Panel 3
Complicating Histories and Futures
Panel Chair - Dr. Jen Kennedy, Queen’s University
Friday, February 9, 2024
2:45 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. EST
Refraction Waged Against Reflection: The Centennial Commission of Waabidiziiyan Doopwining (To See Yourself at the Table)
Alexandra Box, Art History, University of Toronto
In the latter half of 2019, waabidiziiyan doopwining (to see yourself at the table) was acquired by Hart House and Art Museum at the University of Toronto as the first juried commission in the Hart House Permanent Collection since its 1922 founding. Commissioned to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Hart House, the work is stationed in the building’s Great Hall Portrait Gallery which raises paintings of Board Directors, Presidents, and analogous figures. Authored by Osvaldo Yero and Rebecca Belmore (Obishikokaang), “the mirror” responds to a mandate which states the work is “to acknowledge the history of those who came before us, to honour the land upon which we live and work today, and to imagine a more inclusive future”. This essay forms a critique around institutional inclusivity models deployed therein with attention to the exhibition site remaining highly occluded, and yet, deliberations frequent the subjectivity of an imagined public. In addition to institutional critique, the essay performs a close read of the mandate’s colonial celebratory tone refracted by Belmore and Yero materially and attitudinally.
Foregrounded in this centennial celebration is the reflective act that observes both past and present binarily. In this essay, institutional motives for the commission to historicize, disrupt, and absolve are brought into question through material analysis of mirrored aluminum. This essay moves through a critique of monumental scales; politics of recognition (Coulthard) evident in mandate; and finally, reading the reflective mirror with relational aesthetics, inter-subjectivity, and refusal. The multitude of ways inclusion models fail to meet Indigenous political calls, reify habitability, and secure the valuation of artistic labour is captured by this co-authored work. The research concludes the work operates at a different scale than mandated while refracting celebratory notions in its proliferation of the Great Hall, rather than bolstering institutional inclusivity, exceptionalism, governmentality, and capitalist temporality.
Alexandra Box is a transdisciplinary artist, art administrator, and researcher who is studying Art History at the University of Toronto. Currently, Alexandra is completing a CGS-M SSHRC-supported project on Claude Cahun and serves on the Board of Directors at Forest City Gallery, artist-run centre as the founding Chair of Policy & Governance. Alexandra’s research leaps between disablement in art, artist personae, extractivism, institutional critique, and anti-fascisms. Alexandra’s work has been published by Painwise Press, Peripheral Review and The Capilano Review.
Resistance in Conformity: Women Artists under the Nazi Regime
Alexandra Chafe, Art History, Queen’s University
In the construction of Nazi society, German women were idealized as mothers and wives who would stay at home to care for the children of the Reich. This vision suggests that women were not individuals, and creative, artistic, and impactful production in the public and political areas was difficult, if not impossible. However, scholarship has abolished this constructed subjugation, showing women were vital members of the public sphere. Nevertheless, very little research has been conducted on women artists in the Third Reich, with scholars concentrating instead on women as subject matter. This presentation looks at these artists under the Nazi regime, the spaces in which their art was exhibited despite repression and frames their erasure in modern scholarship. I explore the careers of artists of varied backgrounds, including Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Ida Dehmel, and Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, to offer a nuanced vision of the women who produced in Nazi Germany. Looking first at their artistic work and careers in liaison with their institutional allegiances and their varying degrees of support, I propose the conditions for women artists to operate under the Nazi regime. Second, in differentiating their allowed spaces of exhibition, private, public, or political, I analyze how the regime consolidated the creative presence of women artists with their idealized vision of motherhood. Finally, I explore how women artists’ work was erased within the regime and afterwards and the resulting absence of studies on women artists in the first half of the 20th century in Germany. This limited, but not less expansive, overview observes how women artists had to mitigate the restrictions of their gender, their artistic capacities, and the alliances with a repressive, oppressive, and murderous ideology. It proposes continued research into their work as an examination of different forms of resistance in conformity.
