November 16, 2022 – Anthony S. Foy

Anthony S. Foy
Associate Professor of English Literature
Swarthmore College

“Racial Publicity and the Self Unseen: Black Autobiography after the Halftone”

We encourage everyone who is on campus to join us for this in-person talk in Old Library 224. If you are not able to join us in person, please register for the Zoom link at https://visualculture.blogs.brynmawr.edu/

November 30, 2022 – Sonal Khullar

Sonal Khullar
W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies
Department of History of Art
University of Pennsylvania

“Decolonizing the Field: Art, Event, and Environment in India”

Referring to uses of the ‘field’ in art historical and anthropological discourses, this presentation considers a turn to site-specific, socially engaged, and collaborative artistic practices in India over the past two decades. Contemporary artists have assumed the role of fieldworkers, moving across scales and between sites over an extended period to critique modernist and capitalist systems. Through new languages of art and forms of relation, their practice challenges the organization of the art world. The affect and address of this art resonates with new modes of protest, demonstration, and gathering and with old patterns of pilgrimage, procession, and public action in South Asia. It demands reflection on methods in art history and the work of the art historian. 

We encourage everyone who is on campus to join us for this in-person talk in Old Library 224. If you are not able to join us in person, please register for the Zoom link at https://visualculture.blogs.brynmawr.edu/

February 9, 2022 – Ana Lucia Araujo

Professor of History, Howard University
“Exhibiting Slavery: A Visual History of Slave Collars”

Several permanent and temporary exhibitions in Europe and the Americas have attempted to represent slavery by featuring physical punishment. To achieve this goal most exhibitions display instruments of torture such as chains, shackles, and collars. To understand the broad implications of these representations of violence, this lecture attempts to build a visual history of slave collars. First, I retrace the use of lave collars to Antiquity. Second, I use engravings and paintings dating between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to show how the representation of slave collars was widespread in European art during this period, therefore confirming the visible presence of enslaved people in Europe. Third, I connect these representations to similar devices today housed in museum collections in the Netherlands, Portugal, England, Brazil, and the United States. Finally, I discuss the broad implications of displaying this kind of torture device in museum exhibitions today.

Please register here.

April 13, 2022 – Genevieve Yue

Assistant Professor of Culture and Media
Director of Screen Studies, Eugene Lang College, the New School

“The Woman in the Film Archive”

The film archive is outwardly governed by a rational, orderly system, though less attention is given to the operation of desire that undergirds it. In archival theory, this is sometimes articulated as a quest for Gradiva, a chimerical woman from an obscure early twentieth century novella by Wilhelm Jensen. In this talk, trace the Gradivan motif of the vanished woman from writings by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida to its expression in films by Bill Morrison, Cheryl Dunye, and Radha May.

Please register here.