LIBERATIONS: Questions for Art and Theory
A Workshop on the Aesthetics & Historiography of 20th-Century Decolonization
Organised under ERC Consolidator Grant Project Entangled Freedoms & ARTMargins journal
Organisers
Sanjukta Sunderason, University of Amsterdam & Elizabeth Harney, University of Toronto
In partnership with Decolonial Futures, de Appel & the Eye Filmmuseum
Liberations: Questions for Art and Theory is being organised at the University of Amsterdam between 1-2 June 2026 as part of the ERC Consolidator Grant project – Entangled Freedoms: Decolonial Modernisms as Transnational Relations of Resistance, 1940s-1980s (2024-2029), steered by Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason, and as groundwork for a Special Issue on Liberation Aesthetics with the journal ARTMargins. The workshop and the Special Issue are conceptualised by Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Amsterdam) and Dr. Elizabeth Harney (University of Toronto), both editors at ARTMargins.
A core question driving ongoing work at the project Entangled Freedoms is: how did art practices and discourses from the decolonizing worlds of twentieth-century Asia, Africa, and the Middle East visualise and intervene in plural, contesting ideas of freedom? Taking scopes of ‘freedom’ out of hegemonic Cold War binaries of western ‘First World’ versus socialist ‘Second World’ values, the project puts it in relation with its resonant global vocabularies of independence/liberation/emancipation from the vantage point of the decolonizing ‘Third World,’, or what is today seen as the Global South. Liberations: Questions for Art and Theory is the project’s first specialist workshop that foregrounds the specific field of decolonial liberation movements in the 20th century. Thinking from their fraught and fragmented archives and using (visual) art and aesthetic thought as vantage points, Harney and Sunderason are highlighting here in particular, the need for historiographical, methodological, and conceptual questions that can connect fragmented trans/national stories and artistic archives that lie embedded, entangled, even lost within histories of decolonial liberation. A core goal of the workshop and the connected Special Issue is also to push the conversation on art/aesthetics from the Global South beyond the peripheral/alternative/postcolonial/global modernisms scholarship, which in the past 30 years has created concrete foundations for new postcolonial art histories but needs to tread new historiographical and theoretical ground.
With such historiographical and theoretical stakes, Harney and Sunderason are gathering in Amsterdam experts in the field who have been key to transforming the field in the past two decades as well as new scholarship that is actively pushing its archival, theoretical, and speculative possibilities.
Some questions we are working with include, among others,
- How did (visual) art imagine and intervene in plural, contesting ideas of freedom during 20th-century decolonization?
- What histories entangle in conceptualising aesthetics from 20th-century decolonization?
- What are the historiographical directions that art histories of decolonization have taken? And what are the stakes today?
The event spans 1-2 June with various entry-points into these questions – roundtable, panels; exhibition visit; and film screening – supported by our partners, the Research Priority Area “Decolonial Futures”, de Appel Amsterdam, and the Eye Filmmuseum. Please see the program attached above,.
Participants (in alphabetical order)
- Kate Cowcher (art historian, art and socialism, East African art history, University of St. Andrews)
- Lani Hanna (cultural studies, infrastructures of transnational solidarity, University of Amsterdam)
- Elizabeth Harney (art historian, global modernisms, Senegal, African art historiography, University of Toronto)
- Noortje de Leij (art historian, Marxist aesthetics and critical theory, 20th century Western art history, University of Amsterdam)
- Zeina Maasri (art & design historian, Transnational/Arab visual culture and decolonization, solidarity in the global sixties, University of Bristol)
- Naeem Mohaiemen (utopia-dystopia slippage, solidarity in messy practice; filmmaker and researcher, School of Arts, Columbia University)
- Yasmin Nurming-Por (art historian, curator, Non-Aligned exhibitions in North Africa, Yugoslavia and South Asia, University of Toronto)
- Adrienne Rooney (art historian, transnational/Caribbean and US South, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
- Sanjukta Sunderason (art historian, art and decolonization, South Asia, aesthetic theory, University of Amsterdam)
Time: 1 June 2026 (1530-1800); 2 June 2026 (0930-1500).
Venue: Kartinizaal, Bushuis, 1 and 2 June 2026.
Please register and discuss possibilities of getting research school credits.
Contact Lilli Thöne (l.i.m.thone@uva.nl) for details – registration/workshop logistics etc.
