Artist Talk: Allan deSouza, Thursday March 25, 6pm EST

Allan deSouza will discuss their artistic strategies of quoting and rewriting (art) history; how these speak to issues of representation, equity, and justice; and how such strategies create additional labor for those already doing the work of historicizing art.

Allan deSouza renders photo-media, installation, text and performance works as staging grounds for historical memory and its legacies upon the present. Works draw upon public and familial archives and material culture, remaking them through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. Recent projects, Through the Black Country… (2017), and La Vida del Capitan (2019), transpose, respectively, Henry Stanley’s 1870s African expedition journals to England during the 2016 Brexit vote, and Columbus’ 1492 ship diaries to a 2019 expedition from Oak Town, Khalifia (Oakland, California) to Ishbiliyya, Al-Andalus (Seville, Spain). Both texts are accompanied by expedition maps and photographs. deSouza’s work has been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at the Krannert Museum, IL; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and the Pompidou Centre, Paris. deSouza’s two recent books: How Art Can Be Thought (Duke University Press, 2018), examines art pedagogy and critique, and how some of the most common terms used to discuss art may be adapted to new artistic and social challenges; Ark of Martyrs (Sming Sming Books, March 2020), is a polyphonic, dysphoric replacement of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness. deSouza is represented by Talwar Gallery, NY and New Delhi, and is Professor and department chair of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley.

Registrants will receive an email with the Zoom webinar link the week of the event and a reminder email the day of the event.