which articulate, perform, construct, and analyze the global from entangled positions. This acknowledgment of art’s world-making capacities is echoed by recent studies in global art history, which call for a fundamental paradigm shift beyond a neoliberal conception of the ‘global’ as an expansive network of culture and capital that starts from a colonial centre and disperses to its peripheries. Such binary models of centre versus periphery, colonizer versus colonized, settler versus indigenous, east versus west, north versus south, fail to analyze the complex power and knowledge structures of the world.聽Worlding, a concept rooted in phenomenological thinking, is understood as a decolonial “tactic” that “enacts openings of time and consciousness to other values and multiple modes of being” (Wilson 2008). Michelle Antoinette (2014), for instance, examines how contemporary Southeast Asian art contributes to a project of “re-worlding” that not only de-centres Euro-American art-historical imaginaries but also disrupts essentializing narratives about Southeast Asia. Likewise, Sonal Khullar (2015) draws on worlding as a tactic to re-shape art-historical conceptions of the global from the national and international contexts of twentieth-century India, understanding modernism as both projected outward to the world as well as inwardly reflective of the time and place from which specific artworks and ideas are cultivated. More than acknowledging how art worlds have been shaped by globalization, these authors reveal that the necessary work of global art history is that of decolonization, understood as a multi-sited and collaborative engagement with entangled histories, epistemologies, power structures, migrations, culture, and capital (Juneja 2013) that involves critically examining how particular concepts, practices, and knowledges of art-making shape our understanding and being-in-the-world.
Our program comprises a combination of different formats for critically engaged dialogue: from roundtable sessions and panel discussions to an early career researchers’ workshop, networking workshops, artist talks, and a keynote lecture by Shu-mei Shih (UCLA). Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization聽is the first in a series of international academies and symposia organized by TrACE (Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange), the first transregional consortium dedicated to the study of the arts and culture from critical transnational and transcultural perspectives.
Organized by: Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis
Conference Committee: Birgit Hopfener, Ming Tiampo, Victoria Nolte, Emily Putnam, and EJ McGillis
With support from the following 杏吧原创 University bodies: ODFASS, SSAC, MDS, and ICSLAC
Sponsors: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Ottawa Embassy Hotel and Suites, Baden-W眉rttemberg Foundation’s “Elite-Programm f眉r Postdoktoranden/-innen”
Local Partners: Korean Cultural Centre, National Gallery of Canada, SAW Gallery, Universit茅 du Qu茅bec en Outaouais, University of Ottawa
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Schedule of Events
All scheduled events are free and open to the public. No registration is required.
Download conference program (PDFs):
For public program-at-a-glance: click here
For full public program (with speakers’ abstracts and bios): click here
For conference poster: click here
For keynote poster: click here
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Friday November 8, 2019
Korean Cultural Centre (150 Elgin Street, Unit 101)
8:30am-9:00am: Welcome & Introduction
KCC Welcome by Director Kim Yongsup
杏吧原创 Welcome by Pauline Rankin (Dean, ODFASS, 杏吧原创 University)
Introduction by Birgit Hopfener and Ming Tiampo
9:00am-11:00am: Panel 1:聽Decolonizing Modernisms
Chairs: Ruth Phillips (杏吧原创 University) & Ming Tiampo (杏吧原创 University)
Speakers:
Sohl Lee (Stony Brook University)
Jolene K. Rickard (Cornell University)
