Marsha Meskimmon: 'Sol y Sombra: On the Shimmering Opacity of Planetary Aesthetics'
Monash University’s annual Margaret Plant Lecture in Art History for 2023, presented by Marsha Meskimmon.
Sol y Sombra: On the Shimmering Opacity of Planetary Aesthetics is a presentation that takes the figure of ‘sun and shade’ as a starting point from which to engage with the intellectual and aesthetic legacies of the European Enlightenment and, in particular, with the structural violence of ocularcentrism underpinned by the binary hierarchy of light over dark(ness). The aesthetic practices of artists such as Berni Searle, Thảo Nguyên Phan, Myrlande Constant and Graciela Sacco create counterpoints to modes of vision and knowledge premised upon all-seeing transcendence, accompanied by searing transparency. They mobilize instead modes of mutual radiance, transparency and opacity, and the contingent vitalities of sparkling, shimmering, (dis)appearance, even as they challenge continuing conditions of ecological, social, political and epistemic injustice. Marsha contends that these flourishing forms of interdependent ‘survivance’ demonstrate the potential of decolonial, ecological feminist thinking-in-making to materialise an ethics of nonviolence in and through plural and planetary aesthetics, and that planetary survival more generally rests on just such imaginative potential.
About the speaker
Marsha Meskimmon is Professor Emerita of Transnational Art and Feminisms at Loughborough University. In her publications, exhibitions, interdisciplinary and practice-led collaborations, Meskimmon brings decolonial and ecocritical feminist thinking together with modern and contemporary art, arguing that aesthetic practices and art’s affective agency can contribute meaningfully to pressing issues of social and environmental justice. Her current project is a Trilogy, entitled Transnational Feminisms and the Arts, two volumes of which have now been published: Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections (2020) and Transnational Feminisms and Art’s Transhemispheric Histories: Ecologies and Genealogies (2023). The final volume is in progress under the working title: Transnational Feminisms, Planetary Aesthetics and Peace: Resonance and Riffing (forthcoming, 2025).
This program is presented by Monash Art Lectures (MUMA and Monash Fine Art).
About Margaret Plant and the Annual Lecture in Art History
The Margaret Plant Annual Lecture in Art History is coordinated by the Art History & Theory program in the Department of Fine Art, Monash Art, Design and Architecture and the Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA.
Margaret Plant is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Monash University. Plant began her teaching career at the University of Melbourne in 1962 as a tutor in the Department of Fine Arts. She then accepted an appointment at RMIT University in 1968 as Senior Lecturer in the History of Art—the first academic appointment of an art historian within an Australian art school. Plant has a long and distinguished association with Monash University as Professor of Visual Arts (1982–96) and Emeritus Professor from 1996 onward.
The Margaret Plant Annual Lecture in Art History was established at Monash University in 2018. Previous speakers include Andrea Bubenik (Senior Lecturer in Art History in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland, 2023), Erika Wolf (Consultant, Ne boltai! Collection of Propaganda Art, Prague, 2022) Ming Tiampo (Professor of Art History, Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, 2021), Christina Barton (writer, editor, educator and Director, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019), and James Meyer (Curator, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2018).