Postcolonial Hauntologies: Art in the Presence – Absence of the Past

This symposium is part of a three-day event held jointly at the University of Amsterdam and Concordia University. It aims to establish cross-border solidarities and foster transdisciplinary dialogues while enhancing voices from diverse regions that address colonial legacies. It focuses on art as a medium to touch upon and aesthetically transform spectral traces and explores the decolonial potentiality of institutional sites such as archives and museums.

The event is supported by Montreal’s Interuniversity PhD Program in Art History, Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture.

Symposium schedule

10 a.m. - 11:40 a.m.
Session 1: Epistemic Disruptions and Postcolonial Archive

Reckoning with the Terrible Beauty of the Archive
Ingrid Jones (University of Toronto)

The conceptual deployment of the archive in the research-driven praxes of contemporary Maghrebi (working title)
Nancy Demerdash (College for Creative Studies)

The Spectre of Crochet: A Woman’s Lived Experience
Pragya Sharma (University of Brighton) (online)

Hauntology in Gê Viana’s Afro-Indigenous re-imaginations
Rodrigo D'Alcântara (Concordia University)

Moderator Balbir K. Singh

11:50 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Session 2: After Violence: Bodies, Memory, and Haunted Spaces

The Legacy of Violence: Apartheid Monsters and Post-Apartheid Mimicry in the Work of Contemporary South African Artist Jane Alexander
Amy Nygaard (University of Saint Thomas)

The Bodies that Haunt the Colonial Institute: Human remains in and through Dutch museal space

Pansee Abou ElAtta (Carleton University)

Nomadic poetic tracings, or how ghostly figures can emerge

Florencia Marchetti (Concordia University)

(Con)Strained Utopias: Hauntings in the Activist-Workplace

Richenda Grazette (Concordia University)

2:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Session 3: Film Screenings

druzhba narodov (25 min)

a film by Intizor Otaniyazova (artist, Kazakhstan)

The Landmarks of Memory (6:40 min) a film by Christina Hajjar (artist, Canada), followed by a Q&A session moderated by Manar Abo Touk

Baigal Nuur - Lake Baikal, Nutag - Homeland, The Fourfold (22 min)
short animated films by Alisi Telengut, followed by a conversation between the artist and Alice Jim