2025 Margaret Plant Lecture in Art History: Chrisoula Lionis

Join us for Monash University’s annual Margaret Plant Lecture in Art History for 2025, presented by Chrisoula Lionis.

Praxes of Displacement: Contemporary Art as Method for Cultural Resilience
This lecture will discuss the relationship between contemporary arts practice, visual evidence, and legal interventions in contexts of forced displacement. With attention focused on the key sites of Palestine, Greece, and Australia, it will consider the capacity for art to operate both as an instrument of cultural resilience and as a legal tool for forcibly displaced populations.

5pm – 5.45pm | Registration and drinks (Building H)
6pm – 7.30pm | Lecture at The Pavilion (Building H)

About the Speaker
Chrisoula Lionis is a writer, cultural producer and curator based in Athens. She is co-director of the pedagogical platform Artists for Artists and author of books Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (I.B. Tauris, 2016, 2022), (ed) Comedy in Crises: The Weaponisation of Humour in Contemporary Art (Palgrave, 2023), and the forthcoming Displacement and the Art of Intervention: Contemporary Art and Methods for Cultural Resilience (Routledge, 2026).

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 Marsha Meskimmon (Professor Emerita of Transnational Art and Feminisms at Loughborough University, 2024), Dr Andrea Bubenik (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).

_{This lecture follows the Symposium:  Framing Relations: Cultural Entanglements Between Australia and the Arab World}