Community Ties
Asynchronous Session
Global Artists and their Racially-marked Aesthetics: The Politics of Circulation, Visibility, and Exchange View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Inna Arzumanova
Recently, the global market for visual art – formal auctions, informal private acquisitions, gallery exhibitions, international art fairs – has increasingly spotlighted artists of color. Latinx artists, artists from the African diaspora (especially, African American artists), and artists from Asia have gained new visibility and unprecedented valuations within these networks of circulation and exchange. This recent increase in visibility reveals the ways in which the contemporary art world market is encouraging the collection of specific racial memories and aesthetic expressions. Furthermore, the inclusion of those lived – racialized – experiences seems to trouble the colonial, imperial, and capitalist ideological foundations that have buttressed this industry. Within this context, however, it is necessary to examine the conditions of these artists’ visibility and circulation. Are there aesthetic, biographical, or industry-based conditions that work as prerequisites to gaining visibility and circulation for these artists? How do the economics of collecting inform these artists’ experiences in the industry and their valuations? How does their inclusion re-structure, ideologically, and aesthetically, what constitutes the global industry for visual art? I argue that this development must be understood within two contexts of their exchange and display: (1) the prominence of global art world fairs as the primary way in which these works are displayed and made mobile, and (2) practices of art market speculation. These two dimensions reveal the stakes for artists of color, their sustainability, their aesthetics, and their ability to produce aesthetics that shape and dialogue with their own racial memories and racial futures.
Politics of Care: Art, Empathy, and Urbanism View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amy Melia
At the heart of capitalist urbanisation is a demonstrable ‘crisis of care’. As it appears, this crisis is an urban-spatial extension of care’s general degradation and economic capture under capitalist production. The current socio-political landscape of neoliberal privatisation cuts, deregulation, competition, and self-interest has constructed a negligent urban milieu, which signals the extension of capitalism’s ‘crisis of care’ into the physical built environment. Within an urban Marxist context, this paper examines how contemporary art practitioners have responded to capitalist-urbanism’s poverty of care, serving the needs of deprived and diasporic communities via decolonising and non-paternalistic acts of solidarity. However, my overarching aim in this paper is to address examples of contemporary art practice, curation and institutionality that demonstrate, in their distinctive combination of caring and critical aspects, what I call a ‘politics of care’. Feminist scholar Fiona Robinson (1999) has suggested that affect (the personal) and criticality (the political) do not negate one another but are mutually reinforcing, and that social justice is served best by combining the two. Indeed, care/empathy and politicised acts of social justice should not be understood as existing in an opposed, dichotomous relationship, as politicising care radicalises it and sets it into action. Although ‘affective labour’ has been captured and absorbed into the logic of financialised capitalism, I contend in this paper that the examples addressed are able to overcome this co-optation, as they harness a ‘politics of care’, radically combining the antagonistic forces of ‘the political’ with care and empathy.
These Are the Stories of Our Physical Activities: Decolonial Re-existence and Poetry View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sepandarmaz Mashreghi
In this paper, I aim to disseminate the knowledge that was generated during a participatory art-based action research that I collaborated on with a group of young Afghan asylum seekers in Sweden. The focus of the research was the lived experiences of the youth in relation to sport and physical activity. I have chosen a narrative poem which I crafted using vox participare [voices of participants] (Norton & Sliep, 2019) to do this work. In this way I have grounded the dissemination of our research in the shared epistemology of our peoples, the Khorasani peoples of central/western Asia. By adopting the persona of شاعر [the poet] (Olszewska, 2015) and by writing in a reflective manner that does not obscure my own privilege, I work towards decolonising the process of research and knowledge generation as it relates to the field of sport. I attempt to show how the Afghan youth re-make sport (and physical activity) in ways that re-create conditions of dignity for themselves and their community in their everyday living. In this way, I aim to disrupt the dominant understandings about what sport is, what it is supposed to do and how it can be utilised by those who are living with social injustices.
Potters of Pahari in Rajasthan View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Arman Ovla, Satyaki Roy
Rajasthan is a state located in India. It has some of the oldest living crafts practiced by traditional craftsmen. Pottery is a traditional handicraft practiced by Prajapati families for generations. They are settled in various parts of the state and their pottery reflects distinctive regional style and technique. There are twenty-five Prajapati families actively involved in pottery in Pahari. village at Bharatpur district. They have been producing functional products such as water pots, flowerpots, etc. by using conventional pit firing. Amongst them, Motilal and his family have progressed much ahead of the conventional practice, in terms of style, functions, and techniques. Their workshop is known as the ‘Maati Cookware’. They make finished cookware baked in an especially designed kiln for higher temperature along with the application of the Saggar method through the reduction process for producing a range of decorative clay products. Intrigued by his efforts the authors used an ethnographic approach to understand the lives of the Prajapati community, sustainability, creative potential, development, and improved traditional pottery. There are two distinctive methods and techniques, the design of kilns, and the style of products. Upon studying their existing methods the authors planned some design interventions and recommended several process modifications to improve the body of the Saggar container and to increase the efficiency of the kiln. This study aims to understand the scope of design intervention in traditional pottery with an exploratory, collaborative and immersive strategy for the betterment of the craft.
Aphra Behn and “Oroonoko”: Crafting Race, Gender, Inequality and Stereotypes on Black Love View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon
Lauded as perhaps the first woman to support herself almost entirely from her writing, Aphra Behn, (born at some point in the 1640’s to 1689) was a poet, playwright, translator, novelist and, at one point in her career, even an English spy. A proponent of “style” and “theatricality”, Oroonoko is one of her most sensational stories that captured the attention of English audiences who longed for exotic descriptions of the New World and the titillating, ethnocentric, voyeurism in explanations of “the other". In this short story, just like most of her other writing, Behn crafted a presumed “authenticity” in her work, oftentimes relying on a female narrator’s voice for social commentary; and it was through these literary “avatars”, if you will, that Behn publicly aired her views on sex, sexuality and eroticism. This paper critiques Aphra Behn’s most famous short story Oroonoko, about the betrayed, enslaved African King and Behn’s semi-autobiographical musings about love, sex, pain, revenge, class, gender and enslavement embedded in this sensational work. Referencing the work of Michel Foucault, this paper looks at Aphra Behn’s life and work in contrast to the political economy of sex, eroticism, discipline and punishment. In the 1600’s. Aphra Behn’s writings, like Oroonoko made her, both, the “toast” and vilified “harlot” of the English literati.
