Symposium explores Gendered Threads of Globalization

by | Mar 7, 2023 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research

Who makes our clothing? How has the shift from artisanal production to “fast fashion” over the last 150 years devalued women’s textile labor in Asia? How are heritage textile/garment traditions across Asia being preserved and revived by laborers and the organizations that support them?

Hosted by Art History & Visual Studies professor Melia Belli Bose, Gendered Threads of Globalization: 20th century Textile Crossings in Asia Pacific (GToG) united scholars, activists and artists from across North America, Asia and Europe for a three-day symposium dedicated to these issues in March 2023 . . . after twice being delayed due to the pandemic.  

The free GToG events included discussion panels, a screening of Cathy Stevulak’s award-winning documentary THREADS and a textile-based performance by visual artist Monica Jahan Bose.

Organizer Belli-Bose was interviewed ahead of the event by CBC Radio’s All Points West (sadly, the interview was only live and not archived online) and was featured in this article which ran in India’s Telegraph newspaper.

“We hosted approximately 30 scholars, artists and textile experts from various countries in Asia, Europe and North America,” Belli-Bose told the Telegraph. “I conceived this conference to unite those working with heritage textile study, revival, and preservation in different Asian cultures. We focused on women’s roles as textile makers, cultural stewards, activists working for recognition and safe working conditions, and designers. The gendered angle is rooted in the fact that women have always had an integral role in textile production, from sericulture in East Asia to making nakshi kanthas in Bengal and phulkaris in Punjab to indigo in Southeast Asia.”

A scene from Cathy Stevulak’s documentary THREADS

About GToG

Gendered Threads of Globalization: 20th c. Textile Crossings in Asia gathered specialists from a range of academic disciplines and artistic/artisanal practices to discuss intersections of gender, textiles/garments/fashion, labour and heritage across Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Taiwan, Japan, and the diaspora) during the long 20th century (ie: late 19th century to present).

GToG participants investigated topics like

  • heritage textiles/garments—their demise and revival
  • gendered labor in the fashion industry
  • confluences of identity (regional, communal, ethnic, religious), domesticity and agency
  • activist art that critiques the global garment industry
  • the evolution, consumption, appropriation and display of heritage textiles/garments.

Keynote address

Friday’s keynote speech featured Ashoka Fellow Judy Frater on “Threads of Identity in Kutch 2022: Gender, Value, Creativity and the Marketplace” (4:20pm in Fine Arts 103). Judy Frater is steeped in the world of contemporary textiles of Kutch, India. Residing in Kutch for 30 years, she co-founded and operated Kala Raksha, a cooperative for women embroiderers, established the Kala Raksha Textile Museum, founded Kala Raksha Vidhyalaya. the first design school for traditional artisans, and reinvented the school as Somaiya Kala Vidya.

A scene from Monica Jahan Bose’s WRAPture

Live performance

Sunday’s live performance featured the work of Orion Visiting Artist Monica Jahan Bose, a Bangladeshi-American artist and activist whose work spans painting, film, photography, printmaking, performance, and interdisciplinary projects.

Her short film, WRAPture: A Public Art Project was also screened at the event, and was followed by a live textile-based performance in the lobby of UVic’s David Lam Auditorium.

WRAPture follows a climate justice art project from Washington DC’s low-income Anacostia neighborhood to Barobaishdia—a remote Bangladeshi island on the frontlines of climate change—as Jahan Bose leads a dozen women farmers and over 200 Washingtonians to co-create 65 climate-themed saris, which wrap five Washington buildings. While they work on the saris, the participants recite poetry, sing, and dance, creating a trans-border community. The film includes rare footage and testimony of the impacts of climate change on coastal women farmers and the power of art to bring about change.

Orion Series presents Josh Tengan

by | Jan 30, 2023 | Events, indigenous, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, Visual Arts

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Josh Tengan

Visiting curator 

7:30pm (PST) Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Room A162, Visual Arts building + streaming online

Free & open to the public

Click here for the Zoom session 

 

Presented by UVic’s Department of Visual Arts  & Open Space Gallery

For more information on this lecture please email: visualarts@uvic.ca

Josh Tengan is a Honolulu-based contemporary art curator. He was the assistant curator of the second Honolulu Biennial 2019, To Make Wrong / Right / Now.

