The McGill Art History & Communications Studies Graduate Student Association (AHCS GSA) invites you to turn a critical eye on Montreal’s 375th anniversary.

​

While No One Was Looking presents an exhibition, magazine, artist/scholar panel discussion, film screening of The Saver at Le Salon 1861 , and satellite exhibit on-campus, that commemorate Montreal as a city of Indigenous peoples, peoples of colour, and immigrants. The project aims to make space for dialogue and encounter around decolonial concepts of place and agency, foreground marginalized experiences and histories, and decenter dominant celebrations of colonialism.

​

The exhibition vernissage and magazine release will take place on Friday, April 28, 2017 from 7 – 11 pm at MainLine Gallery, an accessible venue on the corner of St. Laurent and Napoléon. The exhibition will remain free and open to the public for two weeks; complimentary copies of the magazine will be available.

​

The exhibition features works by Montreal-based artists who assert a universal right to the city through varying media, perspectives, and cultural memories.

​

:::::::::::::::::::

Participating artists:

​

Fanny Aïshaa
http://www.fannyaishaa.com

​

Ifeoma Anyaeji
http://www.ifeomaanyaeji.com

​

Cécilia Bracmort
http://www.cecibephotography.com

​

Kevin Calixte
http://kevincalixte.com

​

JJ Levine
http://www.jjlevine.com

​

Maliciouz
http://www.maliciouz.com

​

Shanna Strauss
http://www.shannastrauss.co

​

:::::::::::::::::::

​

Art/iculation magazine is a bilingual publication that includes articles and artworks by graduate students at McGill, Concordia, UQAM and UdeM that reflect on often-overlooked experiences and histories.

​

The magazine takes its name from “The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies” (1996) by Jennifer Daryl Slack who argues “articulation can be understood as a way of characterizing a social formation without falling into the twin traps of reductionism and essentialism” (112). This concept captures the spirit of While No One Was Looking which aims to make space for nuanced works that share marginalized experiences, perspectives and subject matters.

​

Complimentary copies of Art/iculation magazine will be available at MainLine Gallery from April 28 – May 6. Articles will also be available online at articulationmagazine.com.

​

:::::::::::::::::::

​

Contributions by:

​

Mira Baba
Lindsay Corbett
Itzel Danae Dorantes
Ayanna Dozier
Sandra Evoughlian
Kyrstin Felts
Kirsten Gerrie
Joana Joachim
La Reine
Victoria Lessard
Sofia Misenheimer
Christina Marie Phelps
Boris Romero
Jonathan Fraser Rouleau
Unceded Voices Collective

​

Also featuring interviews with:
Dr. Charmaine Nelson, Art History, McGill University
Dr. Clarence Epstein, Urban & Cultural Affairs, Concordia University

​

:::::::::::::::::::

​

This project marks the first of its kind designed, organized, and curated by the Art History and Communication Studies Graduate Student Association (AHCS GSA) at McGill University. The organizing committee hopes it will serve as a launching point for future such events and a continued department publication.

​

Working within a feminist, anti-oppressive framework, committee members endeavour to provide an intersectional representation of this year’s theme, "While No One Was Looking", and foster an environment that is inclusive of all artists, magazine contributors, and exhibition guests. We rely on intercultural networking, collaboration, and creative design to achieve these goals.

​

All project planning occurs during committee meetings. Participation is completed on a volunteer-basis, with tasks taken up by members with related experience, or interest in developing a new skill. The organizing committee represents a group of like-minded individuals who embrace an intersectional and collaborative practice of feminism.

