Past programs

Sydney Asian Art Series: Troubling Images

Each year, the Sydney Asian Art Series gathers leading international voices on critical issues in early, modern and contemporary Asian art.

In 2022, the Sydney Asian Art Series introduces its audience to a spectrum of innovative new research on the experience of photography in Asian art.

Given the ubiquity of photographic images, the history of photography – from its nineteenth century origins through to its emergence as one of the defining media of the twentieth century – seems familiar and somehow universal. Yet recent scholarship has been rethinking this familiar history, interrogating photography’s central role in shaping the Asian region, and at the same time revealing how Asian photo histories contribute to a richer understanding of photography and the role of ‘mechanical images’ today. (Read more about the series below.)

This series is convened by art historian, curator and editor Dr Olivier Krischer.

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Art in Place

“Art in Place” is a collaboration between The Power Institute and Honi Soit. It brings student attention to the important artworks by Indigenous artists on campus, to reflect on their mediation of place, and to provide a platform for students to write and publish their reflections.

Honi Soit is the weekly print and digital student newspaper of the University of Sydney. Established in 1929, Honi is made both by and for students, covering news, culture, analysis and more.

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Ways of Being

A series of conversations amplifying the rich Indigenous systems of knowledge that persist in Country. This series will move beyond the homogenising binary of Indigenous / Western, and instead highlight the plurality of Indigenous epistemologies in Australia, as well as the points of commonality between them.

Series convened by Stephen Gilchrist, Deputy Director of the Power Institute, and lecturer in Indigenous Art at the University of Sydney.

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Image Complex: Art, Visuality & Power

Images and artworks exist not simply as objects to be admired or interpreted, but as part of a vast visual infrastructure that governs our lives, shaping what we see, who we are, and what we can do. This infrastructure is what Meg McLagan and Yates McKee call the “image complex”.

This series introduces new scholarship on the way visuality shapes the history and politics of identity, technology and imperialism.

Series convened by Nick Croggon, Events and Programs Officer at the Power Institute

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2021 Sydney Asian Art Series: Art and Environment

Each year, the Sydney Asian Art Series gathers leading international voices on critical issues in early, modern and contemporary Asian art.

In 2022, series convenor Olivier Krischer assembled four of the field’s leading scholars to consider photography’s role in shaping the Asian region, and how this history enriches our understanding of the image today.

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Linework: Lines, Lineages and Networks in Indigenous Art

This series explores the rich history of Indigenous linework, from the specific techniques of line-drawing that express Indigenous philosophies of self and community, to the methodologies of storytelling and network building that join Indigenous people to their past, and to other Indigenous communities across Australia and the world.

The Power Institute’s collaboration with Julie Nagam and Gerald McMaster is made possible by a grant from the Terra Foundation.

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2020 Sydney Asian Art Series: Art & Technology

2020 Sydney Asian Art Series: Art and Technology

Each year, the Sydney Asian Art Series gathers leading international voices on critical issues in early, modern and contemporary Asian art.

In response to the cancellation of in-person events, the 2020 series has moved online. As we embrace this virtual format, the 2020 series aptly explores the intersections of art and visual technologies, in the context of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Asia.

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Image Complex: Art, Visuality & Power in the United States 2020-2021

Image Complex: Art, Visuality and Power in the United States 2020-2021

This online lecture series, which took place between September 2020 and May 2021, investigated the visual infrastructures that have shaped the United States, and the practices that have, and continue to, resist them.

This series is co-presented by the Power Institute, and Discipline journal.

Design by Robert Milne.

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2019 Sydney Asian Art Series: Art and Urban Cultures

The 2019 Sydney Asian Art Series presents four leading international voices on early, modern and contemporary Asian art, addressing the theme Art and urban cultures.

From Isfahan to Edo, Kaifeng to Kolkata—cities have been major subjects, patrons and audiences for all fields of art. Indeed, the arts are part of the very fabric of urban life. These lectures explore the intersection of art, film and architecture in a range of Asian cities, historical and contemporary, considering urban spaces as sites of taste-making and sensorial plenty, as models for imagined futures, as vessels for us to recognise shared pasts, and as stages for the formation of political identities.

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2018 Sydney Asian Art Series: Uncertain Objects, Trajectories of Asian Art

Each year, the Sydney Asian Art Series gathers leading international voices on critical issues in early, modern and contemporary Asian art.

The 2018 series tracked the theme “Uncertain Objects: Trajectories of Asian Art.”

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Past programs