Picturing Fabric: Textile, Photography and Women’s Hands

Friday, October 6, 2023
9 - 11 am | Zoom

zoom: https://virginia.zoom.us/j/96292620956?pwd=RGlHWWJTblZ0QWVjTWdzckFNRllmUT09 

Meeting ID: 962 9262 0956 Passcode: 580663 

In this workshop three artists and two curators and scholars will discuss their practice of working between and across the media of photography and textile, opening avenues to understand each in new ways, which are haptic, gendered, material and decolonial. 

Dr. Christine Checinska is the V&A’s inaugural Senior Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion and Lead Curator of the Africa Fashion exhibition, 2nd July 2022 – 16th April 2023.  Prior to joining the V&A, Christine worked as a womenswear designer, academic, artist and curator. Her creative practice and research explore the relationship between fashion, culture and race.  

Sandrine Colard is Assistant Professor of Art History at Rutgers-Newark University in the United States, and associate curator at the Kanal-Pompidou Museum in Brussels. She holds a doctorate from Columbia University (2016), and she is a historian of African, modern and contemporary arts, as well as a historian of photography. Her research has been published internationally and supported by grants from the Musée du Quai Branly, the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, the Ford Foundation and by the Getty/ACLS for his book project on the history of photography in the colonial Congo.  

Sasha Huber is a Helsinki-based internationally recognised visual artist-researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Huber's work is concerned with the politics of memory and belonging in relation to colonial residue left in the environment. Connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based reparative interventions, video, photography, and collaborations.  

Mónica de Miranda is a Portuguese/Angolan visual artist, filmmaker, and researcher known for her interdisciplinary approach. Her work explores the intersections of politics, gender, memory, space, and history, employing drawing, installation, photography, film, and sound. Her art has been showcased at renowned international events including the Lubumbashi Biennale, Berlin Biennale, Dakar Biennial, Casablanca Biennale, Bamako Encounters, Venice Architecture Biennale, BIENALSUR, and Houston FotoFest.  

Zohra Opoku (b.1976, German and Ghanaian; lives and works in Accra, Ghana) examines the politics of personal identity formation through historical, cultural, and socio-economic influences, particularly in the context of contemporary Ghana. Opoku's explorations have been mostly through the lens of her camera; her photography is expressed through screen-printing and alternative photo processing on varieties of natural fabrics. In 2023, she is among the artists exhibited in the 15th edition of Sharjah Biennale “Thinking Historically in the Present” (United Arab Emirates).  

Giulia Paoletti is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the histories of modern art and photography in Africa. Based on over ten years of research, her book Portrait and Place: Photography in Senegal, 1840-1960 is forthcoming with Princeton University Press (March, 2024). 

This talk is part of The Siren Project: Women’s Voice in Literature and the Visual Arts    

With generous support from the Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation, University of Virginia 

 

For info contact: Giulia Paoletti, gp5mt@virginia.edu