E.3 Research-Creation and the Visual Culture of Difference
Sat Oct 21 / 8:30 – 10:00 / KC 201
chairs /
- Natasha Bissonauth, York University
- Yasmine Espert, York University
To frame research-creation as new and innovative risks crucial institutional amnesia. For historically marginalized folks, research-creation is, and has been, a political tactic and a push for creative freedom. If white supremacist and heteronormative policies create structural barriers for multidisciplinary artists, then the visual culture of difference across Black and Brown diasporas challenges the status quo. For example, in the 1980s, the UK Black Arts Movement witnessed artists like Eddie Chambers and Sunil Gupta curating and writing on art and difference—which they did out of necessity. This roundtable is inspired by under-recognized histories of research-creation like these. We understand the legacy of research-creation as open and embodied. By centering practitioners of colour, this roundtable emphasizes an approach to research-creation that disrupts institutional conventions. We invite artists, curators, and scholars of colour to discuss their current practice and their relationship to the visual culture of difference.
keywords: research creation, artists of colour, institutional critique, 20th and 21st century, modern art, contemporary art
session type: roundtable
Natasha Bissonauth’s research focuses on contemporary artists of colour, queer and feminist art-making situated in contemporary global visual cultures, with an emphasis on South Asian and South Asian transnational circuits of art. Prior to joining the department, she was Assistant Professor at the College of Wooster (OH) in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and has held teaching positions at Haverford College (PA), and Ithaca College (NY). Select artist interviews, exhibition reviews, and book reviews include Art Asia Pacific, Art India, C Magazine, and Women + Performance. Peer-reviewed articles include “Zanele Muholi’s Affective Appeal to Act” (Photography & Culture, 2014) and “Sunil Gupta’s Sun City: An Exercise in Camping Orientalism” (Art Journal; 2019). Recent publication includes a book chapter on how Chitra Ganesh’s speculative aesthetic intervenes in museum display (2020). She also published an article in South Asia journal on the artwork of Sa’dia Rehman titled, “The Dissent of Play: Lotahs in the Museum,” where Bissonauth lays out her ideas on play as a form of aesthetic dissent. New research interests include examining the role of the speculative in the study of indenture studies, with forthcoming articles on the poetry of Kama La Mackerel and visual practice of Renuka Maharaj. Bissonauth is reviews editor at ADVA (Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas).
Yasmine Espert is Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Art & Art History at York University and an editor of profiles and interviews for Seen, a journal of film and visual culture focused on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities globally. Her publications on film, photography and the African Diaspora include “Listening to Revolution” for Artpress, “Can Photography Be Decolonial?” for Public Books, as well as a creative essay on sovereignty for Spectator, and an article on Black British film for Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Other work is published by the Studio Museum in Harlem and Oxford University Press. Her research is supported by York University, ACLS, Union Theological Seminary, the University of Michigan, Fulbright, and others. She received a doctorate in art history from Columbia University.
Kozo, Culture, and Caring through Creation
- Ashok Mathur, OCAD University
When SSHRC introduced a pilot program for research-creation in 2000, those of us working and producing in the arts felt this was a boon, a recognition and validation within the tri-council realm that brought creative practice into the fold. As an early recipient of a research-creation grant, I was able to convert a novel into a participatory, multidisciplinary installation, a space where I could explore diasporic realities in the Parsi community and share them in alternative manners across the country. Early success in the RC program by racialized artist-researchers brought us to the cusp of reframing creative work, presented and exhibited in languages that were not alien or obfuscated by ivory tower gates, and this held promise. As the program developed, from pilot to an independent program to an integration of RC within the larger framework of SSHRC, however, what we began to see was a reversion to disciplinary norms and standards, oftentimes where RC became a one-page add-on or clickbox instead of an integral part of the method and outcome of a research project. Point of fact, I just finished my first tour of duty as a fine arts SSHRC panelist, and I was alarmed at the relative lack of diversity amongst the jurors, and further, the relative lack of uptake of RC projects by BIPOC folks. This presentation will explore how racialized artist-researchers might create support networks and share their work with each other to encourage, mentor, and sustain strong socio-political research creation practices. This presentation draws on a recent research-creation project printing photographs of kozo harvesting in Japan directly onto the high-end washi that is made through the kozo harvest.
keywords: Kozo washi photography research-creation racialization
Ashok Mathur’s cultural, critical, creative, and academic practice is wide ranging and investigates new models of artistic research and interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly those that pursue a social justice agenda. As a writer, photographer, administrator, and cultural worker, Ashok is interested in producing textual and material work that challenges expectations and provides opportunities to advance progressive change.
