Organised by Edinburgh College of Art
“United in Diversity:” Commonwealth Abstraction in Postwar Britain
About this event
As decolonisation proliferated after WWII, so too did the cultural production of the new “Commonwealth” throughout Britain, which also included exhibitions of abstract art. Commonwealth abstraction was often conflated with pre-existing aesthetic and philosophical concepts of the universal and the culturally particular, rooted in Hegelian and Kantian concepts of progress and rationality claiming there is some universal humanist comprehension of our world transcending boundaries between cultural, national, or racial difference. This belief can be traced to the comparative, stylistic analyses between art of the West and non-West by critics including Roger Fry and Clive Bell and their notions of universal or ‘significant forms,’ which in turn influenced mid-century art histories, and the critical reception and organization of exhibitions of non-Western art and artists of colour in postwar Britain. That abstraction was a universalizing visual language was both championed and challenged by artists associated with the Commonwealth, including Denis Williams, Aubrey Williams, Frank Bowling, New Vision Centre Gallery, and the Caribbean Artists Movement. This talk traces this history of postwar abstraction in Britain and the Commonwealth within these historical frameworks of the universal and particular as related to form and stylistic analyses, and the subsequent criticisms by my subjects, stimulated by the rise of anti-colonial politics and Civil rights movements in the UK, US, the Caribbean, and West Africa in the late 1960s onward.
Biography:
Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani is Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the intersections between transnationality, immigration, diaspora, and the politics of postwar abstraction and visual culture. She has held positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; the Ulrich Museum of Art; Tate Liverpool; and the Yale Center for British Art. She has published on artist Denis Williams in NKA: Journal of Contemporary Art (November 2019) and her chapter "The Commonwealth of British Pop: Race, Labor and Postcolonial Politics in Frank Bowling’s Mother’s House series" in Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race and Class in the Global Sixties (Bloomsbury, 2022) is forthcoming this spring.
Please note this event is hybrid - if you wish to view online, please select an "online viewing" ticket and you will receive zoom link before the event.