OSK/Stedelijk Museum/RKD visiting fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art
Making Art in the Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma: South African Imaginaries of Self and Other
Visiting Fellow: Prof. Tamar Garb – University College London
Dates: 29 May 2022 (lecture), 30, 31 May and 1 June 2022 (seminar)
Venue: Stedelijk Museum & University of Amsterdam
Convenor: Dr Sophie Berrebi (University of Amsterdam)
Open to: RMa students who are a member of OSK, (R)MA and PhD Auditors from the UvA or other Dutch universities are, however, also welcome
Credits: 6 EC
Instruction language: English
Registration: Send a CV and brief letter of motivation to Dr Sophie Berrebi (S.Y.Berrebi@uva.nl). Indicate if you would like to follow the seminar as an auditor or as a 6 EC tutorial (limited to 8 students). Application deadline: April 1.
In May 2022 RMA and PhD students in Art History and related fields will have the unique opportunity to participate in the Visiting Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art seminar, sponsored by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD), the OSK, and the Universiteit van Amsterdam.
The aim of the Visiting Fellow in the History of Modern and Contemporary Art seminar is to provide MA students with the opportunity to study a single or a cluster of topics in twentieth and twenty-first century art history and become acquainted in the work of a strong and singular voice in the field through an intensive one-week workshop.
The seminar will introduce students to important issues in the study of modern and contemporary art and furnish students with a stimulus for further research. Its aim is to further knowledge in art history by introducing them to the work of a leading scholar and their thinking. In this way, it both delivers factual information on one or several topic, but more crucially, it encourages students to understand and practice different methodologies and theories within recent art history.
Programme
This course will engage with South African Photography, from Colonialism to the Contemporary. It will range from discussions around anthropology, ethnography and the commodification/instrumentalization of ‘Black bodies, to the aesthetics of resistance during Apartheid and the counter-poetics of quotidian life exemplified by the work of Santu Mofokeng. It will culminate in a discussion of the revolutionary moment represented by Rhodes Must Fall and the debates/practices that the removal of Colonial statues and symbols unleashed.
Master seminars:
Thinking with South African Photography: Then and Now.
The theme for each seminar will be as follows:
1. Ethnographic Photography and the Eroticization/Aestheticization of ‘Native’ Life.
2. Apartheid’s Interstices: Santu Mofokeng and the Site/Sound of the Everyday
3. Rhodes Must Fall, Performance and the Photographic Archive.
Prof. Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London. Her research has focused on questions of gender and sexuality, the woman artist and the body in nineteenth and early twentieth century French art. Key publications include Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth Century Paris (Yale University Press, 1994) and The Painted Face, Portraits of Women in France 1814 -1914 (Yale University Press, 2007). Her more recent work addresses post apartheid culture and art as well as the history of photographic practices in South Africa. She has notably curated a number of exhibitions in this field, including, in 2008 Land Marks/Home Lands; Contemporary Art from South Africa at Haunch of Venison Gallery in London, in 2011 Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and in 2014/15 Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, Walther Collection, New York, Neu Ulm and Berlin. Her article ‘Painting/Politics/Photography: Marlene Dumas, Mme Lumumba and the Image of the African Woman’ appeared in the journal Art History, in 2020.
The Visiting Fellow seminar can be followed as a 6 EC tutorial (limited to 8 students). The number of places for non-UvA RMA OSK students who wish to follow the course for credits is limited. On the basis of the readings supplied, tutorial students will be expected to develop a research question and proposal, plus a bibliography on their chosen topic for a 4,000-5,000 word paper (exact length will be specified during the course), on which their grade will be based. The proposal for the paper will be discussed with the course’s teacher Dr. Sophie Berrebi. The deadline for the paper: TBC
Whether you are taking the course for credits or as an auditor, send a CV and brief letter of motivation to Dr Sophie Berrebi (S.Y.Berrebi@uva.nl). Indicate if you would like to follow the seminar as an auditor or as a 6 EC tutorial (limited to 8 students).