Gabrielle Moser with response by Natasha Bissonauth

ADMISSION
Free

In person at the Place of Many Trees, Liu Institute, UBC 6476 North West Marine Drive, Vancouver (entrance from 1800 West Mall)
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Join us for a talk led by Gabrielle Moser, Research Chair and Director, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University with response by Assistant Professor, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Natasha Bissonauth

What is the social significance of a photographic archive with no, or at most a very accidental, external audience? Is it akin to photographs that are taken but never printed, filed away as negatives in a basement or library? What role do art historians, artists and curators play in developing the meaning of these latent images?

This talk attempts to answer these questions through a close reading of the photographic archives of Toronto’s University Settlement House: a radical experiment in social work that foregrounded extra-curricular activities—including art and music classes, theatre productions, recreational sports clubs, Sunday evening dances, and summer camps—as vital means for providing “lessons in citizenship and cooperative organization” (James 2001). Located in the Ward neighbourhood—a site of an influx of non-European immigration after the Second World War—the University Settlement House’s activities were fastidiously documented by amateur photographers and now reside in the City of Toronto Archives. As part of my wider book project examining the history of photography and citizenship in Canada after 1947, the talk examines the ways photography, race, and extra-curricular activities came together as technologies of assimilation in the archive. But it also attends, via the work of contemporary artists including Deanna Bowen, Zinnia Naqvi and Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, to the ways citizens used these same technologies for the purposes of resistance and transnational alliance.

This event is presented in partnership with Critical Image Forum Research Excellence Cluster, UBC.

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Gabrielle Moser is an art historian, writer, and independent curator. She is the author of Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (Penn State University Press, 2019) and, with Adrienne Huard, co-editor of a special issue of Journal of Visual Culture on reparation (2022). Moser is currently at work on her second book, Citizen Subjects: Photography and Sovereignty in Post-War Canada (under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press). A founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, Moser is Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, and Associate Professor in Art History at Concordia University in Montréal.

Dr. Natasha Bissonauth has taught for the Visual Art and Art History department at York University in Toronto and was Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the College of Wooster in Ohio. She is Reviews Editor for the peer-reviewed journal, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.