This year’s Research Network, selected through open call, will reignite debate and reflect on the concept of globalisation and new internationalism. Expanding on Iniva’s founding ideas articulated in its first symposium ‘A New Internationalism’ held at Tate Britain in 1994 and the essays published in the accompanying publication, ‘Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts’, this public programme will alternate between artist-led presentations and open reading groups, where attendees can begin to consider how the discourse around these ideas has developed over the years.
Join us at the Stuart Hall Library for the public programme and continue the conversation on our Research Network Facebook page.
You can find the reading list here.
Iniva Public Programme
22 April 2020
Reading Group: On Non-Aligned Narratives
In light of our current global crisis we come back to thinking through the terms ‘globalisation’ and ‘new internationalism’, revisiting transnational routes of solidarity through Françoise Vergès’ “Martinska/Martinique. Aimé Césaire’s Return to my Native Land“. Together we take a look at the history of the Non-Aligned Movement through excerpts from Bojana Piškur’s “Southern Constellations: Other Histories, Other Modernities”.
18 June 2020
On the Legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement
Art historian, curator and journalist Leila Mehulić and artist and writer Naeem Mohaiemen will present a lecture on the history and legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement. Leila will combine her research with her own childhood experiences of growing up next to a Sudanese community in former Yugoslavia.
Leila Mehulić believes that in today’s tumultuous political climate, marked by right-wing movements, ‘a new Cold War’ and hegemony of economic and political elites, it is of utmost importance to recall the progressive ideas of the 60s and 70s such as the Non-Aligned Movement, its cultural internationalism and call for equality among people.
23 July 2020
Artist Katy Shahandeh and Maria Kheirkhah present the lecture ‘Veiled Allusions’ on the iconography of the veil in the works of contemporary female Iranian artists.
In the past four decades, the veil has come to represent a multitude of frequently opposing ideologies and is often used to emphasise women’s bodies as sites of social contention whereupon discordant visual signifiers compete. This presentation will examine the iconography and semantics of the veil in post-revolutionary Iranian visual culture and explore how women artists (both in Iran and the diaspora) use this signifier in their imagery to convey the situation of Iranian women and their paradoxical lives.
8 October 2020
The World Met Here – Global Re-Visions of the Caribbean in a Gesture of Collectivity
Curator Jessica Taylor presents ‘The World Met Here – Global Re-Visions of the Caribbean in a Gesture of Collectivity’ in exchange with Helen Cammock. In response to a series of major exhibitions and projects within contemporary European curatorial practice that have taken up the theoretical work of Caribbean writers as a way of discussing and contextualising artworks and practices addressing current migration ‘crises’ and wider patterns of global movement, this talk aims to explore counter-conversations that consider the Caribbean not as a space that “shaped” global modernities elsewhere (as some recent work has suggested) but as the place that is pivotal to discussions around the emergence of so-called ‘global’ societies.
29 October 2020
Artist and researcher Deniz Sözen presents ‘The Art of Un-belonging’ followed by a conversation with Sarat Maharaj. Sözen’s practice-based research seeks to formulate a critical response to binary thinking by engaging and developing artistic strategies that challenge conventional notions of belonging and difference in the context of globalisation and diasporic art.
25 November 2020
Reading Group: Landscapes in Caribbean Literature
To deepen our understanding of the Caribbean as a pivotal place in shaping ‘global societies’ elsewhere as highlighted in our talk ‘The World Met Here – Global Re-Visions of the Caribbean in a Gesture of Collectivity, we will read extracts from George Lamming’s ‘In the Castle of My Skin’ (1953) alongside Joan Riley’s ‘Unbelonging‘ (1985) and encourage wider discussions around internationalism, migration and belonging.
17 December 2020
Reading Group: Untranslatability of the Other
Expand on the notions of belonging and difference highlighted in our Research Network talk ‘The Art of Un-belonging’ through reading Sarat Maharaj’s “Perfidious fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other” (1994). A new space for thinking of difference that introducing and laying out the framework of translation and untranslatability.
21 January 2021
Reading Group: Paradox of the Curatist
Ahead of our Research Network talk, “Vicissitudes of Crossing Borders”, we will examine the role of the curator from the perspective of Chinese cultural producers by reading Lu Jie’s article ‘The Paradox of the Curatist: the Long March as Author’(2008). This will be read alongside Mary Jean Chan’s short poem ‘The Importance of Tea’ (2018) as we also consider the impact of globalisation and themes of identity and culture.
18 February 2021
Vicissitudes of Crossing Borders
Curator Xiaoyi Nie and artist Bo Choy present “Vicissitudes of Crossing Borders: Temporal Experience in the Geopolitical Landscape of London, Hong Kong and Mainland China”. They will explore the way in which migration between mainland China, Hong Kong and ‘the West’ across generations has been entangled with internationalism, identity politics and globalisation, throwing questions into the concept of ‘one nation’, ‘Chineseness’ and ‘the international’. International art curator and critic Hanru Hou will respond to both presentations.
18 March 2021
Art historian, curator, activist and art producer Fortunata Calabro presents ‘Axes of the South: A dialogue on resistance and artistic practices in Latin America and the Arab world’. Building on diverse paradigms from South-South theoretical studies, Calabro will present a new conversation about the expression of protest and artistic production against the backdrop of the megalopolis of the South, where ancient and modern technologies of resistance co-exist. This will be followed by a select screening of artists Larissa Sansour and Regina Jose Galindo work and conversation with the artist.
Image: The 1961 Non-Aligned Conference in Belgrade, the first official summit of the Non-Aligned Movement.