March Meeting 2023

Overview

March Meeting 2023: The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Politics after 1960

The 15th edition of Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual March Meeting runs from 9 to 12 March 2023, following close on the heels of the opening of Sharjah Biennial 15 (SB15) on 7 February. Titled The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Politics after 1960, the four-day programme will convene artists, curators and art practitioners as well as students from around the world to discuss vital issues revolving around SB15’s overarching theme: Thinking Historically in the Present. March Meeting 2023 (MM 2023) builds on the two previous iterations of the meeting—The Afterlives of the Postcolonial (MM 2022) and Unravelling the Present (MM 2021)—that were similarly conceived as part of the SB15 programming in relationship to the late Okwui Enwezor’s conception of the ‘Postcolonial Constellation’.

The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Politics after 1960 examines the forces that have shaped the production and reception of art across the world from 1960 to the present, reconfiguring the cartographies of global modernism and contemporary art. It will offer discursive space to explore artistic, political and cultural positions traversing subalternity and self-determination, First Nation and Indigenous practices, creolisation, hybridity and supranational formations, such as the Black Atlantic, diasporas, exile and statelessness. It will thus constitute a dynamic intersection of artistic, ideological and philosophical perspectives on decolonisation—a field of scholarship originally developed within postcolonial studies.

Delineating a moment in which the notion of a consolidated nation-state is challenged by the remarkable resilience of individual, non-state and counter-institutional models of sovereignty, autonomy, identity and subjectivity, The Postcolonial Constellation studies the global political, social and economic systemic and structural shifts that have characterised our world since the 1960s. It does so by revisiting and reanimating the archives and histories of this period; by examining contemporaneous artistic and political practices, theories and cultural production testifying to that time and by presenting ideas, artists, artworks and critical theory that offer parallactic views of our convulsive world.

The Postcolonial Constellation reflects on the movements and interactions of artists, filmmakers, performers, thinkers, writers, philosophers, public intellectuals, activists, guerrilla movements and other societal actors within and beyond the limiting framework of the ‘sovereign nation-state’. To the extent that The Postcolonial Constellation understands the global present as intimately tied to histories of the postcolonial, MM 2023 and the other platforms of SB15 constitute critical spaces for ‘thinking historically in the present’.

March Meeting 2023 Speakers

Surafel Abebe (Assistant Professor, Performance Studies and Theory, The Africa Institute); Nadi Abusaada (Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zürich); Mahvish Ahmad (Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics, London School of Economics); Esra Akcan (The Michael A. McCarthy Professor, Cornell University); Kamran Ali (Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin); Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic Art, Princeton University and Senior Research Fellow, Art Gallery of Western Australia); Tayeba Begum Lipi (Artist, Co-Founder and Trustee of Britto Arts Trust); Eddie Chambers (Professor of Art History and African Diaspora Art, The David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Art History, University of Texas at Austin); Margo Crawford (The Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor for Faculty Excellence, University of Pennsylvania); Iftikhar Dadi (John H. Burris Professor in History of Art, Cornell University); Manthia Diawara (Distinguished University Professor, New York University); Patrick D. Flores (Professor of Art Studies, University of the Philippines); Anthony Gardner (Professor of Contemporary Art History, The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford); Terri Geis (Visiting Associate Professor of Art and Art History, NYU Abu Dhabi); Atreyee Gupta (Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art; Modern and Contemporary South and Southeast Asian Art, Berkeley); Elizabeth Harney (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Toronto); John Harvey (Writer, Brown Cabs); Suha Hasan (Architect, Researcher and Founder, ASH); Brent Hayes Edwards (Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University); Abdullah Ibrahim (pianist and composer); Heather Igloliorte (University Research Chair in Circumpolar Indigenous Arts, Concordia University); Christopher J. Lee (Professor of African History, The Africa Institute); Naiza Khan (artist); Sonal Khullar (W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania); Kiluanji Kia Henda (artist); Nancy Lin (Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell University); Matthew Lutton (Artistic Director, Malthouse Theatre); Zeina Maasri (Senior Lecturer, History of Art, University of Bristol); Salwa Mikdadi (Professor of Practice of Art History, NYU Abu Dhabi and Director and Principle Investigator, al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art); Marwa AlMugait (artist); Pamela Nguyen Corey (Associate Professor of Art History, Fulbright University Vietnam); Chika Okeke-Agulu (Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, Princeton University); Anissa Rahadiningtyas (Assistant Curator, National Gallery of Singapore); Mithu Sen (artist); AbdouMaliq Simone (Senior Professorial Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield); Terry Smith (Emeritus Professor, University of Sydney; European Graduate School; and University of Pittsburgh); Simon Soon Sien Yong (Senior Lecturer in Southeast Asian Art History, Universiti Malaya); Jihan El-Tahri (Director, Big Sister Productions); John Tain (Head of Research, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong); Jason Tamiru (Producer, Malthouse Theatre); Gilane Tawadros (Director, Whitechapel Art Gallery); Krista Thompson (Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art History, Northwestern University); Salamishah Tillet (Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies, Rutgers University); Nina Tonga (Curator of Contemporary Art, Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand); Akeim Touissant Buck (artist); Jelena Vesić (Independent curator, writer and lecturer); Charlene Villaseñor Black (Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies, UCLA); and Zoé Whitley (Director and Curator, Chisenhale Gallery)