Andrew is a working artist, curator and writer. His practice includes performance, choreographic projects, video installation and work for public space. Past work: a production of Samuel Beckett's That Time; a design for an entrance to Place des Arts, Montreal (with architects Atelier Big City); En masse, a movement project for seventy people (with choreographer Suzanne Miller); Cinéma, an outdoor performance for an audience seated indoors at the Société des arts technologiques, Montréal. Recent work: Mer Parguayenne, a building wrapped in language - a collaboration with Montreal poet Erín Moure based on the writing of Wilson Bueno (ConU EV building, 2017; photo below) and the video installation The Machine Stops, a fiction about the end of the world, recorded in Chandigarh, India (2019 - https://vimeo.com/showcase/9148438). Recent curatorial work includes seeing and not seeing, an exhibition of cowhide works by Concordia artist Mindy Yan Miller for Fondation André Forestier - Institute for the Unknown, Montreal (2021 - www.andreforestier.ca/fondation). AF’s research looks at art practice as a strange gesture for investigating the designed world and at the collision zone between art and design as a vital public space in itself. His Humanities PhD at Concordia was Clairvoyant Practices for the Designed World - The Job of the Artist is to De-Design (2020 - intro at concordia.academia.edu/AndrewForster).
Education
- Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax
- Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands
- Concordia University, Montreal
Research interests
practices called 'making'; the contested public space between art & design; art as clairvoyant practice; performance and public space
Areas of expertise
studio, cross-disciplinary practice, critical design practice, art in public space, design studies, theories of practice
Courses 2022-2023
Fall 2022:
HIST207: Early Modern Europe
Fall/Winter 2022-23:
LBCL 391: Great works in moral/political/social thought (18th-19th centuries)
Winter 2023:
LBCL 395: Great works in science (16th-20th centuries)
Courses taught
Lectures
HIST/HISW 207: Early Modern Europe
HIST 326: Reformation and Counter-Reformation
HIST 328: The Scientific Revolution
HIST 340: Early Modern Britain and Ireland
HIST 382: The Enlightenment
HIST 398: Intolerance and Toleration in Early Modern Europe
HIST 402: The Philosophy and Practice of History (Honours)
HIST 403: Methodology and History (Honours)
IRST/HIST398: Ireland in the Atlantic World (Irish Studies)
Subject seminars (offered as HIST 437/610)
Early Modern Utopias
History and Progress in the Enlightenment
Knowledge and Power in Early Modern Europe
Revolutions in Three Kingdoms: England, Scotland, and Ireland 1640-1660
Science and Early Modern Culture
Graduate and Honours students (current and graduated)
MA
Devyn Gwynne (Kenelm Digby [1603-1665] and seventeenth-century natural philosophy) (current)
Solveig Hanson, "Midwives, Knowledges, and Medical Publications in Seventeenth-Century England and Ireland" (current)
Hannah Sparwasser Soroka, "Anthropophagy in Three Keys: New World Cannibalism, the Blood Libel, and Corpse Medicine in the British Atlantic World, 1640-1660" (2021)
Rana Fahmy, MA thesis, "Re-Settling Woes and Rebellions: The Role of Irelands Natvrall History in the Cromwellian Era" (2019)
James Leduc, MA thesis, "Between Sovereignty and Conscience in the Early Modern World: Archbishop Richard Creagh and the Problem of Government in Tudor Ireland" (2017; winner of the Edward Eastman McCullough Award for best MA thesis in History)
Tyson Lowrie, MA essay, "Broadcasting Peace: UN Peacekeeping Radio Operations, 1989-Present" (2015)
Vanessa Hulewicz, MA essay, "Breeding Behaviour: Etiquette and Companionate Marriage among the British Elite, 1870-1920" (2015)
Thomas Reubens, MA essay, "Barebones of the Financial Revolution" (2013)
Honours
Molly Taylor, "Criminal and Wicked Consciences: Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery in Restoration London" (2021)
Cynthia Panneton, "The Struggle of Friends: Toleration and Persecution of Quakers in Seventeenth-Century England and New England" (2016)
Patrick Reed, "'Seized by Terror and Great Fear': Emotions as Ideology in Early Medieval Ireland" (2016)
Christopher Schütze, "Sir William Osler's View: Medical Science, Institutionalization and Community in the Nineteenth Century" (2009)
Pierre-Etienne Stockland, "'Nature Doth Everywhere Geometrize': The Ontology of the Beehive in Seventeenth-Century English Natural Philosophy" (2009; winner of the David Fox Memorial Prize for best History Honours thesis)
