Online | Hogarth’s Topographies: Decolonizing Sámi Representations
This Thursday, from The Lewis Walpole, Yale Library:
Joar Nango and Mathias Danbolt | Decolonizing Sámi Representations and the Legacy of Colonial Topographies
William Hogarth’s Topographies: A Series of Conversations
Online, The Lewis Walpole Library, 2 June 2022, noon EST
Topography is central to William Hogarth’s canonical progress series in which London settings play a decisive narrative role. Lesser-known works by the artist, however, also engage with topographical representation. Pierre Von-Ow’s online exhibition William Hogarth’s Topographies considers the artist’s illustrations of national and colonized geographies beyond the metropole. Among international topographical views are Hogarth’s illustrations of Sápmi in the Scandinavian north, referred to at the time as “Lapland.” Artist Joar Nango and art historian Mathias Danbolt will discuss the legacy of historical representations of the Sámi, and their reworking of colonial archives in the service of Indigenous Sámi self-determination. This is an online event, and registration is required.
Joar Nango (born 1979 in Alta, Norway) is a Sámi architect and indigenous artist, living in Norway. Nango’s work investigates the nomadic conception of space, territories, and ideas of the concept of home. He focuses on different ways of dealing with materiality, movement, and space. He has exhibited internationally both separately as an individual artist including at Documenta14 (2017), Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), Institute for Modern art (Brisbane, 2019), National Museum of Canada (2019), Bergen Kunsthall (2021), and National Museum of Norway (2022). He is also involved in collective projects. In 2010 he established the architecture collective FFB which makes an architecture celebrating the failure of capitalism. Since 2020, he has been involved as a host and director of the ongoing TV production PCA-TV (Post-Capitalist Architecture TV) in which the 6th episode features a commissioned work for Toronto Biennial of Art in May 2022.
Mathias Danbolt is a Norwegian art historian who has a special focus on queer, feminist, and decolonial perspectives on art and visual culture. Danbolt is currently leading three collective research projects: “The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories” (2019–23), “Okta: Art and Social Communities in Sápmi” (2019–22), and “Moving Monuments: The Afterlife of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era” (2022–25). In 2017 Danbolt curated the visual culture exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony (2017–18), with Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer and Sarah Giersing at the Royal Danish Library. Danbolt is professor of art history at University of Copenhagen.
This program is organized by The Lewis Walpole Library in conjunction with the online exhibition William Hogarth’s Topographies, curated by Pierre Von-Ow, PhD candidate in Yale’s Department of The History of Art.
Online Exhibition | William Hogarth’s Topographies
Portrait of William Hogarth from a detail of the trade card of John Smith, printseller, at Hogarth’s Head, ca. 1760
(Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 749.00.00.02, Box 105)
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From The Lewis Walpole Library:
William Hogarth’s Topographies
Online, The Lewis Walpole Library, open from 17 May 2022
Curated by Pierre Von-Ow, with Cynthia Roman and Susan Walker
This online exhibition explores William Hogarth’s engagement with topography, an important, if lesser-known aspect of his art. Topography is understood for this project in the broad definition provided in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755): “Description of particular places.” First, a series of engraved illustrations that the artist produced in his mid-twenties for the Travels of the French explorer Aubry de La Motraye (1723) offers an opportunity to study his methods to represent territories he only visited through textual descriptions. Then the Five Days Peregrination (1732), an impromptu trip to Kent on which Hogarth embarked with four fellows to satirize the tradition of the Grand Tour as well as the practice of antiquarians in Britain, demonstrates his irreverential relationship with historical traces of the country’s past. Finally, Hogarth’s engraved frontispiece for Joshua Kirby’s influential treatise on perspective is read in the light of the longer tradition of perspective studies in Britain and contemporary debates about the respective roles of the eye and of mathematical rules in the representation of space.
Drawing primarily from the extensive collections of Hogarth’s graphic work at the Lewis Walpole Library and other Yale collections, Hogarth’s Topographies seeks to contribute to recent historiographic efforts that re-read Hogarth’s work in a more international perspective, most notably the Hogarth and Europe retrospective at Tate Britain (November 2022 — March 2023), which stresses the necessity of approaching the artist’s work in the light of a broader European and global context that resonates in his production.
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