SADIA SHIRAZI

Courses

Decolonizing the Museum: Case Studies
Johns Hopkins University (January 2022—June 2022)

The recent decolonial turn in museums has seen myriad demands for the decolonization of museums, alongside requests for repatriation and restitution. What is decolonization? How have anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial writers, thinkers and communities articulated, enacted, and participated in movements of decolonization? What does it mean to “decolonize” the museum? This seminar will examine the colonial legacies of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by focusing on a range of case studies, from the Benin Bronzes and the Bamiyan Buddhas to repatriation requests from First Nations and Indigenous communities across the world, amongst other examples. We will study artworks, photographs, artifacts, architecture, museum collections and their relationship to questions of universalism, sovereignty, translation, untranslatability, display, provenance, stewardship and the life of objects.

Asian American Art and Activism: Third World, Feminist and Queer Entanglements
Johns Hopkins University (September 2021—December 2021)

This interdisciplinary course surveys critical themes related to Asian American art and activism including perspectives from history, art and visual culture, literature, and gender and sexuality studies. It develops an account of Asian racialization from the 19th century alongside theories and histories of race, imperialism, postcoloniality, settler colonialism, translation, labor, migration, dispossession, in/visibility, and diaspora. Throughout the course, we will focus on who and what is “Asian American” and how this shifts over time, while examining Third World, feminist, and queer activist movements from the 1950s onwards that reveal the contradictions of Asian American identities.

Curatorial Studies
Whitney Independent Study Program (September 2018—June 2021)

I teach post-graduate curatorial fellows at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program as the Instructor for Curatorial Studies. We think critically around what is excluded from art historical narratives and consider what a “global” art history might look like. Over the course of the year students are guided through conducting research, studio visits with artists, and working collaboratively to develop proposals for a group exhibition. Once a proposal has been approved, the students are led through the proceed of selecting artworks, arranging loans, developing programming, and thinking through the installation design of their exhibition. I work with the students as they write essays for and participate in the production of a catalogue accompanying their exhibition and oversee installation and deinstallation. Curatorial participants are involved in all aspects of the programming throughout the run of the exhibition.

2019-2020: After La vida Nueva, Curated by Weiyi Chang, Sofie Jamal, Colleen O’Connor, and Patricio Orellana, Artists Space, August 7-31, 2020

2018-2019: Always, Already, Haunting, "disss-co," Haunt, Curated by Nia Nottage, Gwyneth Shanks, and Simon Wu, The Kitchen, May 24 - June 15, 2019

Writing About Art
Cornell University (Fall 2020)

The process of writing about an artwork is also a process of looking at the work itself. This course begins from this premise and considers artworks as emanating out of complex formal, socio-political and historical engagements in which writing is a tool with which we describe and communicate what we perceive to a range of audiences. The course will foreground critical artistic practices, decolonial methods and counter-hegemonic visualities from artists across the global south as well as minoritized artists in Europe and the United States. What is visual representation? How do concepts of transparency and opacity play into problems of representation? What does poetry offer us in our study of art and how does this differ from art criticism? What would it mean to write about an artwork only within the form of the museum wall label or closed caption descriptions? What other stories can we tell about artists and artworks that lie beyond dominant, Euro-American narratives of art history? We will read theory, art criticism, essays on artists, interviews, reviews and poetry, exploring a range of forms of writing that take the art object as their focus. We will look at artworks from a range of periods across the world, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, video, performance and installation.

Other Abstractions: South Asia and its Diasporas, 1960’s-1990’s
Cooper Union (Spring 2021) and Eugene Lang College, The New School (Spring 2018)

This course explores abstraction within a ‘global’ context, in the postwar period commensurate with the era of decolonization and anti-colonial independence movements across the global south and its diasporas. While histories of twentieth century art, locate abstraction solely within a Euro-American narrative of postwar modernism, this course will focus instead on artists working with abstraction in the post-independence period of the 1960s through the 1990s across South Asia, the western Indian Ocean and its diaspora in Britain, France, and the United States. The course will consider the aesthetic, social, and political conditions of artists who were working within the legacy of modernism in a transnational and transcultural context, both within their countries of origin and in Euro-American metropolitan centers, and how these artists reframed indigenous, pre-colonial art and aesthetics. We will study works from painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, experimental film, conceptual art, installation and performance art. Students consider concepts of the nation, modernity, ornament, temporality, citizenship, belonging, gender and sexuality, postcoloniality, urbanism and space.

Curating Against Art History
Cooper Union (Spring 2020)

The recent “decolonial” and “global” turn in museums and curatorial practice often ignores the fact that art history provides the disciplinary foundation for the museum as a colonial institution. What would it mean to curate against art history? How do you curate artists and exhibition histories that are not found in Euro-American narratives of art history or in its attendant institutional archives? How does curatorial practice offer alternate art historical evidence? This course thinks through such questions by engaging with theories and activist practices of decolonization, postcolonial and translation theory, Black studies and Asian studies to move towards other epistemologies and methods of curatorial practice. It will foreground minoritized artists and transnational exhibition histories across the global South, with points of contact across Western Europe and North America, that intersect with histories of Black political movements, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Third World Women’s Movement. We will consider alternate epistemologies, aesthetics, and collections beyond the hold of both art history and the museum. We will study texts, artists, artifacts, art objects, embodied practices, museum collections, exhibition histories, and modes of display and their relationship to questions of history, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, stewardship and the life of objects.

Practicing Curating
Eugene Lang College, The New School (Fall 2016; Spring 2013)

Practicing Curating will offer an in-depth introduction to curatorial practice, examining the art of exhibition making from a historical, cultural, theoretical, and pragmatic perspective. The course covers current and historical exhibitions along with curatorial and critical writing related to exhibition practices. Students will also gain hands-on experience in various aspects of mounting an exhibition, including planning, designing, installing, and archiving the show. The exhibition venue will be the Skybridge Art and Sound Space located on the third floor between the Lang and New School buildings. Students must be able to dedicate time outside of normal class hours for excursions to museums, galleries, alternative art spaces, and other venues as an essential part of this course. Prerequisite: Introduction to Art History and Visual Studies or Exhibitions as History. This upper-level course is restricted to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.