Samina Iqbal (Lahore School of Economics)
Rolando V谩zquez (Utrecht University)
11:00am-11:15am: Coffee break
11:15am-1:15pm: Panel 2:聽How we write histories: Shedding light on art鈥檚 historiographical multiplicity
Chair: Birgit Hopfener (杏吧原创 University)
Speakers:
Viren Murthy (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Naoki Sakai (Cornell University)
Su Wei (Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing)
Peter Morin (OCAD University)
1:15pm-2:15pm: Lunch at the Korean Cultural Centre
2:15pm-4:15pm: Panel 3:聽Collaborative Curating, Curating Collaboration
Chairs: Paul Goodwin (University of the Arts London) & Jonathan Shaughnessy (National Gallery of Canada)
Speakers:
Wanda Nanibush (Art Gallery of Ontario)
Georgiana Uhlyarik (Art Gallery of Ontario)
Liu Ding (Artist, China)
Nanne Buurman (University of Kassel)
4:15pm-5:00pm: Afternoon break
National Gallery of Canada (380 Sussex Drive)
5:30pm-6:45pm: Keynote Lecture presented by 杏吧原创 University, The Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and the National Gallery of Canada
Indigenous Knowledge in a Relational World
Shu-mei Shih (UCLA)
7:00辫尘-9:00辫尘:听CBC In-the-Making: Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory
Film organized as part of 脌badakone / Continuous Fire / Feu continuel
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Saturday November 9, 2019
National Gallery of Canada (380 Sussex Drive)
10:30am-12:00pm: Panel 4:聽Art and Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Chairs: Heather Igloliorte (Concordia University) & Carmen Robertson (杏吧原创 University)
Speakers:
Biung Ismahasan (University of Essex)
Peter Morin (OCAD University)
Melissa Cody (Artist, Arizona)
Skawennati (Artist, Montreal)
12:00pm-1:00pm: Lunch
1:00pm-3:00pm: Meet the artists of 脌badakone / Continuous Fire / Feu continuel
Galerie UQO聽(101 rue Saint-Jean-Bosco, Gatineau, QC)
5:00pm-7:00pm: Roundtable discussion on the occasion of Jinny Yu鈥檚 exhibition聽Perpetual Guest:
Space of suspense between permanence and passing through
A conversation with Claudette Commanda (University of Ottawa), Amy Fung (杏吧原创 University), David Garneau (University of Regina) and Jinny Yu (University of Ottawa)
Moderated by Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University)
7:00pm-9:00pm: Reception at Galerie UQO
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Sunday November 10, 2019
Club SAW (67 Nicholas Street)
8:30am-11:30am: Early Career Researchers鈥� Workshop:聽Worlding Decolonial Knowledges in Modern and Contemporary Art
Chairs: Victoria Nolte (杏吧原创 University) & Emily Putnam (杏吧原创 University)
Speakers:
Anna Stielau (New York University)
Amy Kahng (Stony Brook University)
Ellie Tse (UCLA)
Marisol Villela Balderrama (University of Pittsburgh)
Krista Ulujuk Zawadski (杏吧原创 University)
Maya Wilson-Sanchez (University of Toronto)
11:30am-12:00pm: Coffee break
12:00pm-1:30pm: Panel 5:聽Worlding Gender
Chair: Laura Horak (杏吧原创 University)
Speakers:
Andrew Gayed (York University)
Zairong Xiang (University of Potsdam)
Raven Davis (Artist, Toronto)
1:30pm-2:50pm: Lunch
3:00pm-5:00pm: Panel 6:聽How we work together: ethics, histories, and epistemologies of artistic collaboration
Chair: Franziska Koch (Heidelberg University)
Speakers:
Shao-Lan Hertel (Tsinghua University Art Museum)
Katia Olalde (Universidad Nacional Aut贸noma de M茅xico)
Beth Hinderliter (James Madison University)
Theresa Deichert (Heidelberg University)
5:00辫尘-6:30辫尘:听World Caf茅
World Caf茅 tables:
Worlding
Moderated by Rebecca Dolgoy & Zairong Xiang
Decolonization
Moderated by Malini Guha & Aboubakar Sanogo
Relational Comparison
Moderated by Shu-mei Shih
Biennials at Large: Fit in or Subvert it?聽
Moderated by Amarildo Ajasse & Amy Bruce
Worlding Memory Studies
Moderated by Ania Paluch & Emily Putnam
Global Modernisms
Moderated by EJ McGillis & Maggie Bryan
Worlding Gender: Codes of the Local/Metaphors for the Global
Moderated by Andrea Fitzpatrick
6:30pm: Closing party at Club SAW