On Photography, Ecologies and Decolonising Sexuality

Prof. Caroline Vout in conversation with Dr Edwin Coomasaru

On photography, queer ecologies, and decolonising sexuality

Wednesday, 13th November

17:30-18:30, Seminar rooms 2 & 3, Yusuf Hamied Court, Christ’s College

On photography, queer ecologies and decolonising sexuality, is a conversation between Dr Edwin Coomasaru and Professor Caroline Vout, discussing the work of queer Sri Lankan photographer, Lionel Wendt. Drawing on both decolonial and queer ecological theory, this conversation aims to reveal the connections between queerness, ecology and bodies through visual culture. Colonial Western thought has promoted a distinction between the ‘naked’ and the ‘nude’. In doing so, representations of unclothed bodies have been divorced into two opposing categories: one associated with culture, the mind, and reason, and the other associated with the nature, the body, and passion. The photographers work references and appropriates the classical tradition of Greco-Roman sculpture, as an anti-colonial tool of self-definition that rejects colonial attempts to categorise, define and subordinate queer, bodies of colour.

Dr Edwin Coomasaru is a historian of modern and contemporary British, Irish, and Sri Lankan art; his research considers the politics of gender, sexuality, and race. Coomasaru is an editor of the journal Visual Culture in Britain. He previously worked as a Research Assistant on the Association of Art History’s anti-racist and decolonial resource portal. He is currently working on a project Queer Tropics: Decolonising Sexuality and Ecology in Sri Lanka.

Prof Carrie Vout is a cultural historian and art historian at Christ’s College with a particular interest in the Roman imperial period and its reception. She has curated exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Henry Moore Institute, and is the current director of the Museum of Classical Archaeology and co-director of Cambridge Visual Culture. She has recently published an award winning book Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body (2022), and curated the current exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body.

This talk will be followed by a drinks reception.

Host or Publisher Christ's College Art Collective