The talk will be focused on Elvan Zabunyan latest book Bringing the ends of the world together (Réunir les bouts du monde: Art, histoire, esclavage en mémoire, B42, 2024). The publication is a groundbreaking study of contemporary art practices relating to the history and the memory of Transatlantic slavery. It invokes and interlinks a great number of artists, writers and intellectuals (ranging from Sun Ra, Audre Lorde, Edouard Glissant and Michelle Cliff to Frank Bowling , Ana Mendieta, Beverly Buchanan, Renée Green, Cameron Rowland and Theaster Gates) who based part of their practice on the irreversible rupture caused by four centuries of triangular trade. Ultimately, the book asks what this history continues to produce today.
The talk will be an opportunity to introduce Elvan Zabunyan’s research and the way she conceptualised the book.
Professor Elvan Zabunyan is a Professor at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University, a leading historian of contemporary art, and an art critic. A specialist of African-American art and related historical and political issues, her current research on the memory of slavery in contemporary art in the United States and the Caribbean has led to the book Réunir les bouts du monde, published in October 2024 by B42. She has published several monographs and written numerous articles for edited volumes, exhibition catalogs and national and international periodicals. Her book Black is A Color, a History of African American Contemporary Art, published in French and in English, won the SAES/AFEA research prize in 2005. She is also the author of the first monograph on Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Berkeley, 1968 (2013). More recently, she co-edited Constellations subjectives, pour une histoire féministe de l’art (Ixe, 2020), Decolonizing Colonial Heritage, New Agendas, Actors, and Practices in and beyond Europe (Routledge, 2022), L’art en France à la croisée des cultures (Paris/Heidelberg, DFK Paris/arthistoricum.net, 2023).
Organised by Dr Devika Singh, Senior Lecturer in Curating, The Courtauld.