​

Organizing Committee:

Victoria Lessard (Art History), Sofia Misenheimer (Communication Studies), Sandra Evoughlian (Art History), Lindsay Corbett (Art History), Joana Joachim (Art History)

“The act of magic, via the measured repetition of the ritual, reveals the ordinary object as extraordinary and impacts its meaning within the objective fabric of reality. Paradoxically, in magic, the object speaks of both familiarity and otherness, revitalizing man’s awareness of the uniqueness of his surroundings, but also pointing out the continuity between the human subject and the phenomenal object.” [Emphasis ours] ---Aga Skrodzka, Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe (2014)

​

The Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University is pleased to announce this year's Faculty and Emerging Scholars symposium, “Magic: Between Embodiment and Ontology.” The two-day interdisciplinary symposium will be held at McGill University on February 19th-20th, 2016. The conference seeks to engage and support graduate scholarship from Canada and abroad.

Keynote Speakers:

Professor of Art & Architecture at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Liliana Leopardi 

&

Ph.D. Candidate in the Performance Studies Department at New York University, Aliza Shvarts

The aim of this symposium is to examine the ways in which magic, in any incarnation, is used as both a transformative element to inspire civil action as well a communicative channel for intersubjective relations. The symposium seeks to trace magic’s communicative capacities through material culture

The scope in which magic interacts and/or informs scholarship is broad and we hope for the conference to capture a snapshot of the ways in which magic affects material culture. The symposium will examine the roles in which magic or the mystic has played and generate a productive dialogue around such topics as alchemy, the occult, esoteric, rituals, science, early technology, spiritualism, etc.

Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. […]There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction)

Silence plays the irreducible role of that which bears and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can emerge. (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference)

What is silence? How is it kept or broken? Silence is often used to describe who and what is repressed and subjugated: “being silenced” and “not having a voice.” This conference aims to explore the relations between silence, the unspeakable and the unheard, as well as the ways in which silence is represented, interpreted, and subverted.

John Cage visited Harvard University’s anechoic chamber in 1951, a year before composing his silent piece 4’33”. In this room that muted all environmental sounds, Cage heard the low and high sounds of his blood churning and his nervous system rushing: “There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.” Cage’s denial of the absence of sound and consideration of contingent sounds reveals the pervasive rhythm of life and the impossibility of silence.

The “linguistic turn” in contemporary philosophy exposed silences by attempting to elucidate the limits of language and intelligibility. If we consider silence to be a moment in language, rather than something which lies outside of it, how can we interpret and listen to silence? In the Preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” Although he denies that ideas that cannot be reduced to logical states of affairs can be meaningfully expressed through language, Wittgenstein recognizes that these silences can be expressed through means other than language. The limits of language outlined by Wittgenstein shed light on the exclusionary powers of speech and communication, and the ways in which silence and discourse are strategically employed in power relations.

As Derrida points out, silence is the source of all language. Rather than positing silence as an absolute negation of speech, Derrida suggests that it is a necessary condition for the possibility of meaning. Listening to the haunting echoes that lie on the horizon of sound, just beyond our hearing, entails perceiving the absences that allow sounds to be heard. Nevertheless, silencing often operates as a tool to establish power and exclude. Theorists and philosophers such as Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha and Edward Said have sought to reveal the epistemic silences of our social and political structures. If silence has become a form of quiet consent in an age where power and language are one, how can we rethink silence as an expression of resistance or subversion? By creating a silent space where the voices of the “unspoken” can be heard, how can silence resist and subvert dominant discourses? How can we be attuned to the cacophony of silences and their multiple meanings?

The concept of innovation buttresses a paradigmatically modern Western belief in the possibility of infinite economic growth and technological progress. It is in fact a buzzword with remarkable contemporary currency, one that is instrumentalized as a constant search for new technologies, means of production, market adaptations, scientific discoveries and social changes. As a fundamental tenet in Western systems of thought, it is also – and has long been – inscribed within the West’s very view of itself as more successful and more ‘progressive’ than other societies. Note, for example, G.W.F. Hegel’s famous juxtaposition of Europe’s ever-changing art against the allegedly stagnant visual culture of India: the first modality accounted for the privileged position of the West as the locus of the emanation of universal Geist; while the latter stipulated an essentially ‘un-progressive’ timelessness in India.

