Post-Imperial Scales of Global Art History
A lecture by Ming Tiampo as part of the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series
5:30 p.m., Thursday, February 8, 2024
Room 102, Frederic Lasserre Building
6333 Memorial Road
This event is free and open to the public.
This lecture will take Ming Tiampo’s project Mobile Subjects: Contrapuntal Modernisms as a case study for reimagining the territories, geometries, epistemes, and power structures of global art history through a post-imperial scalar analysis. It argues for a departure from art history as an exclusive mode of inquiry in order to disrupt the discipline’s colonial foundations, and a shift of intellectual models from inclusion to what Tiampo calls “pluriversal worlding.”
Mobile Subjects, Contrapuntal Modernisms (1945–1989) investigates the circulation of artists from the decolonizing world through the colonial and artistic capitals of London and Paris. This tale of two cities considers how these capitals of decolonizing empires functioned as critical meeting places, anti-colonial hubs, and sites of exchange in the decades after World War II due to postwar mass migration. It proposes a new analytical model that uses digital art history to visualize metropoles not as points of origin or as global training grounds, but as spaces of intersection and flow that allow us to understand the transnational condition of modern art.
Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. A curator of exhibitions and public engagement, she co-curated Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2013), and is one of the co-leads of Worlding Public Cultures, a transnational forum for research exchange, Asia Forum for the Contemporary Art of Global Asias, a peripatetic discursive platform, and an associate member of ici Berlin, an interdisciplinary public-facing research institute. A specialist in transnational modernisms, she wrote Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011), and is interested in comparative diasporas, examining histories of migration post-Empire with an emphasis on artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the former French and British Empires. She is the author of Jin-me Yoon: Life and Work (Art Canada Institute, 2023), and is part of the editorial collective for Intersecting Modernisms, a collaborative sourcebook on global modernisms. Tiampo is member of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational Advisory Board.
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
Image: Slade Class Photo, 1957, with Anwar Jalal Shemza, Ibrahim El Salahi, and Wendy Yeo. Courtesy of Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.
