Past event

Art History Research Lecture: Dr Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani Visualising "The Inner Plantation"

Join us on the 1st November at 4pm in School 2 of St Salvator's Quad for Dr Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani's Research Lecture.

This talk explores literary and artistic responses of Afro-Caribbean artists to the Eurocentric conceptions of the universal underpinning the philosophies of existential-humanism that framed discourse surrounding modernist art practice in postwar Britain. More specifically, it examines how the centrality of universalism and existential-humanism in Western arts and cultural discourses were criticised in relationship to the legacy of the plantation, its colonial histories of slavery , and its multi-generational effects on cultural and artistic national and Pan-Caribbean identities, as debated by diasporic artists and intellectuals in Europe and the Caribbean, among them Denis Williams and those associated with the London-based Caribbean Artists Movement (1966-1872), including Eddie Kamau Brathwaite, Aubrey Williams, and Kenneth Ramchand. Brathwaite, in coining the phrase the “inner plantation” in 1975, referred to the psychological effects of these histories in shaping a sense of social and cultural fragmentation and “rootlessness, of not belonging to the landscape; dissociation, in fact, of art from the act of living.” The abstracted visualisation of the plantation, its environmental and existential destruction, will be considered within these and their broader anticolonial contexts.

Biography
Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani is an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art of the global diasporas, focussing on the postcolonial and post-WWII histories of African, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Black British art in Britain and beyond. As a postdoctoral research associate at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven Connecticut, she co-founded the exhibition Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction (2022), and has held numerous curatorial positions including at the Wichita Art Museum and the Ulrich Museum of Art, in Wichita, Kansas, USA; the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA; and Tate Liverpool, UK. Maryam has published widely on diasporic artists including Denis Williams, Franks Bowling, and the Caribbean Artists Movement.

The Lecture will be held at 4pm in the School 2 of the St Salvator's Quad with a wine reception to follow at 79 North Street.