VITRINE
The Art History Vitrine hosts month-long exhibitions dedicated to the public expression of art historical research, methods, and objects of study. Since 2006, professors and graduate students have curated installations in this display cabinet on themes as varied as Canadiana, print culture, postcards, as well as architectural drawings and models, often using original works of art by Concordia students.
Current exhibition
Palestine Will Be Free
Fall 2024
Palestine Will Be Free is an evolving project by Dark Opacities Lab that began as a workshop at the AHGSA conference in February 2024 at Concordia University, transformed into a zine, published with B&D Press in August 2024, and is now on display in the vitrine space of the Department of Art History through late November.
For this project, Dark Opacities Lab went through the vast and rich resource of The Palestine Poster Project, an archive of nearly 20,000 posters in relation to Palestine, composed by nearly 4,000 different artists, and compiled by Dan Walsh. This archive is an invaluable resource in documenting the scale of Palestinian resistance and the place of aesthetics and design. In thinking through the political vernacular of these posters, we are necessarily asked to reckon with the place of visuality and visual culture in the realm of the political. Inspired by The Palestine Poster Project Archives, Dark Opacities Lab asked students and community members to create and contribute postcard-sized art in relation to and in solidarity with Palestinian anti-colonial resistance.
Previous exhibition
What Is Global Contemporary Art?
Witner 2024
Coordinated by Louis-Philippe Savard, MA student
This small exhibition is derived from the Fall 2023 MA seminar ARTH 643 Art and Globalization: Global Contemporary Art. The class allowed students to engage with a variety of authors, theories, and artworks, particularly those of women artists of colour. Over the course of the term, we came to realize that the idea of "global contemporary art" is an uneasy one, often disputed and, at times, contradictory. Our discussions guided us to interrogate this very notion as an art historical framework, but also what such a methodological lens requires in terms of a critical and political engagement with the more pressing transnational issues of our times. Ongoing colonial power imbalances, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, labour and other abuses from the globalized capitalist system, social and gendered inequalities, as well as the overarching question of privilege, which crucially still determines who gets to tell the stories that are exhibited and recounted within the public sphere and who has access to exhibition spaces.
