A series of Web Symposiums presented by AICA, The International Association of Art Critics on the initiative of the AICA Forum Committee (the former Fellowship Fund Committee).
The “Ruptured Histories” project aims to bring together a multiplicity of stands on the global debate of Decolonisation to enable us to investigate it from different geographical and cultural vantage points.
PART 4
Extraction: Coloniality and Decolonisation of Identities
Thursday, 2nd October 2025, online
5 PM CET (Paris)
12 Noon GMT-3 (São Paulo)
Duration: The webinar will be approximately 2 hours long
The AICA online webinar is open to members and non-members, students and academics worldwide. There is no charge for attending. Further information on the content of this webinar and how to request the zoom link will be issued at the end of September 2025 on the website of AICA International.
Theme
According to theorists like Edward Said, Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano, while Colonialism as a political organization has ended, its more vicious structure – coloniality – endures in many former European colonies, especially those situated in the Global South. Whereas the political structure controlled by the European metropoles gave way to national governments across the globe, the control of subjectivities remains ever present in the contemporary world through the suppression of cultural specificity and identities.
As Mignolo elaborated, Coloniality is the downside of modernity, which means that practices of colonialism and those of coloniality have historically been the base for the development of capitalism as modernity’s major project. Among those practices, extraction can be widely understood as regarding the spoils of the land and its wealth, but also the spoiling of identities, social practices like knowledge, art and religion, as much as many other cultural traits not conformed to the European status quo.
Hence, artists and theorists from the Global South – or working on its history, art and culture – have been dedicated to identifying and reflecting on the legacy of colonialism and coloniality, a legacy that is fundamentally extractivist in nature. Our webinar thus focuses on the extraction of identities, their frameworks and their resources. By framing identity as part of a reciprocal ecological system we are able to consider a wide range of associated topics that include individuality, communities, beliefs, gender, nature, ecology and society – as entrenched hierarchical constructs that can be unravelled and complicated through a process of decolonial enquiry.
Speakers
Christian Kravagna is an art historian, critic and curator. His research focuses on postcolonial studies, global modernisms, migration, politics of representation and institutional critique. Since 2006, he has been Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.Author of Transmodern: An Art History of Contact: 1920–60 (Manchester) and The American Museum: Slavery, Black History, and the Fight for Justice in Southern Museums, co-authored with Cornelia Kogoj (Vienna/Berlin, 2019).
Paula Albuquerque is an Amsterdam-based Portuguese artist and scholar. She is currently Senior Researcher at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Assistant Researcher at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. For her solo exhibition Colonised Landscapes and Spectral Deterritorialised Flora Albuquerque focuses on the portrayal of the colonized landscape in formerly occupied territories, alongside the role of early film as a form of proto-surveillance in sustaining and perpetuating colonial structures.
Sandra Gamarra Heshiki is an artist and researcher. Her work at the Spanish pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennale is centred on Spanish art collections from colonial times to the Enlightenment. Her work emphasises the biased representations of colonisers and the colonised within the museum context. In her presentation, she relates present-day racism, migration and extractivism to a museological and ecological crisis.
Christian Kravagna will also be the respondent during the webinar.
Moderator
Robert-Jan Muller is an art historian. He publishes articles on modern and contemporary art in various publications, including Museumtijdschrift. He is an honorary member of AICA Netherlands and is internationally active in the AICA Forum Committee.
This announcement is also available as a PDF in Spanish.