SESSION: Decolonising Art History – Continuing the Conversation (FULL DAY – PART 2)
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 2: Standard panel consisting of four 20-minute presentations
Panggah Ardiyansyah, University of Sheffield
Restitution as Framework: Decolonising Art History through the Lens of Pusaka
This paper proposes to explore how the concept of restitution can act as a productive framework in decolonising art history by drawing on the local epistemology of pusaka. Through the exploration of the return of pusaka objects to Indonesia, I argue that restitution should not be treated merely as the transfer of artefacts, but as a process of reconfiguring knowledge production and power relations. Two case studies are considered: (1) the physical return of gold-inlaid Prince Diponegoro’s kris (Javanese dagger) from the Netherlands to Indonesia; and (2) the digital return of sacred illuminated manuscripts looted from the royal palace of Yogyakarta and presently in the British Library collection. Exploring the term pusaka as sacred heirlooms imbued with spiritual, relational and communal value can shift the focus from object-as-artifact to object-as-relational-inheritance. This concept offers a compelling, non-Western epistemology to rethink art-historical practice and museum-based narratives. In this paper, I outline three interconnected strands: (1) the role of cultural-heritage objects in constituting relational identity beyond materiality; (2) how restitution of pusaka challenges dominant Western museological paradigms and opens space for indigenous epistemologies; and (3) how art-history scholarship might integrate restitution as a methodological and interpretive device in re-centring provenance, narrative voice, community engagement and long-term collaboration. By weaving together case-study insights from Indonesia with broader art-historical debates on decoloniality and restitution, this paper aims to contribute to decolonial art history by invoking restitution not just as remedy, but as lens for structural change.
Aqsa Ashraf, University of St. Andrews
Does Colonialism Affect all Colonised Subjects the Same? Decolonising Art History Through a Conversation about Postcolonial Marginality
Writing about Colonialism and Culture, Nicholas Dirks argued that colonial power clones itself in postcolonial societies, leading to the emergence of regimes as exploitative as the colonial state. In other words, colonial cultural violence does not affect all colonised subjects equally. Therefore, continuing conversations about decolonising art history must reassess the complexities of postcolonial marginality, moving beyond the power imbalances in a coloniser-colonised binary. Considering this argument in the context of colonial photographic archives and postcolonial press photography, this presentation seeks to answer: What does decolonisation mean for postcolonial citizens who are doubly marginalised by the epistemic violence depicted in photographs from the former colonial state and the present, postcolonial regime?
Postcolonial India will be the geographical focus of this enquiry, contextualised against the backdrop of colonial divide-and-rule politics and the rise of Hindutva fascism. The presentation will analyse colonial ethnographic-photographic sources such as the People of India Series (1868). These sources created/perpetuated Islamophobic stereotypes of Muslims as violent invaders and destructors of Hindu temples in India. They will be compared with press photography documenting Hindutva violence in postcolonial India, a consequence of the internalisation of colonial communalist knowledge. Therefore, the presentation will examine photographs of Karsevaks rehearsing their planned destruction of the Babri Mosque (1992), shot by the journalist, Pradeep Jain. Considering the ease of viewer access to these photographs, through digitisation/open-access and online press journals, the presentation will open conversations about the meaning of and strategies surrounding decolonising art history and postcolonial marginality in the digital age.
Barnaby Haran, University of Hull
The Negro Worker’s Anti-Colonial Visuality: From Communist Globality to Pan-Africanist Decolonisation
This paper explores anti-colonial visuality in The Negro Worker (1928-1937), the organ of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, a formation within the Comintern, with a focus on George Padmore’s editorship. The Trinidad-born Padmore edited The Negro Worker from 1931-33, fostering the radicalization of the oppressed globally, represented in scenes of violence, exploitation, and resistance, principally in colonial settings. As editor, rather than artist, Padmore assembled images as rhetorical evidence to generate anti-colonial militancy. The iconised ‘negro worker’, encompassing manual workers and Black Communists, on the magazine’s cover photos or photomontages signified Communist globality, counterpoised internal images of analogised European colonial brutalities, Jim Crow violations in America, and Fascist persecution in Germany and Italy. Padmore’s editorial tenure of The Negro Worker ended in 1933. Although a prominent opponent of Naziism, Padmore’s criticism of the USSR’s abandonment of anti-colonialism in the Popular Front’s courting of Britain and France led to his expulsion from the Comintern in 1934.
Padmore’s subsequent collaborations with heiress, editor, and activist Nancy Cunard took immediate form in contributions to the epic Surrealist-inflected anthropological anthology and intellectual almanac Negro. In these auspices, images of the ‘negro worker’ operated within a dynamic archive of Blackness in which Communist globality reemerges as putative Pan-Africanist decolonisation. The expanded image realm in Negro overdetermines the instrumental ‘negro worker’ with emblematic portraits of Black intellectuals and diverse cultural objects. Fraught with internal contradictions and conceptually compromised, Negro nonetheless documented and visualised the Pan-Africanism that became Padmore’s defining mission.
Agnese Politi, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
Alessia Cargnelli, National College of Art and Design (NCAD) / National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL)/ Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)
Unfinishing the Archive
This paper examines how community-led and feminist archival practices engage Western cultural institutions through a comparative analysis of four archival projects: the Women of Colour Index (WOCI), initiated in the mid-1980s against institutional exclusion and now hosted at the Women’s Art Library (WAL–Goldsmiths) striving for community-led governance; the West Asian and North African Women’s Art Library (WANAWAL), a self-authorised and mobile archive emerging from diasporic organising; Éireann and I Archive, which functions through orality and affective transmission in critical relation to formal archival frameworks; and Archivos del Común (RedCSur/MNCARS), which works within the public museum to negotiate the conflict between institutional heritage and the collective ownership of social and artistic memories.
Across these cases, the archive is approached as a historically situated artistic and political practice that intervenes in the formation of visual canons and art-historical knowledge. These archives reveal institutionality as an ambivalent process of parasitical inhabitation, where the right of use constantly contends with hegemonic regimes of visibility and classification. Drawing on the concept of potential history (Azoulay) and the need to settle the accounts of a double memory (Diagne), the contribution examines how these differentiated positions generate productive friction through practices of access, refusal, and strategic disruption of institutional temporalities. The archive exceeds the logic of the static repository to function as a site of political survival, where care, orality, and relational labour operate as vital infrastructures of persistence (Martinis Roe). Instead of disavowing their entanglement with dominant infrastructures, these practices navigate this tension as a site of constant struggle, working toward a situated delinking from colonial genealogies and striving to hold knowledge accountable to the collective lives and memories that animate these archives.