Join us for this free talk at 7:30pm Wed Jan 11 in the Visual Arts building room A162. You can also watch the talk live via Zoom.

About Josh Tengan

Josh Tengan is a curator and cultural producer from Pauoa, Kona, O’ahu, Hawai’i. He is a generational islander of Kānaka ‘Ōiwi, Ryu-kyuan, and Madeiran descent. His curatorial practice centers on art of Hawai’i
and Moananuiākea. Tengan currently serves as associate director for both Hawai’i Contemporary, the non-profit arts organization that presents the Hawai’i Triennial, as well as Pu’uhonua Society, one of Hawai’i’s oldest arts organizations.

Wayfinders, the ones we breathe with | January to October 2023

Throughout 2023, Open Space will present a series of exhibitions, residencies and events under the title Wayfinders, the ones we breathe with. Breathing together across the shared ocean in cultural, environmental and molecular exchange. Through the work of artists from coastal neighbours and nations across the Pacific Ocean, Wayfinders recalls ancient way finding practices utilizing the stars, wind, water and land markers to find paths across the sea and into the intertwined histories, practices, migrations and contemporary lives of adjacent homelands.

To begin the series, we are excited to welcome Honolulu-based curator Josh Tengan in residence at Open Space from January 26 to February 4, 2023. Josh will connect with folks involved in Tide Lines: Coastal Resistance of the 60s and 70s and the Indigenous Emerging Artist Program

Image to the right: Ihumātao, Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. A growing occupation by Māori, especially the iwi of Māngere, and their allies to protect and conserve the whenua from a high‐cost housing development planned by Fletcher Building.

 

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Free and open to the public  |  Seating is limited (500 Zoom connections) |  Visit our online events calendar at www.events.uvic.ca

Orion Series presents Kade L. Twist

by | Jan 5, 2023 | Events, indigenous, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, Visual Arts

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Kade L. Twist

Visiting interdisciplinary artist 

7:30pm (PST) Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Room A162, Visual Arts building + streaming online

 Free & open to the public

Click here for the Zoom session 

 

Presented by UVic’s Department of Visual Arts

For more information on this lecture please email: visualarts@uvic.ca

Our first Orion Visiting Artist of 2023 is award-winning interdisciplinary artist Kade L. Twist: citizen of the Cherokee Nation, professor at LA’s Otis College of Art & Design and co-founder of the interdisciplinary Postcommodity artist collective. Working with video, sound, interactive media, text and installation environments, Twist’s art examines the unresolved tensions between market-driven systems, consumerism and American Indian cultural self-determination. 

Join us for this free talk at 7:30pm Wed Jan 11 in the Visual Arts building room A162. You can also watch the talk live via Zoom.

About Kade Twist

A US Artist Klein Fellow for Visual Arts (2015) and recipient of the Native Writers Circle First Book Award, Kade Twist has exhibited work nationally and internationally both individually and as part of Postcommodity.

Postcommodity’s work has been included in the Sydney Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Carnegie International and documenta 14, as well as numerous solo exhibitions including the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, San Francisco Art Institute, LAXArt, Scottsdale Museum of Art, Remai Modern Museum and their historic land art installation Repellent Fence at the US/Mexico border in Arizona/Sonora.

Image to the right: Postcommodity’s 2020 installation, “Let Us Pray For the Water Between Us” (Minneapolis Institue of Art, courtesy of Postcommodity & Bokley Gallery). 

 

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Free and open to the public  |  Seating is limited (500 Zoom connections) |  Visit our online events calendar at www.events.uvic.ca

South Asian Art History Student Symposium

by | May 31, 2022 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Faculty, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, Visual Arts

Interested in exploring the fascinating history of South Asian art? Don’t miss the South Asian Art History Student Symposium, hosted by our Department of Art History & Visual Studies.

Join leading and emerging historians of South Asian art history as they present research on diverse topics from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh running from the ancient to contemporary eras.

This free hybrid event runs from 10am to 5:30pm on Saturday, June 4 in room 103 of the Fine Arts building, but can also be viewed online via Zoom.

