Illuminating New Stories about the Dutch East India Company through Art

– with international artists Diyan Achjadi and Beatrice Glow

Saturday 13 July, 2–3pm

Contemporary art is being used more and more around the world to broaden the understanding and to challenge established narratives of museum collections and archives. Please join us to hear how our visiting fellows at the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies, Diyan Achjadi (Vancouver) and Beatrice Glow (New York), think through their artistic practice and offer new insights into artifacts and historical narratives. This initiative forms part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project called ‘Mobilising Dutch East India Company collections for new global stories’, which brings together museum curators, conservators, and interdisciplinary researchers from across the globe.

The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery will host two short talks by the artists followed by a panel discussion about their practice. Members of the panel who are also part of this research project include Associate Professor Arvi Wattel of UWA School of Design, Corioli Souter, Head of the Maritime Heritage Department for the Western Australian Museum and Associate Professor Paul Uhlmann, Visual Arts ECU.

During July 2024, the artists will be ‘artists in residence’ at North Metropolitan TAFE and at UWA. This event is made possible through a collaboration between University of Western Australia, North Metropolitan TAFE, Edith Cowan University and Australian Catholic University. 

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Artists

Beatrice Glow is a New York and Bay Area-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes examinations of archives and collaboration with culture bearers and researchers in the creation of sculptural installations, textiles, emerging media, and olfactory experiences, to envision a more just and thriving world guided by history. An American of Taiwanese heritage, she questions the visual and material languages of power and aromatic cultural histories. Her recent solo exhibitions have taken place at New-York Historical Society and Baltimore Museum of Art, amongst others. Her work has been supported by Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Yale-NUS College, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, the Fulbright Program, and many more.

Diyan Achjadi works with printmaking, drawing and animation to explore the ways that surface ornamentation and illustrated printed matter can function as archives documenting the circulation of ideas in visual form. Currently based on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Watuth territories, they were born in Jakarta, Indonesia and spent their formative years moving between multiple educational, political, and cultural systems. Diyan received a BFA from the Cooper Union (New York, NY) and an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal, QC). They have exhibited widely at galleries and film festivals across Canada and beyond, most recently as part of the historic collective Godzilla Asian American Arts Network at Eric Firestone Gallery (New York, NY, 2024) as well as in the solo presentation Carried Through the Water (Nanaimo Art Gallery and Burnaby Art Gallery, BC, 2022). Public commissions include Hush, an animation commissioned by Emily Carr University for the City of Vancouver Public Art Program (2021); NonSerie (In Commute), part of How far do you travel?, a year-long exhibition on the exterior of public buses, commissioned by the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) in partnership with Translink BC (2019); and Coming Soon!, a monthly series of prints installed at sites slated for construction and development, commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program, documented with a book-length publication in 2020.  In 2021, Diyan was a recipient of the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation. Diyan is a Professor of Print Media and Interim Vice President Academic at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, BC.

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Panel

Corioli Souter is a curator, archaeologist, and Head of the Department of Maritime Heritage. She has been a practicing archaeologist since 1992 undertaking archaeological fieldwork, research, exhibition development, film documentaries and capacity building and teaching in Australia and abroad. Corioli has developed and contributed to interagency research and community projects in line with WAM’s ‘people-first’ philosophy which provide place-based, collaborative interpretation of maritime archaeological sites in Western Australia and the Indian Ocean region. She is committed to making maritime cultural heritage and its related museum collections accessible to all researchers and the public, and endeavours to incorporate critical approaches to maritime archaeology and collection interpretation with consideration of current issues—such as environmental sustainability—while maintaining ethical and inclusive best practice. She is an expert member of ICOMOS International Committee in the Underwater Heritage. (ICUCH).

Arvi Wattel holds a degree from the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and presently is a lecturer in the History of Art at UWA’s School of Design. Prior to relocating to Perth, he was awarded grants from the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund and Dr Hendrik Muller's Vaderlandsch Fonds. He was a visiting fellow at the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University and held fellowships at esteemed institutions like the Fondazione Ermitage in Ferrara, the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max Planck Gesellschaft) in Florence, the Dutch Institute for Art History in Florence and the Royal Netherlandish Institute in Rome. His teaching experience extends from the Radboud University in Nijmegen to the University of Maastricht and Oberlin College in Arezzo.

His research focuses on questions of centre and periphery, marginalization, and alterity, from the Renaissance onwards, with a keen eye on perspectives, in Renaissance Italy, and with a global perspective. He is particularly interested in Dutch seventeenth-century interactions with Australia and Asia.

Paul Uhlmann is an artist whose work strives to communicate philosophies of impermanence. Working experimentally through the mediums of painting and printmaking he is particularly interested in how artists’ books can compress complex ideas of word and image to create new forms of perception through intersections of art, literature, time, and history. He studied art in Australia and Europe and was awarded a practice-led research PhD at RMIT in 2012. Currently course coordinator of the Visual Arts at Edith Cowan University, his work is held in many prominent collections including National Gallery of Australia; Art Gallery of New South Wales; National Gallery of Victoria. He has published papers on the creative process and embodiment and was a featured artist in Batavia: giving voice to the voiceless exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at UWA and touring in WA (2017–18). This exhibition sought to shed new light on the VOC Batavia shipwreck (1629) through the nexus of art and science.

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Campus Partnership: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery,  School of Design UWA and Edith Cowan University

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Images (left - right)

Diyan Achjadi, yes, and, also (detail), 2023, ink and gouache on paper, adhesive, 38 x 322.5cm, photograph by Rachel Topham

Beatrice Glow, Hallucinating in the Afterimage of Empire (after Claes Janszoon Visscher)(detail), 2024, digital print on Belgian linen, acrylic paint, “Dutch gold” metal leaf, polyester thread