SESSION: Decolonising Art History – Continuing the Conversation (FULL DAY – PART 1)

The AAH’s dedicated resource portal on antiracism and decolonial approaches, established in 2020 during the global pandemic in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, represents a key milestone in our collective efforts. Formed by Higher Education Committee (HEC) members and supported by Art History Journal’s landmark 43rd issue ‘Decolonizing Art History’, these initiatives, alongside continuing discussions at the 2025 Annual Conference, demonstrate both how far we have come and how much further we need to go in decolonising our field. As susan pui san lok observes, a decolonised art history would be: ‘De-centred, de-territorialised, de-disciplined; heterogeneous, contested, contradictory, confused, confusing; multiple, multitudinous, multilingual, translingual, untranslatable; diasporic, migratory, translocal, transhemispheric, oceanic, archipelagic; uncertain, indefinite, unstable, transforming, transformative’ (2020).

This panel, convened by AAH HEC members, will bring together the latest practices, provocations, research, and pedagogical strategies on decolonising art history and visual culture. We invite contributions that explore what decolonising means, currently and in the future. We want to hear about what you are reading, writing and thinking about, and welcome your suggestions for moving forward.

This session will consist of a range of shorter (8-minute) and longer (20-minute) presentations.

Session Convenors:

Rina Arya, University of Hull

Claire Moran, Queen’s University Belfast

Ceren Özpınar, University of Brighton

Amanda Sciampacone, Open University

PART 1: Roundtable 1 consisting of four 8-minute presentations

Speakers: Tuva Mossin, University of Bergen

Curatorial listening: exhibiting Norway’s role in the colonisation of Greenland

While the colonisation of Greenland is typically framed as a Danish imperial project, its early phases in the eighteenth century were significantly shaped by Norwegian missionaries, traders, bureaucrats etc. Yet when the union between Denmark and Norway was dissolved in 1814, Greenland remained under Danish rule—leaving Norway with a muted colonial legacy that has since faded from public memory.

Drawing on material from Norwegian museum collections, the exhibition Bergen–Greenland: Forgotten Connections sheds light on this neglected history. Anchoring its narrative around a portrait of Maria Epeyubsdatter—a young woman from Paamiut brought to Norway in 1746—the exhibition traces the violence, ambivalence, and asymmetry embedded in early colonial encounters, including the widespread practice of transporting Greenlandic individuals to Denmark–Norway against their will. To confront the archival blind spots surrounding Maria and other Inuit, the exhibition employs strategies of speculation and refusal, invoking what Saidiya Hartman terms “critical fabulation.”

Framed as a case study from within the curatorial group at the University Museum of Bergen, this paper discusses how the exhibition forms a counter-archive that resists dominant classificatory and display logics while also exposing the violence of the museum’s own collection. How can we, as researchers, move beyond merely listening for muted voices in archives built on colonial violence? And can collection-based exhibitions become spaces that invite audiences to listen differently—even when composed of materials made, collected, and donated by those who silenced these voices in the first place? Considering problems such as these, I propose curatorial listening as a method that refuses to overwrite absence with false certainty.

Olena Bogdanova, Lviv National Academy of Arts

Reclaiming the Sacred: The Golden Gates of Kyiv and the Challenges of Decolonising Museum Collections

The ongoing debate on the restitution of cultural heritage occupies a central place in the global process of decolonising art history. This paper focuses on the case of the Golden Gates of Kyiv Monastery, currently held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which were sold by Soviet authorities in the 1920s to a foreign collector. The object’s trajectory: from sacred Ukrainian context to Western-museum display, reveals the layered complexities of ownership, legitimacy, and historical responsibility in post-imperial art discourse. While the Soviet sale was technically “legal” under the political regime of the time, it raises profound ethical questions about coerced transaction, state appropriation, and the commodification of cultural identity.

The restitution of such objects encounters numerous obstacles: uncertain provenance due to fragmented archives; conflicting legal frameworks between source and holding countries; and institutional resistance within Western museums shaped by colonial collecting practices. Moreover, the geopolitical instability of source nations, such as Ukraine, often complicates claims, as restitution can be entangled in contemporary narratives of nation building and cultural sovereignty.

This paper argues that overcoming these challenges requires a shift from ownership-based debates toward a framework of shared stewardship and ethical accountability. Collaborative research projects, transparent provenance databases, and bilateral agreements between museums and source nations can build trust and open pathways for restitution or long-term loans. The case of the Golden Gates of Kyiv Monastery exemplifies how recontextualising displaced heritage within its cultural and spiritual origins can contribute not only to decolonising art history but also to repairing historical injustices and strengthening intercultural dialogue.