Visualizing the East Side: Research-Creation with Scarborough Youth in Nuit Blanche
- Marissa Largo, York University
Long before its institutionalization as a line of funding by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), research-creation has always been an alternative mode of knowledge and cultural production that marginalized practitioners have had to create, engage in, and sustain in order to be legible and pull through in academic, community, and artistic spaces. Artificial disciplinary boundaries have rarely served marginalized artists and their communities, especially with regards to expressing their lived experiences of difference in mainstream art festivals. Difference – in the form of race, age, gender, citizenship, and class – are brought to the fore in the 2019 Toronto Nuit Blanche intervention entitled "Visualizing the East Side". This was a series of installations produced by students from Scarborough, many of whom were first- and second-generation immigrants and part of the Asian diaspora. By closely examining this case, I argue that youth-led research-creation collaborations not only upend widely held conventions of excellence and modernist notions of the artistic genius, but also undo traditional art world hierarchies of discipline and expertise. By carving out spaces for interdisciplinary youth expression and bringing the culture and knowledge of racialized suburban youth to the center, research-creation embraces its emancipatory ambitions to level the unequal power dynamics inherent in many research and art institutions. This presentation asks: how can research-creation disrupt conventional understanding of art, “the artist”, research, and the contemporary art festival? How can interventions such as "Visualizing the East Side" produce more equitable art worlds?
keywords: research-creation, Asian diaspora, youth-led, collaboration, interdisciplinary, Nuit Blanche
Marissa Largo (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Department of Visual Art and Art History in the School of Art, Media, Performance & Design of York University. Her research focuses on the intersections of community engagement, race, gender and Asian diasporic cultural production. Her forthcoming book, Unsettling Imaginaries: Filipinx Contemporary Artists in Canada (University of Washington Press) examines the work and oral histories of artists who imagine Filipinx subjectivity beyond colonial logics. She is co-editor of Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Since 2018, Largo has served as the Canada Area Editor of the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA). Her curatorial project Elusive Desires: Ness Lee & Florence Yee at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham was recognized by the 2022 Galeries Ontario/Ontario Galleries (GOG) Awards for best exhibition design and installation and best curatorial writing. At present, Dr. Largo is part of a team developing the new Creative Technologies BFA program at the York University Markham Campus, which will open its doors in Summer 2024.
Materials and Surfaces
- Swapnaa Tamhane, Concordia University
As a Canadian from the South-Asian diaspora, I am working to form decolonial methods as an artist and curator, working across the disciplines of art and design. I am interested in thinking about modes of representation, how we consider “value”, and destabilizing how ideas of art, craft, and design have been determined by Western methodologies and definitions of high and low art. With my studio practice being centered on drawing, I turn to the poet/saint/weaver Kabir, who I consider as a site from which to approach mark-marking as an accumulation or a community/collective. With two strands of my practice – one being quite solitary in terms of making handmade paper and drawing – the other being in a skill-sharing and collaborative process working with wood block carvers and block printers in Kutch, Gujarat, I am wanting to find new processes for image-making. These research and methods of making are not simply voluntary, but because there is no choice: as a BIPOC artist I have to find material significance and resonance that can communicate a wider viewpoint of the colonial and post-colonial landscapes of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which are interconnected through dyes like indigo, materials like jute, or craft skills like block printing. The larger aim is to insert locations as well as navigate away from those histories of art that were never intended to include someone like me beyond anthropological and ethnographic structures of classification, consumption or trade.
keywords: South Asian diaspora, decolonial, drawing, craft, ethnography, Kabir
Swapnaa Tamhane is an artist and curator. She has a MA in Contemporary Art, University of Manchester (2001), MFA in Fibres & Material Practices, Concordia University, Montreal (2021), and BA in Art History from Carleton University, Ottawa (1999). Her visual practice is dedicated to drawing, making handmade paper, and working with the material histories of cotton and jute. She has exhibited her work at articule, Montreal; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Serendipity Arts Festival, Panjim; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, Dundee. Her interests extend to material culture, and with designer Rashmi Varma, she wrote SĀR: The Essence of Indian Design, published by Phaidon Press (2016). Curated exhibitions include In Order to Join – the Political in a Historical Moment, an exhibition of global feminisms at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, and CSMVS, Mumbai, India (2014-2015); HERE: Locating Contemporary Canadian Artists (2017), Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, and CONSTITUTIONS (2021) at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal. She has been a Research Fellow with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, Canada, and an International Fellow with the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Germany. Her artwork and research has been supported by SSHRC, Canada Council for the Arts, and Ontario Arts Council. She has been a juror for the Sobey Art Award (2019), and is currently on the board of SAVAC.
