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Tatiana Mellema

Sessional Instructor

Availability:

Education:

BA, Art History and Political Science (Honours)
MA, Art History
PhD, Art History and Theory

Bio

Tatiana Mellema holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of British Columbia. Tatiana is an art historian of twentieth century art, Marxist feminism and critical theory. She also works as Curator of Outdoor Art at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and has worked at art institutions across Canada, including the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Banff Centre.

Research Interests

Tatiana’s research work focuses on the critique of institutions, gender, sexuality and labour in art history post-1960s. She is developing a book on how artists of the 1970s centered socially reproductive labour in the museum-gallery nexus. Serving as a corrective to historical discourses of institutional critique, this project looks to artworks that have relied on embodiment as critique, challenging gender and race as an abstraction that is made operative in the question of value for capital. Her current projects include articles that look to the practices of Senga Nengudi and Mary Kelly and their engagement with socially reproductive labour. She will also be presenting on social reproduction and queer socialities at the conference The Grand Transition in May 2025 organized by the Historical Materialism Network. Through her curatorial work she seeks to collaborate with artists whose practices address the extraction of value from land and labour. Recent projects at the Belkin have included the panel Monuments (2025) and the podcast Spill Radio (2019).

Courses

Course Name Department Course Code Term
Humanities HUMN 101 26/SP

Description

Continuing with the development of modes of literacy and visual/textual analysis initiated in HUMN 100: Academic Core I, this course will prioritize how representation makes meaning, and how art, media, design, and textual practices participate in a broader social and political sphere. Analysis of both visual images/objects and texts from a variety of historical periods, from the 16th century to the present day, will be emphasized through shared case studies (from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas), keywords, and themes. Throughout, an integrated approach to the humanities will be prioritized, involving the development of critical thinking, writing skills, and class participation and engagement. Combining weekly lectures and smaller breakout seminar sessions for art, design and media, students will be exposed to the specificities of a Humanities curriculum (drawing from Art Media + Design History, Visual Culture, English, Composition and Rhetoric, and Cultural and Media Studies), and to the conceptual and practical skills necessary for further courses in Critical + Cultural Studies, as well as their subsequent studies as a whole. As students persist in building the skill set necessary for critical and contextual inquiry, emphasis will be placed on processes of visual perception, the cultural meaning of images and objects, and their many intersections with knowledge, power, and technology. Throughout, students will be encouraged to situate their own practice in relation to a broader history of representation, in order to articulate their own perspective on what it means to participate in cultural production.

Pre-requisites

No prerequisites.