Panel 6
Saving Time
Panel Chair - Dr. Juliana Ribeiro da Silva Bevilacqua
Saturday, February 10, 2024
1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. EST
From Curios to Art: A Re-Interpretation of the Bishop White Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum
Kara Ma, East Asian Studies, University of Toronto
Between 1925 and 1934, Bishop William Charles White (1873-1960) acquired more than 8,000 Chinese antiquities for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). White was the Keeper of the East Asiatic Collection at the ROM and the first professor to teach Chinese archaeology at the University of Toronto (UofT) using the encyclopedic collection of Chinese objects he acquired for the ROM as his teaching materials. Drawing on material objects and archival materials, this paper focuses on the 54 pictorial tomb tiles dating to the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE - 9 CE) unearthed in Luoyang, Henan province. White acquired these tomb tiles at a time when not many collectors appreciated their value and significance within the field of Chinese art. The process of constructing meaning and classification of the tomb tiles, whether as fine specimens of ancient Chinese burial structures or as the epitome of pictorial art, was dependent on the spatial and temporal context. This was the case for many of the objects White collected for the ROM, a reflection of the field of knowledge of Chinese art as a fluid and contested space. Using these tomb tiles as a case study, this paper traces the changing definition of Chinese antiquities, from curios to specimens, to art, and White’s role in the knowledge production of China in Canada through the collecting, studying, and displaying of ancient material objects during the first half of the 20th century. By framing the development of Chinese art as an accumulation of meanings, this paper seeks to complicate the classification of Chinese things and to rethink the role objects play in bridging the past/present, east/west.
Kara Ma is a PhD Candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, where she is conducting research on the Bishop William C. White Collection of Chinese objects housed at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Prior to returning to academia in her pursuit of a doctoral degree, Kara worked as an Assistant Technician at the ROM, overseeing both the East Asian and South Asian collections, including acquisitions, gallery rotations, exhibition planning and loans. Kara also contributed to various museum catalogues on the ROM’s East Asian collections. It is this experience at the ROM that sparked her love and passion for museums and objects.
“We’re Taking It Home”: Franco-African Activists and the Move Towards Restitution
Anne Hollmuller, Institute of French Studies, New York University
In recent decades, the possession by Western museums of thousands of artifacts taken under the context of colonialism from Africa, Asia, and Oceania has become the subject of increasing controversy. Cultural activists, indigenous peoples and independent states have called for the return of significant objects and assemblages, while many museums and governments refused demands for restitution. In France, the national response to the restitution question altered abruptly, as President Macron's discourse at Ouagadougou in 2017, the release of the Sarr Savoy report in 2018, and the initiation of some major returns set off shockwaves in museums across Europe and the United States.
This paper will draw from my ongoing dissertation project, “Le Grand Retour: French Cultural Politics and The Long History of Restitution, 1993-2022,” to analyze how activists have mobilized around the colonial past and sought to build more just futures. While many accounts of recent restitutions focus on the impact of the speech at Ouagadougou and the Sarr-Savoy report, this paper will de-center the actions of French political and thought leaders and focus instead on how Afro-French activists and African leaders have advocated for and achieved acts of return. Facing legal restrictions, a powerful art market, and a conservative status quo, advocates for change have raised a conversation about historical memory, the future of museums, Franco-African relations, and the legacy of the colonial past in present.
This paper will help to record the work of restitution activists whose contributions may be forgotten as French and Western political and museum leaders increasingly appropriate the notion of restitution for their own ends. Amplifying the appeals of Emery Diyabanza, Thomas Bouli, Louis-Georges Tin, and others, this essay will show how these activists have challenged prevailing narratives and called objects into new conversations about colonial violence and postcolonial healing.
Anne L. Hollmuller is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Institute of French Studies and the Department of History at New York University. Her dissertation project, “Le Grand Retour: French Cultural Politics and The Long History of Restitution, 1993-2022,” centers on French museums and the debate over object return, analyzing the shifts in French cultural policy and their implications for a post-colonial world. Her research interests include histories of colonialism, historical memory, decolonizing museums, and contemporary cultural policy. In 2022-2023, she served as a Public Humanities Doctoral Fellow with the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation in New York, conducting provenance research on their African arts collection. Hollmuller received her BA and MA in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2018.
