Artist Talk: Climates of Colonialism, Annual Conference Association for Art History, Newcastle, 3 April
Extremely excited to announce I'll be speaking at the Annual Conference for Art History on April 3 in the Climates of Colonialism session. The session was created by Art Historians Julia Lum (Scripps College, California) and Gabrielle Moser (OCAD University, Toronto). I've been working relentlessly for sometime now on this line of thought and I'm deeply touched the project has made its way into contemporary debate at this event. The conference brings speakers from around the world and across disciplines.
This session investigates how art and cultural production in the former British Empire has long charted the interdependent and co-constitutive logics of climate and colonialism. Examining a diverse range of media – including painting, video, architecture, public sculpture and photography – the papers consider how artistic treatments of environmental change can be located within overlapping and interconnected histories of acclimatisation, forced migration, land dispossession, resource extraction, deforestation and struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. Not only has climate been central to anthropological representations of racial differences in imperial ideologies – such as suppositions about which populations were ‘naturally suited’ to particular weather events, temperature ranges and climatic conditions – but colonial practices of extraction and commodification have radically altered ecologies under colonial rule. Following calls by Indigenous, Black, postcolonial and feminist scholars to extend the time frame of climate change beyond the Industrial Revolution, the presentations in this session imagine climate change not as a new event, but rather as ‘the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, that have been at work for the last five hundred years’ (Davis and Todd 2017: 761). Taking up the rich cross-disciplinary discussion that has emerged around the Anthropocene, the session considers case studies in the Arabian Gulf Region, Australia, Guyana, Canada and the heart of the Empire itself.
Event Details
Friday 3 April 2020
Venue
University of Newcastle and the University of Northumbria