Join us for the April Art Focus on the 18th of April with Dr Noit Banai, Visiting Professor of Art History at NYU Shanghai!

We continue our 2020–21 theme of Creative Ensemble for RAS Art Focus, exploring art outside and beyond the figurative parameters of conventional institutions of museums and galleries. Through this specially curated series, we seek to explore and open up the dialogue of how artists are expanding our notion of what constitutes "art." This month, we are greatly pleased to have Dr Noit Banai, Visiting Professor of Art History at NYU Shanghai share her research with us. This talk focuses on contemporary artistic practices that make visible the entanglement between modernity and coloniality as the logic of the capitalist world. As a counterpoint to this epistemic framework, such practices perform a 'double-consciousness' that is at the basis of what the theorist Walter Mignolo has called "Border Identity" and "Border Thinking." Through performativity, these artists explore forms of self-representation – in its spectrum of vexed emotions, blind spots, and silences – that contrast with those produced by artists proceeding from European vantage points. This self-representation, which Dr Banai argues, is the very condition for a transformative political practice of decoloniality.

About the speaker:

Dr Noit Banai an art historian and critic with a focus on modern and contemporary art in a global context. She is author of Yves Klein (Reaktion, 2014) and is currently completing a book titled Between Nation State and Border State: Modernism from Universal to Global Subject. She was the assistant editor for the journal RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics and is a regular contributor to Artforum International.

For more info about Noit Banai, please visit: https://shanghai.nyu.edu/academics/faculty/directory/noit-banai​

Convener: Julie Chun, Art Historian and Art Critic