ARTH 389 Issues In Ethnocultural Art Histories: Interdisciplinary Responses to Pollution and Colonialism

• Instructor: Jasmine Sihra

In the last five years, the Canadian Arts sphere has seen an explosion of artworks, exhibitions, and other arts programming that explores the intersection of artistic practice, curatorial strategies, sustainability, pollution, and climate change. What is the lineage of these practices? This seminar explores three periods in Canadian art history where art and pollution intersect, focusing on research from both the Sciences and the Arts. The majority of the course will survey a more recent period of 2012 to the present, covering artists and curators who express a relationship between pollution, colonialism, and climate change in their work through interdisciplinary research. These artists include Christina Battle (Black), Tsēma Igharas (Tahltan), Zoe Todd (Métis), Rajni Perera (Sri Lankan), and the interdisciplinary collective, The Synthetic Collective’s exhibition Plastic Heart: Surface all the way through (2021). The beginning of the course will cover two earlier periods: 1920 to 1990 where artists like the Group of Seven depicted nationalistic representations of the land and extractivist industries, like mining, and 1990-2012 where Indigenous artists in Canada exposed the relationship between the threats on Indigenous sovereignty and extractive industries, such as artists like Rebecca Belmore and Brian Jungen.