ARTH 450 Advanced Seminar in the History of Art and Architecture: Artists, Archives and Counter Histories in Canada

• Instructor: Dr. Gabrielle Moser

This undergraduate seminar addresses the archive — institutional and informal — as a place where historical narratives are made, and contested, by artists, curators, museum educators and art critics working in Canada since 1945. Understanding the archive as a site of conflict that unsettles any static sense of self, national identity, or of colonial history as continuous and already complete, the course begins from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s foundational concept of “potential history” to examine the crucial role artists, art historians and curators have played in intervening in the archive. We will examine key works by Krista Belle Stewart, Julietta Singh and Chase Joynt, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Hajra Waheed, Camille Turner, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Stan Douglas, and David Hartt, among many others, whose research methods and creative practices offer rich lessons in un-learning the archive.

A further aim of the seminar is to open up the problematic binary of theory and practice. By bringing together texts about the archive from scholars working in philosophy, museum studies, gender and feminist studies, history, art history, psychoanalysis and queer theory, the course will examine the critical potential of counter archives in advancing the work of reparation and reconciliation in present-day Canada. Assignments will offer students the opportunity to explore conceptual, institutional, informal and individual archives through field trips, guest speakers and final projects that study or emerge from a real-world archive.