Past events

The finest collection of Chinese ceramics outside China can be seen in the Sir Percival David Collection gallery in the British Museum in London. Created by Sir Percival David (1896-1964) in the first half of the 20th century, the collection contains some of the rarest and most valuable pieces in the world today and is a benchmark for dating, identification and scholarship.

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Lecture by Melody Rod-Ari.

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The digital mediates nearly every aspect of the work that we, as art historians, do today: from word processing, smartphone photography, and image file storage to museum and library database searches. More than merely a tool, the digital carries the potential to radically transform the means by which we perceive, document, preserve, organize, and present the objects and spaces that we study.

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Viewing museum collections online, one will find endless references to an “artist unknown”—or, in the context of objects made in India, an artist “unknown, Indian”—displayed prominently in the topmost registers of the webpages. Other metadata, like the work’s title, date of completion, and medium, typically appear below that. As “natural” as this informational hierarchy may seem, it betrays a clear bias for cultures and periods that privilege (or have privileged) artistic authorship over and above other facets of an object’s production and use. Simply reordering the online record’s text would hardly correct this bias, for many museum collections management systems reproduce the very same hierarchies.

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The second event in the 2023 series, Indigenous Ways of Seeing, which is co-presented by the Power Institute and the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge. Learn more about the Wapatah Centre and the series here.

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Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic volatility have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, scientists, and governments towards computational technologies as sites of potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and “crisis”.

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White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing.

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 Rex Butler & ADS Donaldson, UnAustralian Art: Ten Essays on Transnational Art

David Homewood & Paris Lettau, Ends of Painting: Art in the 1960s and 1970s

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The first event in the 2023 series, Indigenous Ways of Seeing, which is co-presented by the Power Institute and the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge. Learn more about the Wapatah Centre and the series here.

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As colonial regimes excavated and collected artifacts and disassembled monuments and transported them part-by-part to metropolitan museums, the promise they held out was of preservation: objects buried under the earth and buildings mouldering in the jungle would be rescued from the elements, from ignorant natives, from the ravages of time. In the museum, they would be kept safe for times to come. But the museum is not always hospitable to the objects it collects. This talk demonstrates this by tracking four significant architectural-scaled objects from India that were or are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum but can no longer be seen there.

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