The Western valuation and definition of innovation has thereby been mobilized as a justification for diverse colonial, post-colonial and now neoliberal enterprises. It operates as a smoke screen to preserve dominant power regimes both within the West and globally, concealing simultaneously the biased valuation of cultural production, and the unequal distribution of technological and scientific headway among diverse social strata. This is the case even as the current global financial crisis challenges the West’s ability to regenerate perpetually. In fact, the stakes involved in the Western impetus to innovate seem to intensify even as recent projections of economic acceleration in several non-Western countries rouse fears that the West is losing ground as innovation’s main stimulant.

The innovation paradigm is moreover implicit within the bulk of humanistic academic production. As a case in point, the Greenbergian approach to art history, which dominated much of the twentieth century, revolves indisputably around a teleology of formal innovation. Meanwhile, within a number of current academic discussions – for instance those concerning experimentation and invention in the history of science (Galison); global art history (Elkins); visual culture studies (Moxey); history of ideas (Godin); the philosophy of mondialisation (Nancy); media archaeology (Parikka); technological obsolescence (Kittler); and the aesthetics of failure (Halberstam) – innovation is tacitly treated with caution, if not skepticism.

Given this tangle of collusions and complexities, how are we to approach and define innovation in academic discourse? Is the paradigm purely a means of disarming social pressure for an all-inclusive equalized prosperity; or might it be recuperated to provide a stimulus for sustainable growth? Can we understand innovation in a broader global spectrum without falling into the trap of cultural essentialism; or does this concept perpetuate Western-centric views and mores? Can the concept of innovation be used for the analysis of historical periods; or does it figure too easily in teleological narratives?
 

"We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out of the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible,”
- Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

As suggested by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the tangibility of objects is concomitant with their visibility. Both the visual and tangible properties of objects profoundly influence their cultural circulation, meaning, and value. Similarly, while visual phenomena are typically understood as immaterial, they invariably have tangible connotations and effects. To attend to the tangible, then, is to create the conditions for an interdisciplinary encounter between varied modes of perception and understanding.

Such an investigation might begin in an examination of the complex accounts of materiality. While the value placed in the tangibility of objects has never been a static constant, trends in digitization and thing theory present shifts to our stakes in the material. How do the various tangibilities of objects, art, media, and theory influence embodied and scholarly negotiations of representation and ontological meaning? In moments of uncertain materiality, do we find an over-abundance of the tangible, or its privation?

Secondly, the tangible is also an important dimension of affect and sensory studies. A wide range of present and historical images, technologies, and practices mediate and induce the tangible in all its sensorial dimensions. Across history, how have sensory experience and other tangible affects operated in the reception and circulation of art objects, technologies, and other forms of media? How might these objects and discourses be called upon to represent and induce sensation, and in what ways might this communication threaten become a form of affective labour?

Finally, the interrelated history of tangibility and visuality suggest new ways of accounting for contemporary and historical concepts of virtuality and perception. How does a focus on tangibility complicate or influence what we understand as the virtual, the immaterial, or the absent? What tangible techniques and interfaces might support a sense of presence, acts of remembrance, or empathetic exchange? Under what circumstances is this tangibility desirable?

The word “parasite” inspires fear of contagion, infestation, and disease. Parasitic metaphors pervade discourse and discussion relating to medicine, agriculture, media, politics, and the social sphere, and find expression in the arts, popular culture, and literature. Typically perceived as the agent of incursion or invasion, dependent upon a healthy body or functional system, the parasite establishes a dichotomous relationship with its support: the host feeds the carrier. But as Michel Serres characterizes it in his 1982 book, Le Parasite (The Parasite), the parasite is a quintessentially relational figure. Host and carrier are drawn into a relationship of consumption, complicity, and coercion that upsets the balance of power and underscores the ontological instability of their characterization.

