Zoé Samudzi is a sociologist with a PhD in medical sociology from the University of California, San Francisco and an MSc in health, community, and development from the London School of Economics. Her research is primarily concerned with German imperialism, the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, and settler colonialism in southern Africa (and coloniality across the continent more broadly). Other topics of research engagement include visuality and violence, the ethics of seeing and witnessing, human remains and restitution, biomedicalization and ancestry, genocide memory and denialism, and the spatialities of racecraft and dispossession.
Samudzi is also an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, a popular magazine dedicated to psychoanalytic thinking. She is an art critic and writer whose work has appeared in the Funambulist, Protean Magazine, The New Inquiry, BOMB Magazine, Errant Journal, The New Republic, Architectural Review, ArtReview and other outlets.
This first-year graduate seminar approaches painting as a technical skill, a historical practice and an intellectual project. Weekly sessions begin with group discussions of key readings about recent painting. Readings are organized in three sections. The first looks backward, to the problem of medium that preoccupied modernist painting and, residually, contemporary practices until the 1980s. The second section looks at the academy, the institution and the art market, and their effect on how painting is produced, disseminated, discussed and received. The third, the most speculative, looks laterally at a range of contemporary practices and their cultural frameworks from the 1990s to the present. Frequent studio visits will occur and drive some of the reading and discussion.
