The Power Institute's regular reading group, focusing on new ideas and research in art history and visual culture.
Howardena Pindell, Autobiography: East/West (Gardens), 1983 (front cover of Joan Kee's Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity).
"As a heuristic provocation, Afro Asia stresses a history of modernism rooted in the idea of the commons versus a history of modernism founded on identifying formal commonalities (pseudomorphologies) or even intellectual sympathies. If Afro Asia is not precisely collinear to Euro-American modernism, meaning that its constituent entities are not points on the lines drawn by Euro-American histories, how to conceptualise its domains or realms takes on additional complexity. Although subject to multiple structural pressures, the vibrant geometry of Afro Asia consists of events and artworks (points), movements and trajectories (lines), bodies and entities (solids), venues and grounds (surfaces), and other forms whose arrangement and occasionally deformation allows a wealth of possibiltities for life to emerge."
-Joan Kee
Readings
Joan Kee, The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity (University of California Press, 2023) (Introduction and Chapter Two)
The Power Institute Reading Group is open to all - to attend, just turn up!
For access to the readings, contact nicholas.croggon@sydney.edu.au