Critical Studies Lecture: Alpesh Kantilal Patel (Webinar)

Alpesh Kantilal Patel. Photo: Sarah C. Blanchette

Multiple and One: Global Queer Art Histories

In a 1974 essay, poet and theorist Édouard Glissant presciently wrote that “diversity needs the presence of peoples, no longer as objects to be swallowed up, but with the intention of creating a new relation.” My forthcoming book project “Multiple and One: Global Queer Art Histories” allows for such new relations and affiliations to emerge among artworks. Drawing on concepts from Glissant’s rich lexicon such as “archipelago,” “opacity,” and “errantry,” Patel will stage collisions and encounters between artworks exploring queer issues that may appear unrelated at first glance. He does so to enact, perform, and instantiate cross-cultural contexts for sexual artistic geographies, and thereby brings into being a new world of intimacy and relationality across multiple times and spaces.

Alpesh Kantilal Patel is associate professor of contemporary art and theory at Florida International University. His art historical scholarship, curating and criticism reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art. He is the author of Productive failure: writing queer transnational South Asian art histories (2017) and co-editor of the forthcoming Storytellers of Art’s Histories and a special journal issue commemorating Okwui Enwezor for Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (both 2021).  His next major book project is titled Multiple and One: Global Queer Art Histories. In 2016, he was a critical studies fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

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