Transnational and Transcultural Studies Symposium
April 6-7, 2018
The Transnational and Transcultural Studies Symposium investigates different discourses, terminologies, and research projects being pursued by scholars in transnational and transcultural studies from universities in Canada, England, Germany, and the United States.
This conference is generously supported by the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC), the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), the Korean Cultural Centre, the National Gallery of Canada, and Embassy Hotel and Suites. Special thanks to our collaborators at Concordia University, Cornell University, Heidelberg University, New York University, and the University of the Arts London as well as to all of our conference participants, note takes, graduate student committee, and volunteers.
Schedule of Events
Friday April 6, 2018
Korean Cultural Centre (150 Elgin Street, Unit 101)
9:00am-9:10am: Introduction & Welcome
9:10am-10:25am: PANEL/Q&A: Rethinking Disciplines, Rethinking the Global
Moderated by Ming Tiampo
- Victoria Nolte (Carleton University), Where Is the Place for Diaspora in Global Art History?
- Paul Goodwin (University of Arts London), Activating the ‘Trans:’ Rethinking Transnationalism in Contemporary Art
- Monica Juneja (Heidelberg University), Art History and Travelling Concepts: A Transcultural View
- Birgit Hopfener (Carleton University), What is and isn’t Contemporary Art? An Analysis of the Dispute Triggered by The Chinese National Pavilion in 2017
- Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University), Is Transnationalism a Generative Methodology for Film Archival Research?
10:25am-10:35am: Coffee break
10:35am-11:30am: PANEL/Q&A: Korean Art in a Transcultural Context
Moderated by Victoria Nolte
- Euijung McGillis (Carleton University), Quac In Sik and Lee Ungno: Transnational/Transcultural Art Practices in Global Art History
- Okyang Chae-Duporge (Paris INALCO University), Bang Hai Ja’s Transcultural World and her Vertical Approach
- Franziska Koch (Heidelberg University), Transcultural Explorations of the Archive: Examining Documents of Nam June Paik and the Question of Collaboration
11:30am-11:40am: Coffee break
11:40am-1:00pm: PANEL/Q&A: Translations and Negotiations
Moderated by Joana Pimentel
- Stephen Inglis (Carleton University), “Date with a Dream”: Popular Art in 20th Century India
- R. Siva Kumar (Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan), Indo-Japanese Artistic Production Under Pan-Asianism: What They Discovered in Each Other
- Toshio Watanabe (University of Arts London), Japanese and Anti-Japanese Gardens in Asia
- Jill Carrick (Carleton University), François Dufrêne’s Critical Toponymies
- Carol Payne (Carleton University), Transcultural Encounters in the Eastern Arctic: Photography, Settler Colonialism and Inuit Community
1:00pm-2:30pm: Lunch (Provided by the Korean Cultural Centre)
2:30pm-3:30pm: PANEL/Q&A: Critiquing Global Capitalism
Moderated by Pansee Atta
- Amy Bruce (Carleton University), Critiquing the Globalizing Structures of Biennales
- Malini Guha (Carleton University), Adventure Cinema in the Age of Austerity: The case of Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights (2015) Trilogy
- Lale Eskicioglu (Carleton University), Postcolonial Mega Cities as Depicted in Global Literatures
3:30pm-3:40pm: Coffee break
3:40pm-4:40pm: PANEL/Q&A: Diaspora and Minor Transnationalism
Moderated by Emily Putnam
- Ming Tiampo (Carleton University), Paris From the Outside In: Anti-colonial World-making
- Michelle Gewurtz (Ottawa Art Gallery), Transcultural/historical Resonances in Howie Tsui’s Retainers of Anarchy
- Catherine Khordoc (Carleton University), When Nation Becomes Transnational: Écriture migrante, Transnationalism and Transcultural Writing in Québec
- Christine Duff (Carleton University), Gratuitous Overkill or Astute Commentary? Exploring Intertextuality in the Novels of Stanley Péan
4:40pm-4:50pm: Coffee break
4:50pm-5:40pm: PANEL/Q&A: Memory
Moderated by Rachelle Dickenson
- Sarah Phillips Casteel (Carleton University), Reading History for Clues: Black Holocaust Literature and Art
- Rebecca Clare Dolgoy (ICI Berlin/CTCA) & Jerzy Elzanowski (Carleton University), Terra Nullius, Tabula Rasa, Stunde Null: Moral Geographies of Conflict
5:40pm-5:50pm: Coffee break
5:50pm-6:50pm: PANEL/Q&A: World-Making
Moderated by Jonathan Shaughnessy
- Amara Antilla (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Inventing Internationalism: The Guggenheim International Exhibitions and New York’s Postwar Cosmopolitanism, 1956-71
- Philip Kaisary (Carleton University), Literature, Law and Film in The Black Atlantic: Radical Horizons and Worldliness
- Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Ethnocultural Futurisms
Saturday April 7, 2018
National Gallery of Canada (380 Sussex Drive)
6:00pm-8:00pm: KEYNOTE LECTURE, presented by The Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and the National Gallery of Canada.
When Art Embraces the Planet. The Contemporary Exhibition Form and the Challenge of Multiple Archives
Monica Juneja (Chair of Global Art History, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University)
The global and curatorial turns marking contemporary art worlds are frequently celebrated for re-inscribing the excluded in cultural institutions and aesthetic practices through narratives that aspire to be more complete and just. Does incorporating art form beyond the West within contemporary exhibition circuits, the smooth transition from “xenophobia to xenophilia” (Irit Rogoff) that marks modern multiculturalism, engender a discursive space to remap cultural geographies and theorize the dystopian/disjunctive condition of contemporaneity, or does it merely answer global capitalism’s need for new commodities? Do new boundaries come into being in thewake of the connectivity that dissolves older ones? My discussion of these issues will revisit the famous – also controversial – exhibition of 1989, Magiciens de la Terre, conceptualized as the first planetary show of contemporary art that, at the same time, sought to challenge the conventions of exhibition-making within the narrow confines of the art world and its modernist taxonomic frames. Curated by a team headed by Jean-Hubert Martin, at the time Director of theMusée d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the show aspired to create a display in which cultural differences could coexist without a homogenizing agenda. My investigation will follow its bold topography across continents to those sites where the works had travelled to Paris were produced and anchored, to examine their post-Magiciens lives: my urge to read objects, their producers and curators coevally, while restoring to different sites their own historicity. The example of South Asia and its multiple archives will be used to draw out the complex histories of cultures that live in a permanent and fluctuating relationality with one another and whose dynamics get lost when we exclusively attend to dismantling the centrality of the so-called “West.” These multi-scalar stories sensitize us to new fault lines and the transcultural complexity of inclusion as a curatorial strategy.