Please join us in celebrating the recent publication by our colleague Jaleh Mansoor.
Art History Book Launch
Jaleh Mansoor, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory
2:00 p.m., Friday, October 24, 2025
Room 1002, Audain Art Centre
6398 University Boulevard
ahva.ubc.ca
Moderated by Associate Professor Ignacio Adriasola, the book launch will open with a conversation with the author, followed by a reading and a question and answer period.
Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of modern and contemporary cultural production, specializing in twentieth-century European art, Marxism, Marxist feminism, and critical theory. In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory, published by Duke University Press, Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction, as well as a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Her first book Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia was also published by Duke University Press in 2016. Stevphen Shukaitis, Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, Centre for Work and Organization, and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective, has written about the new book that “Mansoor’s central provocation, that modernist abstraction does not evade political and economic determination but instead metabolizes and reflects it, pushes beyond traditional art-historical frameworks.” Furthermore, he argues, “An excavation of how art bears witness to the becoming-technical of the human, the abstraction of labor, and the birth of new social ontologies, Universal Prostitution brilliantly maps the aesthetic forms through which capitalism, defines as the movement of the value-form in social space, inscribes itself on the very conditions of perception, embodiment, and subjectivity. Mansoor’s work compels us to see art not merely as a response to social conditions, but as a means of theorizing them.”
Image: Yves Klein, Untitled (Shroud Anthropometry), 1960, © The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ADAGP, Paris.
