A lecture by Delinda Collier as part of the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series
5:30 p.m., Thursday, March 16, 2023
Room 104, Frederic Lasserre Building
6333 Memorial Road, University of British Columbia
ahva.ubc.ca
This event is free and open to the public.
In this lecture, Delinda Collier summarizes the history of media studies’ and art history’s reliance on “Africa” as shorthand for unmediated, non-technological, or pre-philosophical art. From Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik’s non-contextual photographs of African sculpture to Marshall McLuhan’s many invocations of Africans’ inability to perceive film or television, Africa was foundational to theories of medium in both fields. This talk will discuss this history in relation to the burgeoning digital and media art scene on the African continent, and will ultimately propose a broader understanding of mediation tied to an “Atlantic” history of art.
Delinda Collier is Professor of Art History and Interim Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has authored two books, Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art (2016) and Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa (2020). Her writing appears as book chapters and as articles in Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Culture; Third Text; Africa Is a Country; African Arts; and VCS: Visual Cultural Studies.
Image: Landing page map for Pan African Space Station, a project of Chimurenga since 2008.
