WSA PhD Seminar Series, 26th February 2025 (Location: PGR Rooms and MS Teams)
What’s missing from our cultural field, and why? What are the ethics of absence, erasure, and invisibility? Can intentional absence or invisibility be a politically productive strategy? In this workshop I’ll present some of the ways my own research asks and answers these (and related) questions as a preface to a group exploration of how invisibility and absence might operate as useful theoretical positions to take in our own practices.
Louise Siddons is Professor of Visual Politics and Head of the Department of Art & Media Technology at the Winchester School of Art. Her research focuses on intersectional visual resistance to structures of marginalisation in modernity, and has covered topics from the eighteenth century to the present. She has recently a monograph about photographer Laura Gilpin that examines the intersection of lesbian and Navajo sovereignty politics at mid-century (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Her research has been supported by grants from the British Library, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and others.