Carla Kessler, Courtauld Institute of Art

Audience Reception Studies for Decolonised Art Histories

As a white scholar, I almost refrained from applying for this panel. However, the methods I propose in this paper are designed to help bring a plurality of voices into art historical discourse, regardless of the artist or art historian’s identity. I will demonstrate how methods such as social media analysis, ethnographic interviews, and auto-ethnography grow our object of study beyond artworks to how they generate meaning for a multiplicity of publics.

Audience/participant reception studies are largely invisible in our field, but they can help decolonise art historical archives and scholarship. The methods I propose in this (8- or 20-minute) paper rely on digital networks and intersubjective exchanges, which are as de-centred, heterogeneous, contradictory, and translocal as susan pui san lok’s vision for decolonised art history.

Consider an artist such as Ragnar Kjartansson, whose identity as a white Icelandic, cis-male, heterosexual artist could be considered incompatible with the urgent need to decolonize art’s histories. In this paper, I show how social media analysis and ethnographic interviews with audiences and participants surface an analysis of Black performativity and embodiment in an artwork not originally designed to do so. I examined hundreds of Instagram and blog posts and conducted interviews with all 27 women who participated in Kjartansson’s durational performance, Woman in E. I argue that incorporating these voices enables us to consider ‘the performer’ and ‘the audience’ as differentiated individuals whose experiences offer a fuller understanding of how race and womanhood operate within the work.

Jessica Midgley, Institute of Education, University College London

Contesting the Canon: Art Historical Approaches in the Classroom

This paper situates secondary Art & Design education within the broader field of Art History, positioning the classroom as a vital yet underexamined site where the discipline is continually reimagined. It argues that the decolonisation of art history cannot remain confined to museums or universities but must extend into the everyday pedagogical spaces where students first encounter its narratives. By recognising teachers and students as active art historians, the paper explores how classroom practice can challenge the mythologies of the Western canon and transform art history from a fixed, linear story into a living, participatory dialogue.

While art-historical scholarship has long interrogated the canon, little attention has been paid to how these debates are enacted in school-level practice. Addressing this gap, the paper asks: How do art educators challenge and reimagine the boundaries of the Eurocentric canon, and what new pedagogical models might emerge from this process?

Drawing on findings from Reimagining the Canon (2022–present), a classroom-based inquiry in a girls’ state school in East London, the study shows how students
recontextualise canonical imagery through collective research and making, crafting stories that speak to their cultural contexts. Moving beyond school-art traditions of imitation and individual production, they collaborate using everyday materials – textiles, collage, and assemblage – transforming the content and construction of art history through expanded representation and critical dialogue with the canon.

The paper concludes that decolonisation unfolds through collaborative, everyday acts of teaching and learning, opening space for plural, entangled, and imaginative art histories grounded in lived experience.

Roundtable 2 consisting of five 8-minute presentations

Speakers: Seda Öznal, Loughborough University

Decolonising the Recline: The Socio-Spatial Exposure of Odalık’s Body

By the nineteenth century, the odalisque had become one of the most recognisable motifs in European painting. Her reclining nudity was no longer legitimised through mythology or allegory but through otherness, the imagined body of the woman of the harem, painted within rooms the artists had never entered but appropriated from a colonial distance. Derived from the Turkish odalık, meaning “one who belongs to the room,” the term binds the figure to a spatial condition of confinement, service, and domestic subordination.

This research adopts the odalık as an active analytical framework, a generative discursive and spatial construct through which entanglements of power, spectatorship, and embodiment are examined. Rather than treating her as a static icon of Orientalist fantasy, the study positions the odalık as a spatial phenomenon that exposes how both body and interior were constructed as sites of fascination and control.

Drawing on a dataset of nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings, the research employs comparative visual and spatial analysis to decode how perspective, ornament, and posture mediated the colonised gaze, a gaze that translated exoticism into aesthetic and spatial domination. It also interrogates the cultural rationalisation of nudity, the conditions under which it attained artistic legitimacy, and the role of interior space in materialising that power. Through this ongoing inquiry, the odalık functions as a framework for re-mapping art history’s colonial archives, revealing how representations of body and space together sustained the visual economies of otherness and control.

Alexandra Fraser, University of Chicago

Genealogies of Migration in the History of Art: Research, Teaching, Practice

What could it mean to write a migratory history of modern art and design? Could migration, perhaps more so than its parallel concepts of globalization, heterogeneity, or even decolonization, offer a useful and timely mode by which to study images and their cultural formations, especially in the modern period?

