UBC visiting artist and lecture series winter–spring 2018

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 in winter and spring 2018.

Tameka Norris
“Ivy League Ratchet”
Wednesday, January 17, 5:30pm

Tameka Norris began her career in the Los Angeles hip-hop scene before migrating to the fine arts. She supplemented along the way with a range of odd jobs, from call-centre customer service representative to sex worker. Her artwork is informed by her experience of how exploitation is built into these systems, particularly for women of colour and queer communities. She often combines intensely personal experience with overtly performative personas to critique the ways that identities are appropriated and exploited by high and low culture alike. Norris’s visit is presented by the Rennie Collection Distinguished Visiting Artist Program.

Jeanine Oleson
“Conduct Matters”
Wednesday, February 28, 5:30pm

Interdisciplinary artist Jeanine Oleson will discuss her recent work of interrelated performances, objects, and videos based in research on contemporary conditions of lived experience and the irreconcilable relationships between bodies, labour, resources, and art. Oleson will speak about the development of a recent project, Conduct Matters, which takes the idea of conduction that is material, political, musical, and ethical while working with an ensemble cast using the production cycle of copper as a ground to examine communication, technology, and the sensory through an absurdist lens. Oleson’s visit is presented by the Rennie Collection Distinguished Visiting Artist Program.

Esra Akcan
Keynote address, Tracing Erasure (41st Annual Graduate Symposium)
Friday, March 9 (time TBC)

Tracing Erasure invites the exploration of art and architecture as sites of intervention in personal, social, and cultural narratives and memories. It seeks to examine sites of struggle and potential transformation, where art and architecture, as loci of memory, challenge notions of historical stability and linearity.

Keynote speaker Esra Akcan’s scholarly work focuses on a geopolitically conscious global history of architecture. Her research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe and West Asia. Akcan is associate professor in Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University.

Samantha Baskind
“The Warsaw Ghetto in American Popular Culture”
Thursday, March 15, 5pm

On April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto revolted against their Nazi oppressors. Since that day, the deprivation and despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination. Samantha Baskind looks at how this place and its story have been remembered in fine art, film, television, radio, theatre, fiction, poetry, and comics. Samantha Baskind is professor in the Department of Art and Design at Cleveland State University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century American art and culture and the role of the Jewish American artist in the modern world. Baskind’s visit is presented by the UBC Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, and sponsored by the Waldman Holocaust Education Committee in the UBC Faculty of Arts.

Felicity Scott
Thursday, March 22, 5:30pm

Felicity Scott’s work as an architectural historian and theorist focuses on articulating genealogies of political and theoretical engagement with questions of technological and geopolitical transformation within modern and contemporary architecture, as well as within the discourses and institutions that have shaped and defined the discipline, sometimes evidently, sometimes less so. Scott is associate professor of Architecture, director of the PhD program in Architecture (History and Theory), and co-director of the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program at Columbia GSAPP. Scott’s lecture is presented through the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series.