Tunneling Time Through Visual Archives: Fabricated Memories from Iran’s Pahlavi Era
Ali Ghasemibarghi, Theory and Criticism, Western University
It is now widely recognized that visual archives are not merely repositories of actual images of the past but rather the site of an unfinished past in which political interventions strive to shape collective memories. This article will critically analyze the "Time Tunnel" television program featured on MANOTO TV, a London-based Persian television network. It explores how the show constructs a narrative of Iran's history during the Pahlavi era, portraying it not merely as a ‘golden age,’ but, more crucially, staging it as a period of stalled progress. The series crafts an image-narrative by selectively utilizing documentary footage from Iran's National Radio and Television archives and photographs that capture daily life in 1970s Iran, sourced from popular magazines of the time.
My analysis identifies key themes within this curated narrative: the portrayal of the Pahlavi royal family as forward-thinking modernizers; showcasing industrial, economic, and cultural development; highlighting the flourishing Western youth culture among Iranians; presenting the liberties bestowed upon women; depicting the idyllic life of low-income households; and last but not least, captioning images of the peaceful quotidian as #Normal_Life, an extensively embraced hashtag among Iranian social media users, signifies a criticism of the Islamic Republic's militant ideology. Needless to say, such an idealized depiction of the Pahlavi era ignores its darker sides, such as political oppression, class disparities, and human rights abuses.
I will demonstrate that the main strategy employed in forming this narrative image is a self-aware infusion of a nostalgic ‘aura’ into the visual archival material, along with supplementing the visual remnants of the past with bits of the present and its constitutive discourses.
Finally, it will be argued that by staging an image of the past as an ‘arrested progress,’ such a fabricated memory implicitly calls for reinstituting that past in the present.
Ali Ghasemibarghi is a second-year Ph.D. student at Western University's Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. He previously pursued his master's in sociology at the University of Tehran, Iran. His theoretical interests revolve around Walter Benjamin's thought, psychoanalytic theory, and the tradition of ideology critique. His scholarly path includes translating books like Žižek and Theology (by Adam Kotsko) and Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of The Game (by Todd McGowan) into Persian.
In his recent book-length research, published electronically in Persian, he explored the representations of Ashurā, the founding event of Shi'i political theology, within contemporary Persian drama, fiction, cinema, and scholarly works in post-revolution Iran. The resulting critical constellation aimed to dismantle the unholy marriage between the epic-tragic aura of the Imam with the sacralised figure of the sovereign in ruling Shi’i political theology.
A Slippery Transnational Archive: Reconsidering the Past in the Rudolph P. Bratty Family Collection
Frances Dorenbaum, Art History and Visual Culture, York University
The Rudolph P. Bratty Family Collection consists of roughly 22,000 press prints from the larger New York Times Photo Archive that document twentieth-century Canadian events. The prints were purchased and removed from their original context in 2008 and gifted in 2017 to Toronto Metropolitan University’s Image Centre (IMC). Visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards writes: “In many ways a photograph denies history. A fragment of space and time, it defies diachronic connections, being dislocated from the flow of life from which it was extracted.” Studying this collection requires one to consider, not just what it means for the events pictured to be isolated in photographs, but also what it means to remove this body of prints from its own archival history. These news photographs, many never published, become something different as they are separated from the Times archive.
In this paper, I will consider the collection in its past form at the Times in contrast to its present form at the IMC, and outline how developments in understandings of settler-colonialism impact how one can read this nascent archive. I ask: how can one understand photographic archives, such as this one, that include a large body of unseen images made for a specific imagined public only to be read decades later through a different contemporary context? To contemplate this query, I will look at the possible priorities of the New York Times as a business selling stories versus the images as shifting artefacts historicizing a transnational identity through a comparison between unpublished images of activist Jeannette Corbiere Lavell fighting for equal status rights in contrast to published images of Queen Elizabeth II on tour in Canada.
Frances Dorenbaum works as curator of photography and is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University in Toronto, territory of many Indigenous nations and covered by Treaty 13. Her current research focuses on settler-colonial representations of Canadian national identity in twentieth-century news photographs. Most recently, she has curated exhibitions at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and the Chicago History Museum and is a guest curator for the upcoming exhibition Hypervisibility: Early Photography and Privacy in North America, 1839–1900 at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Image Centre in May 2024. She was the 2020 Elaine Ling Research Fellow at the Image Centre. She has an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA Combined Honours from the University of King’s College in Halifax.