Keynote speaker Rebecca Brown

Schedule of events:

  • Welcome coffee: 9:30am
  • Plenary talk with Dr Dulma Karunarathna: 10:20am
  • Keynote/Orion talk with Dr Rebecca Brown on “Modern Ecologies: KCS Paniker’s Painted Gardens”: 1:00pm

All are welcome to attend!

Thanks to our partners for this event, including UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts, the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives and the Centre for Global Studies.

Orion Series presents Rebecca Brown

by | May 31, 2022 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Rebecca Brown

Professor & Chair, Department of Art History, Johns Hopkins University

 

“Modern Ecologies: KCS Paniker’s Painted Gardens” 

 

1:00pm (PST) Saturday, June 4, 2022

Room 103, Fine Arts building + streaming online

 

Free & open to the public

Part of the South Asian Art History Student Symposium

Register here for the Zoom session 

 

Presented by UVic’s Department of Art History & Visual Studies

For more information on this lecture please email: arthistory@uvic.ca

Dr. Rebecca M. Brown’s research engages in the history of art, architecture and visual culture of South Asia from the late 18th century to the present. She is particularly interested in the tensions and struggles that emerge within visual culture at moments that present themselves as transitional (but usually do not constitute a true “break”)—the early British presence on the subcontinent, the anti-colonial movement of the early twentieth century, the decades after India’s independence in 1947, and the economic and political machinations of the long 1980s.

Her current research focuses on the painting and editorial work of K.C.S. Paniker (1911–77) as it evinces a rich mode of experimentation with gesture, colour and line to deeply question the foundations of knowing in a fraught postcolonial linguistic and political landscape of southern India.

“Throughout my work, I am attentive to the interplay between space and the activities it shapes and enables, as well as the temporality of movement, performance, and duration as embodied by textiles, photographs, paintings, and people,” she says. “At the core of each of these engagements lies an attentive commitment to visual culture in its materiality, its instability, its active role for history, and its reconstitution in different epistemes under changing political demands.”

Paniker’s work explodes with vibrant life, both vegetal and animal, all carefully arranged alongside the marks humans make to seek understanding of the world: writing, math, charts, and astrology. His work thus presents an ecology of human-animal-plant mutuality, one of painted, curated modernist “gardens.”

 

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Free and open to the public  |  Seating is limited (500 Zoom connections) |  Visit our online events calendar at www.uvic.ca/events

Orion Series presents Smum iem Matriarch Marilyn James

by | Apr 21, 2022 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Marilyn James

Smum iem Matriarch, Autonomous Sinixt 

“Counter mapping and Sinixt Resurgence” 

12:30pm (PST) Monday, May 16, 2022

Online webinar 

Free & open to the public via Zoom

Register here

Presented by UVic’s Department of Art History & Visual Studies

For more information on this lecture please email: arthistory@uvic.ca

Marilyn James is a Smum iem Matriarch appointed by her Sinixt elders to uphold Sinixt protocols and laws in the Sinixt təmxʷúlaʔxʷ (homeland) under the laws of whuplak’n and smum iem. Her work has included the repatriation of 64 ancestral remains from museums and collections back to their rightful places in Nk̓ʕáwxtən, “a place for praying,” (Vallican).

She was the appointed spokesperson for the Sinixt Nation in Canada from 1990 to 2013. She continues her work as Smum iem Matriarch and knowledge-keeper for Sinixt. She is an accomplished storyteller of traditional and contemporary Sinixt stories as well as the co-author of Not Extinct: Keeping the Sinixt Way (Maa Press, 2018, 2021). Marilyn holds a Masters of Education from Simon Fraser University and has worked extensively in the field of curriculum development. She is an ardent advocate for her ancestors and the land and water of their təmxʷúlaʔxʷ.

Sinixt təmxʷúlaʔxʷ was divided by the Canada-US border with 80% of Sinixt territory is in what is now known as southeastern BC and the other 20% in what is now called Washington State. Find out more here.

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Free and open to the public  |  Seating is limited (500 Zoom connections) |  Visit our online events calendar at www.uvic.ca/events