Convened by Dr Artun Ozguner (Senior Lecturer, Contextual Studies, Graphic Design School of Communications, University for the Creative Arts) as a DHS virtual seminar series.
Thursdays 6th, 13th and 20th June 2024 via Zoom
Please register for free via the DHS TicketSource page: www.ticketsource.co.uk/design-history-society
Objects have had their share from the political turmoil and conflict that trouble human lives, they have equally been distressed. Political turmoil and conflict place objects in strict binary narratives, dichotomies of gender, race, religion, politics, or hard-boiled nationalisms. The repressed, oppressed, restricted and distressed object reflects our own troubled world.
Objects in Distress virtual seminar series seeks to explore such changes in our approach to objects today or in the past. These attitudes vary from restrictions on uses and interpretations of objects/images to how individuals and communities use them to construct their identities or to reminisce in times of turmoil.
Join our discussions from around the globe, reaching out to object histories from India, Greece, Italy, France, Fiji, Mexico, Germany, Morocco, to Turkey, UK, USA, Philippines, South Africa, and Japan!
Each session consists of 4x10-mins presentations followed by 20 mins discussion. The seminars are free and held online, thanks to the generous support of the Design History Society. Everyone is warmly invited to attend.
6 JUNE
Session 1: 16.00-17.00 BST - Objects of displacement
Alejandro Gonzalez Milea - Dangerous drawings and the debate about the future on the Mexico-United States border: Contests over urban-architectural designs in the 1930s
Anna Derriks - TruckBloc & Co: Aesthetic sublimation of hostile vehicle mitigation barriers
Andrea Sosa Fontaine - 158 centimetres
Iskander Guetta - A House and a hole
Session 2: 19.00-20.00 BST - Deprived objects
Elena Radoi - The Object of Absence: Anthropogenic Gaps in Fresco Wall Paintings
Hella Wiedmer-Newman - Memorial Fetish Objects: The Case of Sarajevo’s War Childhood Museum
Durre Shehwar Ali - Lotacracy: Unveiling the Political Odyssey of Electoral Symbols in Pakistan
Guglielmo Rossi - The Claimants Union
13 JUNE
Session 1: 16.00-17.00 BST - Objects yearning for peace
Lucy Razzall - ‘Piles of empty boxes’: Bureaucracy, Infrastructure, and Design in the Great War
Henrica Langh - Distressed Garments: Clothes as silent witnesses of troubled worlds
Eilidh Duffy - Transcending the Imperial: the shifting codes of the M-65
Sweety Taur - From Screen to Reality: Depictions of Conflict in Indian Media through Objects
Session 2: 19.00-20.00 BST - Un-gendering objects
Bengisu Köse - Stiletto, or breaking the non-transitivity of objects
Rocio Naval - Vibrant piña textiles: revealing relationality and queer entanglement
Fabiola Adamo - Beyond Constriction: Empowered Femininity within Chitè's Lingerie Designs
Helena Bosch Vidal - Objects for desires in pandemic times
20 JUNE
Session 1: 16.00-17.00 BST - Misunderstood objects
Kavita Peterson - I-cula - Feeding into the Cannibal Myth
Zenia Malmer - Confronting Chinoiserie through the lens of Anti-Asian Hate: An Experimental Case Study
Anne Hollmuller - Art, Loot, Artifact, Art: Reactivating the Treasures of Béhanzin
Marguerite Van Der Merwe & Jacques Lange - Settlers, slaves, culture, politics, and reconciliation: the role of the koeksister as a signifier of identity
Nupur Doshi - Transgressions in Objecthood: Art, Conflict, and Shifting Realities
Session 2: 19.00-20.00 BST - Revelatory objects
Althea Ruoppo - Germany’s Refugee Crisis as Global Public Emergency: Civic Transnationalism in Isa Genzken’s Schauspieler II, 8 (2014)
Aya Yamamoto - Editorial Design of ‘World Proletarian Theatres Overview’ (1932) by Koreya Senda
Inês Jorge - Reinventing diplomatic ties in post-Brexit Britain: The Kingdom of Heaven (2017) installation at Manchester Cathedral
