Keynote Speakers - CONVIVIAL CULTURES | XI Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture - Nav Haq

MONOCULTURES AND ARTISTIC PRACTICE

Abstract

Nav Haq will discuss ideas from his recent exhibition Monoculture – A Recent History (M HKA, 25 September 2020 – 25 April 2021), which was a research project investigating a history of monoculture – or cultural homogeneity – approaching it not only from historical, social, cultural and ideological perspectives, but also philosophical, linguistic and agricultural ones. Covering a period of approximately 100 years, Monoculture provided a tentative mapping, allowing for a comparative analysis of different manifestations of monoculture, as well as their reflections in art and propaganda. Looking at the recent relevant past through to the present day, it sought to consider notions of culture in a different way to established lenses such as identity politics or post-modern relativism. Haq will discuss what such historical manifestations can tell us about the present, and how it might inform us about the role of art and its institutions.

Biography

Nav Haq is Associate Director at M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp – responsible for the artistic programme. He was Senior Curator at M HKA from 2012-2019. Haq was a founding editor of the online research platform for the L’Internationale confederation of European museums (www.internationaleonline.org) and is an editor at Afterall. He was previously Exhibitions Curator at Arnolfini, Bristol, and Curator at Gasworks, London. Haq has organised numerous monographic exhibitions with artists such as Cosima von Bonin, Imogen Stidworthy, Otobong Nkanga and Cevdet Erek, as well as significant overviews of work by Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Joseph Beuys, Kerry James Marshall, Laure Prouvost and Shilpa Gupta. Haq was curator of the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2017. Other group exhibitions have included Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction (2012); Museum Show – a major historical survey of (semi-fictional) museums created by artists (2011); the two-person exhibition The Sea Wall presenting works by Haegue Yang and Felix Gonzalez-Torres (2011); Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie: Class Hegemony in Contemporary Art, co-curated with Tirdad Zolghadr (2006-09); and Contour Biennial 2007, Mechelen, Belgium. At M HKA he co-curated the group exhibition Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics in 2014, as well as curating the interdisciplinary exhibition Energy Flash: The Rave Movement (2016). In 2012, he was recipient of the Independent Vision Award for Curatorial Achievement, awarded by Independent Curators International, New York.