Despite its negative connotations, then, how might the parasite be theorized as a positive or productive process, as a potential catalyst for non-reversible systemic change? Rather than viewing the host as innocent victim of the carrier’s colonization, could the parasitic be conceived as a subversive strategy or mobilizing manoeuvre for the overturning of problematic power structures? As a tactic, can the parasitic offer a means to share space or combine forces between two typically opposed individuals, ideas, or institutions? In the history of art, for example, the accepted practice of appropriation by unknown or under-valued artists has often contributed to their advancement by instigating a complex relay between host and carrier, encouraging a re-interpretation of their relationship. 

We propose that engaging the parasitic can re-animate discourse concerning the problematics of power, from Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, to feminism and queer studies’ opposition to patriarchy, to the project of decolonization, and beyond. It can also address the increasing interdisciplinarity of academia and contribute to the advancement of institutional critique. The parasitic is politically employed when individuals infiltrate or align themselves with a party in order to advance their own concerns. Could political parasitism result in revolution? The political and social spheres are shifting and widening with the introduction of new communications media that grant access to previously unheard individuals and individual concerns. In what ways could such actions be perceived as parasitic?  

Papers in both English and French are welcome

AHCS Conference Organizing Committee:

Reilley Bishop-Stall (Art History)

Sylvie Boisjoli (Art History)

Natalie Bussey (Art History)

Lotfi Gouigah (Communication Studies)

Sara Kowalski (Art History)

This year’s symposium will seek to interrogate the value and status of what is indiscernible to direct experience.  From the rise of nanotechnologies on the one hand to the overwhelming size and complexity of global systems and networks on the other, artistic, theoretical and daily practices are confronted with realities that lie beyond immediate perception.  Placed at the centre of artistic practice -- or even used as an interpretative prism for the tracing of lineages through the history of art -- the indiscernible offers a valuable way of entry into discussions of the invisible, the blinding, or that which lies beyond the realm of the sensible at large. Similarly, from the perspective of theoretical practice, opacity, murkiness, ambiguity, and grey areas may be thought of as obstacles to knowledge, yet we can also understand the indiscernible as a necessary aspect of knowledge production.  Thus, we may ask whether revelation requires mystery, or whether a will to action requires a poetic yearning in the face of unfathomable constraints.  

As an object of inquiry the indiscernible opens up a space of desire that motivates both thought and action.  In an age when many of us have immediate access through Internet technologies to a global storehouse of information, and perhaps an overabundance of opportunities for discernment, is the space of uncertainty shrinking along with the power of folklore and myth?  Or is the inability to discern the relative value of information felt more acutely than ever before?  In the political realm, does the indiscernible represent an impasse to judgment and action, or is it simply the constant condition of contingency that provides a ground for decision?  

Papers in both English and French are welcome.

AHCS Conference Organizing Committee:

Caroline Bem (Communication Studies)

Sara Kowalski (Art History)

Elizabeth Lista (Communication Studies)

Paulina Mickiewicz (Communication Studies)

Cayley Sorochan (Communication Studies)  

This year’s symposium will explore the various moments that make up our everyday. We wish to engage with the tensions that emerge between the real (concrete) and the perceived (represented) that manifest themselves within everyday practices that occur in specific moments in time within particular places - whether lived or imagined. The everyday, through its lived realities and other fictions, can become more than just our requisite critical ‘context’, it has the potential to become a, or perhaps the, common site of collective mediation.

As an interdisciplinary symposium we invite papers from various fields, possible presentations could pertain to: film, music, art, literature, architecture, communication, media, archives, gender and corporality, and the city, amongst others.

Papers in both English and French are welcome.

Abstracts for submission should be no more than 300 words, accompanied by a short biography or CV.

AHCS Conference Organizing Committee:

Samantha Burton (Art History)

Nadia Kurd (Art History)

Paulina Mickiewicz (Communication)

Cheryl Thompson (Communication)