2026 Margaret Plant Lecture in Art History: Jeannine Tang
Join us for Monash University’s annual Margaret Plant Lecture in Art History for 2026, presented by Jeannine Tang
Living Legends
This lecture explores the work of artists who turned to tr/ancestors and recruited their co-presence in works of art employing performance in the 2000s and 2010s. During this time, artists such as Tourmaline, Julie Tolentino, micha cárdenas and many others summoned the embodied and ghostly presence of elders and peers, reanimating archival materials, exploring older survival strategies, earlier forms of making and living. Some of these experiments include mixed-reality, digital and bio-art projects by cárdenas and the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, whose unexpected actions and durations yielded critical forms of movement and sustenance, that elaborated trans life and social reproduction beyond the era’s political liberalism, towards a more expansive counterculture and politics.
About the speaker
Jeannine Tang is an art historian from Singapore, teaching as Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Jeannine has published widely in venues such as Artforum, Art Journal, Art History, journal of visual culture, GLQ and Theory, Culture & Society. Recent writings include an essay on Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett’s performances, “Declarations of Vulnerability: Ring of Fire” in Methods for Ecocritical Art History (Manchester University Press, 2025); “Those Portals: Ming Wong’s Wayang Spaceship” in the catalogue for Ming Wong: Wayang Spaceship (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2025) and “Videotage: Emergent Infrastructures” on the Hong Kong based video and media arts organization Videotage, co-authored with Hsu Fang-Tze, in The New Television: Video After Television (MIT Press, 2024). In 2017, Jeannine co-curated the museum exhibition and co-edited the book The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts Co. with Lia Gangitano and Ann Butler at the Hessel Museum of Art. The forthcoming monograph, Living Legends: An Art and Performance of Trans* History is under contract with Duke University Press, and received The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
This lecture follows a one-day symposium organised by the Queer Research Cluster. More details soon.
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 Chrisoula Lioni (writer, cultural producer and curator, 2025), Marsha Meskimmon (Professor Emerita of Transnational Art and Feminisms at Loughborough University, 2024), 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).
Event Details
- Date:
- 12 August 2026 at 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
- Venue:
- Lecture Theatre G1.04, Building G, Caulfield campus
- Categories:
- Fine Art
Description
Join us for Monash University’s annual Margaret Plant Lecture in Art History for 2026, presented by Jeannine Tang
Living Legends
This lecture explores the work of artists who turned to tr/ancestors and recruited their co-presence in works of art employing performance in the 2000s and 2010s. During this time, artists such as Tourmaline, Julie Tolentino, micha cárdenas and many others summoned the embodied and ghostly presence of elders and peers, reanimating archival materials, exploring older survival strategies, earlier forms of making and living. Some of these experiments include mixed-reality, digital and bio-art projects by cárdenas and the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, whose unexpected actions and durations yielded critical forms of movement and sustenance, that elaborated trans life and social reproduction beyond the era’s political liberalism, towards a more expansive counterculture and politics.
About the speaker
Jeannine Tang is an art historian from Singapore, teaching as Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Jeannine has published widely in venues such as Artforum, Art Journal, Art History, journal of visual culture, GLQ and Theory, Culture & Society. Recent writings include an essay on Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett’s performances, “Declarations of Vulnerability: Ring of Fire” in Methods for Ecocritical Art History (Manchester University Press, 2025); “Those Portals: Ming Wong’s Wayang Spaceship” in the catalogue for Ming Wong: Wayang Spaceship (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2025) and “Videotage: Emergent Infrastructures” on the Hong Kong based video and media arts organization Videotage, co-authored with Hsu Fang-Tze, in The New Television: Video After Television (MIT Press, 2024). In 2017, Jeannine co-curated the museum exhibition and co-edited the book The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts Co. with Lia Gangitano and Ann Butler at the Hessel Museum of Art. The forthcoming monograph, Living Legends: An Art and Performance of Trans* History is under contract with Duke University Press, and received The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
This lecture follows a one-day symposium organised by the Queer Research Cluster. More details soon.
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 Chrisoula Lioni (writer, cultural producer and curator, 2025), Marsha Meskimmon (Professor Emerita of Transnational Art and Feminisms at Loughborough University, 2024), 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).