Goldfarb Summer Institute to explore border politics through art

Man's silhouette sitting in front of illuminated art gallery exhibit in the background, stock banner image from pexels

The 15th annual summer institute, presented by the Department of Visual Art and Art History at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design (AMPD), will offer panels, screenings and talks running until May 19.

Since its inception, the Goldfarb Summer Institute aims to provide University graduate students, and the wider community, the opportunity to engage with critical ideas with prominent national and international theorists, artists, educators, curators and critics.

Organized by AMPD professors Natasha Bissonauth and Tammer El-Sheikh, this year’s institute is titled “Border Forms: (Re)Drawing Lines,” and will consider how many key art historians, artists, curators and more think about the visual through anti-colonial discourse and critical race theory to disturb the white, colonial, Eurocentric roots that undergird the field and the residues that remain in the discipline.

The featured events will investigate how region-specific genealogies are so foundational to art history and what it would mean to trespass the borders so generative in art making and thinking. By emphasizing Black and brown art histories that reorder and disorder the bordered logics of the discipline, and that imagine possibilities for the visual beyond surveillance regimes, the 2023 Goldfarb Summer Institute will examine the border as a political tool, a conceptual device, and an aesthetic gesture.

Among the artists participating in this year’s programming are acclaimed York associate professor and filmmaker John Greyson, visual artist Larissa Sansour, art historian and author Iftikhar Dadi, award-winning Manitoba artist Divya Mehra, curators Sarah Rifky, Eunice Bélidor and Cheryl Sim, as well as doctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa, Anna Shah Hoque.

Upcoming events include:

May 11, 4 to 6 p.m.
Panel Discussion “On Curating Borders,” moderated by Marissa Largo
Accolade East Building, Room 244

May 12, 4 to 6 p.m.
Divya Mehra in conversation with Natasha Bissonauth
Accolade East Building, Room 244

May 18, 2:30 to 5 p.m.
Film screening of Photo Booth (John Greyson) followed by discussion with Tammer El-Sheikh
Ross Building, N102

May 19, 2:30 to 5 p.m.
Film screening of work from Larissa Sansour followed by discussion with Amanda Boulos
Ross Building, N102

Further details about dates and times can be found in the York University Events Calendar.