Professor Oriana Baddeley
Title
Professor of Transnational Art History & Theory
College
University of the Arts London
Email address
Tags
Researcher Research
Biography
Professor Oriana Baddeley is Dean of Research at UAL, she is also a member of the research centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN).She studied History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex. Her doctoral subject, researching the historiography of definitions of ‘art’ in relation to Ancient Mexico, formed the basis for work on the 1992 Hayward exhibition, The Art of Ancient Mexico. She has written extensively on contemporary Latin American art, including Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America (Verso 1989, co-author Valerie Fraser) and collaborated with Gerardo Mosquera to produce Beyond the Fantastic: Art Criticism from Contemporary Latin America (inIVA/MIT 1996). With Toshio Watanabe and Partha Mitter, (2001–04), she worked on a major AHRC funded project, Nation, Identity and Modernity: Visual Culture of India, Japan and Mexico, 1860s–1940. She is on the Inter-national Advisory Committee of the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art, and the editorial board of Art History, is a Trustee of the St Catherine Foundation in London and New York, and the Ashley Family Foundation.
As a co-founder of the UAL research centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), my research is undertaken within the context of globalization, identity studies and contemporary art practice. My earlier doctoral research grew out of attempting to understand the values and meanings of the ancient cultures of the Americas and the ways in which colonization and the discourses of post-colonialism had impacted on the interpretation of those cultures.
With a focus on Mexico and Latin America, I have also worked in detail on the histories of ‘exhibiting’ the art of these regions and explored how traditions of display and categorization have been responded to within the global structures of contemporary art expositions.
Running throughout much of my writing has been a fascination with the ways in which different geographic contexts impact on definitions of creative practice and how such definitions are then interpreted. In recent years, my publications have included a comparative discussion of the work of Ernesto Neto and Gabriel Orozco, and an exploration of the work of Teresa Margolles in relation to stereotypes of Mexican identity. From 2011, working with a previously unknown archive of his work, I have curated an exhibition of Swiss photographer Fred Boissonnas that explored themes of identity and myth in the area of travel photography.
More recent research revolves around what constitutes the ‘indigenous’ in the contemporary context of the transnational.