Important Dates

Dr. Temi Odumosu (Malmö University, Sweden)

Who is the Subject? On portraiture in the colonial archive

Dr. Temi Odumosu is an art historian, creative educator, and postdoctoral researcher for the Living Archives Research Project at Malmö University in Sweden. Her international research and cultural practice is concerned with the representation of African peoples, visual politics of slavery and colonialism, colonial archives and archiving, Afro-Diaspora aesthetics, and more broadly exploring how art mediates social transformation and healing. Her PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge explored the construction and use of African caricatures in British satirical prints during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Between 2012 and 2014 she was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral fellow for EUROTAST at Copenhagen University (Denmark), where she worked collaboratively on a pan-European project with geneticists, historians and archaeologists investigating the effects of the transatlantic slave trade on African health, disease patterns, and biosocial identity. Since 2014 Temi has been working collaboratively with an interdisciplinary team of researchers for the Living Archives Research Project, which has been addressing the challenges of producing and working with archival material in an increasingly digitized and networked environment. Under the project’s “Performing Memory” inquiry strand she is currently developing alternative approaches to the representation of colonial archival material, by combining augmented reality (AR), sound, media projection, and varying kinds of performance to develop more affective public experiences with this contested past.