Visiting artist Dr. Caterina Pizanias: Can art ever be political?

Caterina Pizanias is an itinerant academic, independent curator, arts writer, teacher, and active member of the arts communities in Canada and Greece.  She received her doctorate in the Sociology of Art from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, and has taught at the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, Simon Fraser University and Zeppelin University, Germany. Dr. Pizanias has published extensively in refereed academic journals, books, anthologies, and arts periodicals, and has made presentations on Canadian and Greek art in North America and Europe.

Can political art be more than a theme for exhibitions, biennales or conferences?  What will it take for art to be political? During the last few years Athens with its political, social, economic and humanitarian crises, has become the focus of attention of institutions such as Documenta 14, 2017 and the ever-present Ai Weiwei in 2016. Weiwei made promises to the citizens of the island of Lesbos to build a monument to the refugees, relocate his studio to the island to better follow and help publicize abroad the refugee problem. How is one to think of and learn from artists such as Ai Weiwei? 

Thursday March 16, 2017

Talk begins at 12:00 noon in the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery