How can art history support a careful and nuanced discussion about image ethics? Particularly in light of unprecedented digitization/datafication of historical matter(s)? This presentation engages some of the knotty problems and poetics of working with colonial collections, which is to say those image worlds (of photographs, artefacts, prints, maps etc.) induced by colonialism, and furthermore their re-appearance in contemporary art practices. Steeped in Black radical feminist, Indigenous, and other forms of reparative thought, the discussion centres refusal multimodally, as an ethical stance or gesture in research and conceptual processes, but also as the literal and intuitive information revealed by subjects caught in/under the colonial gaze. The aim here is to open for dialogue, and to focus on methodologies at this global and disciplinary threshold moment.
Temi Odumosu is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Malmö University. She is author of the book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017). Her research and curatorial practices are concerned with colonial archives/archiving, slavery and visuality, race and visual coding in popular culture, postmemorial art and performance, image ethics and politics of digitisation. Overall, she is focused on the ways art can mediate social transformation and healing. She is currently a member of the research network The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories.
This event will take place on February 2, 2021 as a live Webinar at 12:15 pm ET (New York time). Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.