Alexandra Ruby Chafe is a second-year M.A. student in Art History at Queen’s University, Canada. She graduated with distinction with a Bachelor of Arts at McGill University, majoring in Art History and minoring in German, Italian, and European Culture and Literature. Her research interests are art in Germany and Austria in the first half of the 20th century, women’s rights, and women artists. She is also interested in provenance studies, having attended the “Provenance in Action” workshop in London held by the Society of Antiquaries and volunteering at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in their provenance department. Her thesis focuses on the artist Elena Luksch-Makowsky, motherhood, independence, and conformity under the Nazi Regime. SSHRC and OGS have supported this research. Research and retellings are central to Ms. Chafe’s goal of bringing new life to works and artists that have been forgotten or underestimated.
subRosa and Reproductive Health: Tracing the History of 1990s Cyberfeminist Activism
Anna Douglas, Art History, Queen’s University
In the aftermath of the leaked Supreme Court draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, activist Elizabeth McLaughlin sent a tweet warning against the use of period tracking apps, as the data they store could be used in court proceedings as US states began to criminalize abortion. McLaughlin’s tweet summarizes the entanglement of technology, surveillance culture, and reproductive bodies under capitalism. More specifically, the tweet shows how the same technologies developed to support informed choice in reproductive health could be turned against the people who use them. This paper returns to the past, to the cyberfeminist practices of the art collective subRosa, to untangle some of the complexities between technology and reproductive healthcare in the present. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, subRosa created works such as the newsletter @SecondOpinion (1999), the parodic SmartMom (2000), and The Sex and Gender Education Show (2002) which examined how then-novel reproductive health technologies complicate, and in some cases circumvent, bodily agency through their inherent surveillant and extractive tendencies. subRosa’s art practice used digital tools when, at the time, the Internet became increasingly participatory and transformed into the social web, otherwise known as Web 2.0. subRosa also used performance, a medium associated with feminist activism from the 1970s, to bring the body into focus in discourses related to reproductive healthcare. This paper re-centres subRosa’s networked approach to reproductive activisms in art history and analyzes how their art critiques the seemingly invisible power of surveillance embedded into technologies meant for emancipation. subRosa’s artworks provide a critical perspective to reproductive rights and healthcare at the onset of the technological age, addressing the same issues encapsulated in McLaughlin’s tweet 20 years later.
Anna Douglas is an MA candidate in Art History at Queen’s University. Her graduate research focuses on the art collective subRosa and their contributions to cyberfeminisms in the late-1990s and early-2000s. More broadly, her research explores feminist art practices that are grounded in networked technologies and performance. Anna centres feminist, queer, and post-colonial theories in her research, exploring the uses of technology as a medium in art histories, and technology’s relationship to alternative publics. Anna has co-curated several exhibitions at Union Gallery, including What Are You Reading?, Creating Communities Through Art, and Creating Desire Lines: Pathways to a Counter Education.
Feedback, Fugitivity, and Overexposure in Monique Walton’s Dark Matters
Francesca C. DiBona, Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Queen’s University
What does it mean for the image to screech, to explode, to force away our gaze as it searches for singularities? There are an infinite many ways of becoming fugitive, a critical position defined by James Edward Ford III as “the artful escape of objectification.” Monique Walton’s 2013 film Dark Matters paradoxically masters the sounds and images of fugitivity through the use of overexposure, feedback, and static. This work approaches Walton’s fugitive practices through an Afrofuturist lens, calling on Autumn Womack’s discussion of overexposure in Zora Neale Hurston’s Fieldwork Footage and Rasheedah Philip’s interpretation of Afrofuturism’s non-linear consideration of time as invoking micro/macro time and retrocausality — all time happens at once as past and future shape the present as the present shapes the past and future. To analyze Afrofuturism from a fugitive perspective is not just to analyze storylines that focus on African diasporic subjects, but also how the filmmakers surpass the limitations of filmic strategy to approach the uncommunicable aspects of Black experience. Afrofuturism can bring a new, fugitive imagination to an audience often fed settler singularities, rewriting the dominant presuppositions about the future that may instead center the nuance of Black history and the present effect of slavery and colonialism in the contemporary Black experience. And, as we see in Dark Matters, new futures can be formally imagined, allowing filmmakers to depict Black experiences not as visual truths that can be neatly packaged, but as something that exists outside the containments of traditional imaging modes.
Francesca C. DiBona is a graduate student in Queen's University's Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program. She holds a BA in Critical Media Studies and Urban Education from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. Expanding on her experience working in maker spaces, restorative justice education, and participatory media activism, she focuses on new ways of learning, being, and storytelling pasts/futures. Working in both textual and essayistic media forms, her scholarly work concerns topics of transgression theory, foreignness, futurisms, and fugitivity.