The nineteenth century has long been characterized by bounded models of settlement, citizenship, subjectivity, and what it might look like to intimately belong in such a world. Yet, the character of that belonging was entangled with experiences of mass migration, mobility, displacement, exile, and untiring attempts to imagine a world otherwise. In recent years, the discipline of Art History has sought to redraw the map upon which those very models were placed, effectively and urgently establishing a “global turn” while blasting open possibilities for a fresh and long-awaited archive. In this talk, I propose another methodological tack at moving forward by recentring migration as both material reality and interpretive tool. In so doing, I mine a genealogy extending from Aby Warburg’s “image vehicles,” nineteenth-century artist’s near-obsession with belonging, Creole artists’ own writings, to a wave of recent scholarship in Literary Studies. What emerges is a rough guide by which we might provoke new, expansive interpretive imperatives in our research and in the classrooms. Crucially, it also affords us an opportunity to see Art History in direct relief with our contemporary moment beset as it is by heightened politization around displacement and belonging. By extension, this presentation proposes that migration might in fact represent modernism’s most enduring note.

Zhi Zhi Chia, Freie Universität Berlin

Neither/Nor: Pan Yuliang’s Nu and the Limits of Postcolonial Hybridity Theory

This paper examines how decolonial art history might expand beyond colonial-centric frameworks by addressing semicolonial experiences such as China’s, with contexts shaped by unequal global power without formal colonial rule. It focuses on Pan Yuliang’s painting Nu (1946), exploring how her practice reveals the limits of postcolonial hybridity and suggests alternative, situated modes of artistic agency.

Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), one of the first Chinese women to study painting in France, is frequently celebrated in exhibitions and scholarship for achieving a ‘fusion of Chinese and Western art’. Her practice has often been interpreted through a logic that echoes what Homi K. Bhabha ‘terms postcolonial ‘hybridity’. However, this framework, developed for colonised societies, risks misrepresenting Pan’s negotiations of identity and medium, and strategies of resistance.

Drawing on close visual analysis, feminist and postcolonial theory (Lydia Liu, Tani Barlow, Walter Mignolo), I argue that Nu sustains contradiction rather than achieving synthesis, what I termed an ‘aesthetic of sustained ambiguity’. By using Chinese ink brushwork to depict the Western subject of the female nude, Pan enacts a tension that reflects China’s semicolonial condition, neither colonised nor autonomous.

This reading proposes a methodological reorientation: if decolonial frameworks continue to treat colonial experience as the universal model, they risk erasing the heterogeneous, contested realities central to a decolonised art history. Pan’s work demonstrates the need for locally grounded, historically specific approaches that decentre established postcolonial paradigms.

Patricia Lopez Sanchez Cervantes, University of St. Andrews

Beyond Decolonising: Rethinking Narratives from the Former Colonies

This paper argues that the discourse of decolonisation in art history has evolved into a new mode of Western authority, a moral framework that still determines how the “postcolonial other” should speak, create, and be understood. Within museums and universities, decolonisation is often reduced to a checklist of good intentions rather than a radical shift in epistemic power. If art history is to change, it must allow the former colonies to define their own terms and needs, rather than continuing to interpret them through imported concepts.

Based on ongoing doctoral research and fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, this presentation focuses on the work of three contemporary Maya creators: photographer Säsäk Nichim Martinez, textile artist Cecilia Gómez, and visual artist Darwin Cruz. Working across photography, textiles, and community-based art, these artists do not seek to “decolonise” anything. The term itself holds little meaning for them. Instead, they are engaged in processes of self-definition, exploring identity, history, and continuity beyond the binary of coloniser and colonised.

Speaking as a former museum director and collaborator in these initiatives, I analyse how their practices exceed the conceptual frame of decolonising art history and propose an alternative approach: to colonise ourselves, to confront the colonial structures internalised within our own ways of seeing and narrating. Through these practices, we witness a quiet yet profound transformation: the shift from telling the story of the other to recognising ourselves within the ongoing story of what the other has marked in us.

Sophie Kazan Makhlouf, University of Notre Dame USA, London Campus

Art Not Made to Be Understood: Oral Histories and Decolonising Art History in the UAE

The act of decolonising art history requires a fundamental shift in epistemology and discourse, moving beyond content adjustment to redefine how we know and speak about art. This necessity is powerfully encapsulated by acclaimed artist Hassan Sharif(1951-2016) who argued: “Art is not made to be understood; it is not a train taking you to a specific destination. We the audience have to get out and walk into new spaces.”
The rapidly developing art history of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – a unified country since 1971, situated along historic global trade routes – offers a crucial case study for developing non-Eurocentric, localized art historical language. As the country’ artistic practices developed more quickly than its infrastructure, the art scene has been described as ‘postmodern’. The lack of traditional Western-style art education, museums and literary archives necessitates a decolonial methodology.
This approach bypasses the conventional foregrounding oral history, indigenous frameworks of value and local knowledge production. By validating memory and localised aesthetics, this methodology directly challenges the Western-centric canon.
This short eight-minute presentation focuses on my book, The Development of An Art History in the UAE – An Art Not Made to Be Understood (2024). It examines how the UAE’s unique art ecosystem prioritizes local narratives leading to a broader, more inclusive understanding of global art history.