Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar), a Qatar Foundation (QF) partner university, recently hosted a colloquium titled 'Materiality of Migration in the Indian Ocean and Global Asia: Artifacts, Self-Fashioning, Belonging.' The first day was at VCUarts Qatar and the second at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI). The event was the first leg of the international colloquium.
The second leg will be held in Davis, California, in December 2024. The colloquium was spearheaded by Global Asia: Mobilities and Arts (GA:MA) Lab. The principal investigators of the Lab, under the Institute for Creative Research at VCUarts Qatar, are Neelima Jeychandran PhD and Monica Merlin PhD, from the Department of Art History.
The conference aimed to uncover the unwritten histories of migration through the material culture that people most valued and brought with them as they traversed the space of the Indian Ocean world and beyond. The lab collaborated with the DI, The Indian Ocean Study Group at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q), and the University of California Davis (UC Davis) in the US, to organise the colloquium. Merlin, said: “The GA:MA Lab works to create a strong global network of researchers, artists, and curators who contribute to the understanding of mobility in its many forms, such as migration and displacement, and its intersection with visual and material cultures as well as creativity.
In this critical moment for international and regi.