Ein Vortrag von Bart Pushaw im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung: Entangled Art Histories. Objekte – Narrative – Diskurse

19 January 2023 | 17:15 h | Room E.002 (HS Agnes Muthspiel) | Unipark Nonntal | Salzburg

In 1818, the librettist-cum-mineralogist Karl Ludwig Giesecke donated two embroidered sealskin pouches to the forerunner of the Weltmuseum Wien. Collected around 1810 in Kalaallit Nunaat, the textiles belong to the design genre of tupassiviit, ornate tobacco pouches that Kalaallit women fashioned as lucrative trade items to navigate the colonial economy. This lecture charts a new biography of Giesecke’s personalized tupassivik, revealing how various logics of extraction coalesced in the transformation of an Arctic seal into a vessel for commodities of the global plantation. In doing so, it asks what it means for global art histories to center the knowledge and modes of making of Inuit women in the age of Black enslavement.

About the speaker

Dr. Bart Pushaw is an art historian of the colonial Americas, with a focus on Indigenous artists of the Circumpolar Arctic. He teaches art history at the University of Copenhagen, where he is a Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Fellow and member of the research network “The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories.” He collaborates with museums and collections in and out of the Arctic to propel the accessibility of Inuit cultural heritage and advance repatriation campaigns.