56. (In)visible Hands and City-Making: Art Education, Labour, and Modernities in the Global South?

This session examines how modernities across the Global South were visually constructed, managed, and politically contested through the intertwined histories of urban labour, visual culture, and art education. Taking the colonial and postcolonial metropolis as a vital site of inquiry, this panel unpacks how institutional, artistic, and visual practices intersected with systems of race, caste, class, and gender to simultaneously utilise and obscure the foundational work of city-making.

Rather than treating art education and visual production as disparate fields, this session frames them as dual apparatuses of urban development. We investigate how state and pedagogical institutions used art training, documentation, and diverse visual media—including but not limited to photography, drawing, printmaking, and architectural renderings—to discipline, categorise, and render invisible the already marginalised labour forces that built the modern city from Jakarta to Lagos, and Mexico City to Madras (now Chennai). Crucially, we also explore how these same visual media and educational frameworks became spaces for radical rupture, collective organising, and the subversion of dominant archives.

By bridging visual culture, urban history, and critical art pedagogy, this panel seeks to expose the politics of visibility behind the role of the “invisible hands” of artists, artisans, and workers in the making of global modernities. We invite papers from art historians, curators, educators, and visual practitioners working on diverse colonial and postcolonial urban geographies across the Global South that propose new methods for recovering, historicizing, and complicating the absent or obscured narratives behind racialised, gendered, and caste-based urban labour.

Themes: Art Education, City-Making, Urban Labour

Additional format comment: 20-minute presentations.

Lead Convenor: Tanya Talwar, Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften (Institute for Asian and African Studies) / Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte (Institute for Art and Visual History), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

Co-convenors: Ayesha Rachel Matthan, Department of Art History and Visual Studies, Cornell University, USA

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.