Date: March 10, 2016

Time: 5:00 PM

Location: Audain Art Centre, 6398 University Boulevard, UBC

Symposium runs March 10 – 11 and Exhibition runs March 10 – April 2

The 39th Annual University of British Columbia Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory Graduate Symposium is pleased to announce that this year’s event, The Margin is the Centre, will take place from March 10– 11, 2016. The concurrent exhibition, curated by the Graduate Symposium Committee, will open from 5 – 7pm on March 10, at the AHVA Gallery in the Audain Art Centre.
The Margin is the Centre will engage with and bridge materialist, cultural, geopolitical, and medium-oriented discourses on marginality within art and art history at a moment when the stability of the centre-margin binary is rapidly deteriorating. The political and cultural potential of marginality, as well as the persistent actions of the former centre, saturates contemporary discourse and reflects the historical progression of global de-colonial efforts, globalization, and the acceleration of late capital. Artistic-activist interventions, new approaches within marginalized discourses in art history, and subalternized artistic practices and objects ask us to re-evaluate the dynamic process of constitution and identification at play in the centre-margin binary. Perhaps the decentering work required by these practices can encourage us to see each margin as a centre of its own. The AHVA Graduate Symposium proposes a self-reflexive examination of this shifting dichotomy within art and art history, as well as the social sciences and humanities at large.
The keynote speaker will be Byron Hamann, from the Department of History of Art at Ohio State University.
MARCH 10
10am–1pm: Seminar with Byron Hamann: “Marginality and (Imagined) Exhibitions” Seating is limited. To attend, RSVP to grad.symposium@ubc.ca
5pm–7pm: Exhibition opening (AHVA Gallery in the Audain Art Centre) Featuring artists:
Mallory Amirault (Emily Carr University of Art and Design)
Shannon Deer (University of British Columbia)
Yoriko Gillard (University of British Columbia/Douglas College)
Scott Mallory (Emily Carr University of Art and Design)
Alice Olsen Williams, Anishinaabe-Kwe and Joanne Ursino (University of British Columbia)
Setareh Yasan (University of British Columbia)