Al-An deSouza presented the third Migrations Visiting Artist Talk, “The Culture of Location,” in conjunction with their exhibition at the Johnson Museum, Al-An deSouza: Elegies for Futures Past.

DeSouza discussed the genre of landscape in relation to migration, settlement, and climate change. The title of their talk is a play on The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha, now a classic of postcolonial theory. DeSouza’s transmedia practice explores the legacies of colonialism through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation.

A conceptual photographer, performance artist, and writer, deSouza was born to South Asian parents in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in England before settling in the United States. They are a professor in the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley, and hold an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles and a BFA from Bath Academy of Art, England. DeSouza is represented by Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi.

This was the third in a series of artist talks with the campus-wide Migrations Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell, with support from the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.