Ms Evelyn Owen
PhD student

School of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
Email: e.owen@qmul.ac.uk

Research interests:

Cultural geography; cultures of colonialism and postcolonialism; imaginative geographies; material geographies; politics of display and exhibitions; contemporary African art.

PhD Research
Title: ‘The geographies of contemporary African art world’
This project is concerned with the geographical knowledges produced by, and associated with, contemporary art from Africa and/or by Africans. Drawing on approaches in cultural geography, I consider ‘geographical knowledges’ as the imaginative, shifting, power-laden and sometimes contradictory conceptions of place, connection, movement, identity and belonging that are shaped and worked through by artists, curators and scholars in the context of the contemporary African art world. African objects, and their display in different contexts, have long played an important role in shaping geographical imaginations about the continent. However, the idea of ‘African art’ is no more straightforward than the idea of ‘Africa’ itself. Postcolonial critiques have demonstrated that ‘Africa’ and its art have been produced, defined and redefined by the positioning and repositioning of objects, whether physically (in or out of galleries) or discursively, in the pages of journal articles, books and catalogues on the subject. Such matters tell us much about the ways that Africa is imagined and produced as a place, but geographers have yet to explore these issues in any detail, particularly in relation to contemporary African art. I address these issues by investigating the institutional networks involved in negotiating the tensions presented by contemporary African art in the context of the international art world.

Key words: art, Africa, museums, networks, objects

More broadly, I am interested in the relationships between geography, art and identity, especially in urban and/or (post)colonial contexts.  This focus emerged while I was completing the MA in Cities and Cultures at QMUL.  My MA dissertation, entitled Banksy in the City: Re-placing Street Art, discussed media representations of the UK street artist Banksy and imaginative geographies of London’s East End. 

PhD supervisors: 
Prof Catherine Nash
Dr David Pinder

PhD funding:
ESRC
Central Research Fund, University of London

Visiting scholarships 
Overseas Institutional Visit in the Department of Visual and Critical Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, funded by the ESRC, supervised by Prof Jim Elkins and Dr Delinda Collier (Autumn 2010)

Publications:

  • Interview (forthcoming) Conversation between Evelyn Owen and One-Room Shack (Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi and Emeka Ogboh). To be included in the catalogue accompanying One-Room Shack Collective's exhibition UNITY, at Waterman's, London, Saturday 25 February - Sunday 8 April 2012, as part of the International Festival of Digital Art 2012.

Presentations and seminars:

  • ICT use in the contemporary African art world. Conference paper at the session 'Technology as an Agent of Economic and Social Change in Africa? Connecting Historical and Contemporary Debates' at CAS@50: Cutting Edges and Retrospectives, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, June 2012 (forthcoming)
  • The afterlife of the militant image: Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s Foreword to Guns for Banta. Conference paper at the Art and Geopolitics session of the RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, September 2011
  • Issues in Art History, Geography, and contemporary African art discourse. Working paper and discussion at the Cultural Geography Talking Shop, Queen Mary, University of London, February 2011
  • Geographies of contemporary African art. Conference paper at the Intersections of Creativity session of the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington D.C., April 2010


Other activities:
Curatorial support for the collaborative photography project 'Money in Bamako & London' at The Clore Education Centre, The British Museum, June 2012 (forthcoming). www.bamakoandlondon.com

Writing and researching blog on African art in London - africanartinlondon.wordpress.com (ongoing)

Research assistant to Robert Loder and Polly Savage - project documenting artists' accounts of participation in Triangle Network workshops (ongoing)

Administrator of the London Women and Planning Forum (2009-2011)