Al-An deSouza will present the third Migrations Visiting Artist Talk, “The Culture of Location,” in conjunction with their current exhibition at the Johnson Museum, Al-An deSouza: Elegies for Futures Past. The talk will be preceded by a curator-led walk-through of the exhibition at 4PM, open to all.

DeSouza will discuss the genre of landscape in relation to migration, settlement, and climate change. The title of their talk is a play on The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha, now a classic of postcolonial theory. DeSouza’s transmedia practice explores the legacies of colonialism through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation.

A conceptual photographer, performance artist, and writer, deSouza was born to South Asian parents in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in England before settling in the United States. They are a professor in the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley, and hold an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles and a BFA from Bath Academy of Art, England. DeSouza is represented by Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi.

This is the third in a series of artist talks with the campus-wide Migrations Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell, with support from the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.

Masks are suggested and social distancing will be encouraged in the Museum's wing lecture room. This event will also be available as a webinar. Please click this link to join (Passcode: 1234).

Navina Najat Haidar is the Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah Curator in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is currently marking ten years of its permanent galleries. This talk will be a visual introduction to the spaces, objects, and ideas that constitute the galleries, as well as new directions ahead.

Haidar organized the exhibitions Workshop and Legacy: Stanley William Hayter, Krishna Reddy, Zarina Hashmi (2016); Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy (2015); and Treasures from India: Gems and Jewels in the Al-Thani Collection (2014) at the Met. She was involved in the planning of their permanent galleries for Islamic art, which opened in 2011, and is currently working on a series of new installations to mark their anniversary. Her future projects include an exhibition on the age of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, and a forthcoming book on the pierced window screen (jali) in Islamic architecture.

Masks are suggested and social distancing will be encouraged in the Museum's wing lecture room. This event will also be available as a webinar. Please click this link to join (Passcode: 1234).

The annual Stoikov Lecture on Asian Art at the Johnson Museum is funded by a generous gift from Judith Stoikov, Class of 1963, and is cosponsored this year by the Department of the History of Art and the Cornell South Asia Program.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

This conference focuses on Kashmiri literature through extensive discussions of forms, genres, ecologies, and poetics that inhabit literary landscapes in Kashmir. By exploring multiple forms, genres, and languages of literary expression across disparate te mporalities and historical contexts the conference aims to answer as to what we can learn about the morphing formations of power in Kashmir? How to understand the subsequent modalities and idioms of subversion in and across Kashmiri
literature?

We ask that masks be worn during this conference.