ARTH 663 Art History and Social Justice: Dark Aesthetics
- Dr. Balbir Singh
This seminar will explore the concept of “going dark” as a mode of engaging art and visual culture in relation to processes of visibility, invisibility, hypervisibility, and surveillance for racialized peoples. The goals of our class are to centre struggles for racial justice, including those against surveillance, policing, and prisons, while at the same time grappling with the vexed relationship between such politics with the arts and with culture. Units in the class will span several fields, including foundational texts in theories of race and anti-colonialism; documentary film; photography; Black studies in art and visual culture; Asian and Arab diasporic art and theories of embodiment; and so forth. We will consider questions salient to discourse around race and representation, capture and consumption, and erasure and evasion.
Sandra Mujinga, Spectral Keepers, 2020. Tulle fabric, cotton fabric, nylon thread, threaded rods, wire clamps, and cellular concrete, four figures, 109 7/16 × 31 1/2 × 15 3/4 in. (278 × 80 × 40 cm) each; four baskets, 30 5/16 × 30 5/16 × 38 3/16 in. (77 × 77 × 97 cm) each. Private collection. © Sandra Mujinga. Photo: Plastiques, courtesy the artist and The Approach, London
