Guest Lecture: Colonialism and Masculinity in Art and Visual Culture

Yesterday, Mariama de Brito Henn gave a guest lecture on Colonialism and Masculinity as part of the lecture series “Hegemoniale Männlichkeiten in der Gegenwartskunst – Kritische Perspektiven in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte”, organized by Prof. Friederike Sigler at the Art History Institute of the University of Vienna.

Drawing on art history, visual culture studies, and postcolonial theory, she showed how masculinity, race, and power were co-produced through images shaped by colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

Through close readings of artworks from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, including works by Velázquez, Dirk Valkenburg, François-Auguste Biard, and Gustav Klimt, the lecture highlighted how Black men were variously infantilized, exoticized, anonymized, or hypersexualized, while white masculinity remained largely invisible and universalized. Mariama emphasized that these visual strategies were not neutral but actively contributed to colonial hierarchies and enduring stereotypes.

A central theme of the lecture was coloniality: the persistence of colonial power structures and ways of seeing beyond the formal end of colonial rule. The discussion also addressed the consequences of these histories for art history and museum practices today, including the continued classification of many objects and artworks within ethnographic rather than art-historical frameworks.

The lecture concluded with a lively discussion on gendered and racialized representation, including questions of sexualization, agency, and the ongoing negotiation between reproducing and reclaiming visual languages shaped by colonialism.