Review | In conversation with Shelley Ruth Butler & Jennifer Carter [MAHI Brown Bag Lunch Series]
By Zeynab Yousefzadeh, MAHI Intern
The first event of the Art Hive Brown Bag Lunch series was held from 12 – 1 p.m. on February 8, 2018, at the library of McGill Faculty of Education. The event gathered researchers from three universities in Montreal under the title of “Beyond Museum Walls: New Methodologies for Dialogue Around Difficult History and Cultural Conflict”.
After a brief introduction to the Art Hive and its activities by Maria Ezcurra (MAHI Art Facilitator), Lori Beavis (P. Lantz Coordinator) then made a territorial acknowledgement and introduced the subject of the brown bag lunch series and the individual speakers. The core content of the discussion that noon hour, centered around the speakers’ experiences and studies about conflicts associated with human rights abuses through the exhibition of (potentially) difficult subjects and imagery.
The guest speakers were Shelley Ruth Butler (McGill, Institute for Study of Canada), Jennifer Carter (UQAM, Director of Museology programs and Professor in the Department of Art History), Marilou Thomassin (Art History and Communication graduate student at McGill) and Maria Juliana Angarita Bohorquez (Museology graduate student at UQAM), all of whom are the members of Concordia Curating & Public Scholarship Lab (CaPSL). The panel also included Milka Nyariro (Doctoral Candidate in Educational Studies at McGill), whose displayed photo-voice project instigated this discussion on the exhibition of difficult materials and subject matter.
Dr. Shelley Ruth Butler started with an introduction to the CaPSL team, its research axes, and activities. She continued by explaining how constructive/creative critiques and museum ethnography can contribute in meditating and controversy. The next speaker was Marilou Thomassin, who shared her research following a white photographer in India. She highlighted the conflicts that were created after exhibition of the pictures and documentary produced at the end of the project. She described how the photographer’s humanistic goals of teaching photography to children born in brothels as a way of making a better life for them were criticized as racial stereotyping of India and exploiting the children for Indophobic propaganda.
The third speaker, Dr. Jennifer Carter, began her speech with an introduction to an exhibition hosted by CaPSL in May 2017. The exhibition was designed based on two historical and anthropological studies dealing with the works of two artists depicting Congolese women. She described the curators’ process of predicting probable conflicts and engaging with those potential conflicts as a part of the exhibition. Juliana Angarita Bohorquez followed with an examination of other potential challenges when curating an exhibition. Each of the speakers emphasized their strategies to counter the various issues that can arise with displaying difficult subject matter and materials by giving voice and shared authority to the artists.
Milka Nyariro closed the talk with a presentation of her Ph.D. project, focused on highlighting the challenges that prevent Nairobian teen mothers from continuing their education using the participatory visual methodologies of photovoice and cellphilming. She spoke about the controversy the Art Hive encountered upon display of the photos for this project. The speakers closed with an exploration of strategies that can be employed during the curatorial process to engage likely objections in a respectful manner without censoring or altering the artists’ voice.
This warm and friendly discussion in the colorful environment of the McGill Art Hive was finished by an open discussion amongst the group of 20 audience members and speakers. The participants unanimously agreed that making space for debate within the exhibitions themselves modified their potential consequences.
EVENT INFORMATION | In conversation with Shelley Ruth Butler & Jennifer Carter [MAHI Brown Bag Lunch Series]
Please join us for the first of a monthly series of conversations on art and difficult subjects
Brown Bag Lunch Series in the M.A.H.I./ McGill Art Hive Initiative
Thursday, February 8, 12-1pm
Art Hive 1st Floor, Education Building,
McGill University
3700 McTavish
On Thurs. February 8th Shelley Ruth Butler (McGill, Institute for Study of Canada) and Jennifer Carter (UQAM, Director of Museology programmes and Professor in the Department of Art History) and project research assistants, will be the speakers at our Brown Bag Lunch series. Carter and Butler are affiliated with the Curating & Public Scholarship Lab (CaPSL) located at Concordia University – a research centre that translates academic scholarship into exhibitions, responding to critical social issues. CaPSL projects speak to the legacies of colonialism, genocide, slavery, and human rights abuses through the exhibition of (potentially) difficult subjects and imagery.
The talk will introduce the MAHI audience to the research project, “Beyond Museum Walls: New Methodologies for Public Dialogue Around Difficult History and Cultural Conflict” designed to support the creation and mobilization of knowledge via new methodologies for critical museum-scholar-community collaborations and engagement with difficult subject matter. With researchers and research assistants from all four Montreal universities, the project supports the development, debate, and dissemination of shareable pedagogical tools to engage scholars and publics in critical, creative dialogue with museums.
For more information on CaPSL Curating & Public Scholarship Lab: http://capsl.cerev.ca
Jennifer Carter (PhD McGill University) is a critical museologist and historian of art and architecture. Her research focuses on the history and theories of museums, museum architecture and expography, and the museology of human rights and social justice. She has worked in museums and archives in Canada, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and the Canadian Architecture Collection (McGill University). As curator, she has organized several exhibitions, including Drawing from Ideas, Building from Books: Architectural Treatises in the McGill University Library, Women and Homelessness, and Safdie's Sixties: Looking Forward to Looking Back. Jennifer is Associate Editor of Museum Management and Curatorship, and a member of the Board of Directors of ICOM-Canada and the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
Shelley Ruth Butler (PhD York University) is a cultural anthropologist who researches museums, curating, and heritage sites in Canada and South Africa. She co-edited (with Erica Lehrer) Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (MQUP 2016), and facilitates Curatorial Dreaming workshops for researchers, museums professionals, and community groups (http://www.curatorialdreams.com). Her first book, Contested Representations: Re-visiting Into the Heart of Africa (1999 & 2011) is a widely taught ethnography of a controversial exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum.