FLESH: Embodying Praxis
45th Annual AHVA Graduate Symposium
March 3 – 4, 2022
On Zoom
Keynote speakers Dr. Kaja Silverman & Dr. Dylan Robinson
What is body? What is flesh? What is human? Despite our incessant connection via screen during the past two years of pandemic isolation, we yearn to regain the intimacy of embodiment. Bodily presence has been eroded by the paradigm shift towards global digitalization, and it feels more imperative now than ever to return to the flesh. Is our shared ontological flesh destined to remain alienated, or will it be reclaimed and reconstituted?
Flesh concerns the physical and immanent reality of bodies; it is central to the dialogues of our lived experience/encounters with the world. The materiality of the flesh is embedded in the body’s affective functions, enabling its faculty for inscription and performance. This exhibition is critically invested in the ways in which artists work with various notions and materials of flesh. In other words, how do the bodies of artists serve as interlocutors between theory and such inscribed and performed praxis?
This event takes place remotely, but the University of British Columbia Point Grey campus occupies the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
Schedule:
Thursday, March 3, 2022
Keynote speaker: Dr. Kaja Silverman
10:30 am – 12:30 pm
Moderated by Johnny Willis, MA candidate in Art History at UBC
First Panel: Flesh as Embodied Praxis
Moderated by Tim McCall, PhD candidate in Art History at UBC
1:00 1:40 “Flesh as Material: Nakahira Takuma’s Provoke and Body Politics” Daniel Abbe, PhD candidate, Art History, UCLA
1:40 2:20 “The Politics of Painted Flesh: Bodies and Murals in Sandra de la Loza’s Action Portraits” Eric Mazariegos Jr, PhD candidate, Art History, Columbia University
2:20 – 3:00 “The Schnütgen Embroidered Ciborium: Flesh and Fulfillment in a Medieval Thing” Margaret H. Wilson, PhD candidate, Art History, Ohio State University.
Second Panel: Subversive Embodiments: Towards Transgressive Flesh
Moderated by Ozan Yıldız, PhD candidate in Art History at UBC
3:20 – 4:00 “God Is a Black Woman: Decolonizing Black Women’s Bodies and Reforming the Jezebel Narrative” Nicole Smith, MA candidate, Art History & Visual Culture, University of Guelph
4:00 – 4:40 “‘I’m Not A Big Fan of Pain’: An Autoethnography on Self-Injury and Depressive Suicidal Black Metal” Olivia Dreisinger, PhD candidate, English, UBC
Friday, March 4, 2022
Keynote speaker: Dr. Dylan Robinson
10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Moderated by Dr. T’ai Smith, Associate Professor in Art History at UBC
Third Panel: Becoming-Erotic: Deliberations on Eros and Flesh
Moderated by Johnny Willis, MA candidate in Art History at UBC
12:30 – 1:10 “Fleshed: Elio Rodriguez’s junglas as erotic form” Gwen A. Unger, PhD candidate, Art History, Columbia University.
1:10 – 1:50 “Queer racial erotics and textures of intimacy in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” Amanda Wan, MA candidate, English, UBC
Fourth Panel: Post-Anthropocene: Between Cyborgs and Pastoral Immersion
Moderated by Nathan Clark, MA candidate in Critical and Curatorial Studies at UBC
2:10 – 2:50 “Subverting the Orientalist Bodies in Sci-Fi: Reimagining Techno-Orientalism through the lens of AI and Asian Futurism” Hau Yu Wong, MA candidate, Critical and Curatorial Studies, UBC.
2:50 – 3:30 “Embodying the Anthropocene; an Immersion in the Aquatic Thinking of Joan Jonas and Jacynthe Carrier” Jeanne Blackburn, MA candidate, Art History, Concordia University
Following the symposium on March 4, the exhibition will be open for viewing at the AHVA Gallery from 5:00 to 6:00 pm