Up Coming Events

EAHR Speaker Series 2012-2013

Fall semester

Thursday October 25th 2012, from 6:00 – 7:30 pm in room EV-3.760

Nuria Carton de Grammont  
Narco-art and the culture of violence in Mexican contemporary art.


Since the presidential mandate of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), the war against

drug cartels became a political scheme, which generated a climate of extreme

violence causing more than 80,000 deaths. Presently, violence is an integral part

of a society tied to diverse armed groups who fight for territorial occupation.

Closely intertwined to collective memories of violence, contemporary Mexican

art has become pictorially influenced by crime scenes, cadavers and blood. In

turn, these culturally specific productions present a bloody recount of Mexican

history.

Wednesday December 5th 2012, from 6:00 – 7:30 pm in room EV-1.615 

Jon Soske (Modern African history Assistant Professor at McGill) 

Jon Soske will discuss two projects that appeared independently in 2009—South-South: Interruptions & Encounters and Chimurenga 14: “Everyone Has Their Indian”—in order to reflect on different literary and aesthetic strategies of “mapping” the intersecting histories of Africa and South Asia. Or, not exactly, since the maps in question lead to a different place each time one tries to use them, and when one finally returns to where one started, whether “Africa” or “India,” the meaning of the each term has been enriched and displaced by the other, creating geographies of unlikely inheritance and difficult intimacies.


Soske is Assistant Professor of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. He is currently writing about South Asian diasporas and the politics of African nationalism in South Africa. He has also been involved in curating and organizing a number of exhibitions, including South-South: Interruptions and Encounters (2009), Under the Umdoni Tree: The Art of Ebrahim and Omar Badsha (2010), the Bonani Africa Festival of Photography (2010), and Christopher Cozier/Luis Jacob (2011).

. Sharlene Bamboat (multimedia artist)

Sharlene Bamboat will be speaking about her film, video and performance practice, in relation to her programming experience for both SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and the Pleasure Dome Experimental Film & Video Collective.

Bamboat will speak about MONITOR SAVAC’s  annual  South  Asian  experimental  film  and  video   program; opening up the archive of work from the last 7 years to speak about the shifting nature of identity markers within the diaspora, as well as shifts in politics within a global context.

Bamboat also discusses the challenges facing programming within a specific South Asian context in Toronto, as well as the ways in which her curatorial and art practice attempt to push the boundaries of conceptual art.

Sharlene Bamboat is a Toronto-based mixed media artist, working predominantly in film, video and performance. Her work calls into question narratives of diaspora, migration and nation building. Through a re-examination of history, Bamboat elicits tongue-in-cheek performative videos and installations to question our contemporary moment marked by colonialism and neoliberalism.

Bamboat regularly works in collaboration with artists and academics. In 2011, she co-created Border Sounds with media artist Alexis Mitchell. A site specific sound and performance installation, Border Sounds challenged the nature of territorial and national borders culminating in a silent disco in an underground parking garage in Toronto. Bamboat’s 2012 installation, Throwback, a collaboration with the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) and Montreal-based video and performance artist Ali El-Darsa, was a performative response to queer archiving, and the absence of migrant bodies/stories/histories within queer North American art production. Upcoming shows include, a commission for 8Fest, Toronto and a collaborative performance with artist Eugenio Salas for Hemispheric Institute Encuentro, Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Bamboat’s work has been exhibited internationally. She is on the programming committee of the Pleasure Dome Film & Video Collective, and works as the programmer for SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre).

http://www.mcgill.ca/history/jon-soske
http://www.sharlenebamboat.com/mainsite.htmll

 

Winter Semester

Thursday January 31st 2012, from 6:00 – 7:30 pm in room EV-1.605

Charmaine Nelson (Associate Professor of Art History at McGill University)

 “‘...the Canadian inhabitants are remarkably fond of dancing’: Reading the African Musicians in George Heriot's Print ‘Minuets of the Canadians’ (1807)”

 Published as one of 28 prints in George Heriot's illustrated book “Travels through the Canadas..." (1807), the foldout print “Minuets of the Canadians” is an intriguing image of Quebec social interaction. The image depicts a scene of merriment; a dance at which a large group of mainly white men and women have gathered to dance the minuet. However, the presence of three black male musicians amongst the large group of merry-makers calls attention not only to the little known practice of Canadian slavery, but to the central role of black males as musicians for their white owners' pleasure/entertainment in various locations across the Americas. Furthermore, the black musicians are joined by two white male ones indicating a level of musical hybridization and cooperation, likely necessitated by the smaller numbers of enslaved Africans in Quebec when compared to other tropical sites of slavery. This paper will explore the visual representation of the black trio as an indication of the resilience of African musical traditions, which surviving the Middle Passage, prolifically shaped the new hybrid forms of expressive culture in the Americas (including Quebec and Canada). It will also explore the prevalence and implications of an insidious white imperial gaze within the context of African expressive cultural continuity.


Charmaine Nelson is an Associate Professor of Art History, in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, Montreal. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial and black feminist scholarship, critical (race) theory, Trans Atlantic Slavery Studies and Black Diaspora Studies. Her work examines Canadian, American, European and Caribbean art and culture. She has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation and Black Canadian Studies. Nelson is also an expert on nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture. Her research and teaching explore various genres of so-called high, low and popular art forms including photography, prints, sculpture, dress, portraiture, still-life, nudes and landscape art.

http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/faculty/nelson