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Aesthetics, Politics and Histories: The Social Context of Art AAANZ Conference 2018
December 5-7, 2018, School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
RMIT University School of Art will host the 2018 AAANZ conference in December 2018 to open critical dialogue on the histories of art by examining the social contexts of aesthetics and politics. Bringing together art historians, theorists, curators, critics, and artists from across the region, the conference will offer a stimulating four-day program of panels and papers, publication prizes, masterclasses and encounters with Melbourne’s vibrant arts sector with a parallel artistic program to be announced in coming months.
The conference will feature distinguished keynote speakers who will present expanded and alternative frameworks for understanding the diverse contexts and histories of art. Gabi Ngcobo (South Africa), curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale; Genevieve Grieves (AUS), Head of the First Peoples Department at Museums Victoria; and Ema Tavola (Fiji), independent curator are each engaged in critical curatorial practices aimed at democratising and decolonising art institutions and opening up art collections to alternative perspectives and narratives traditionally overlooked by museums and galleries. Art historian Professor Griselda Pollock (UK) from Leeds University is renowned for her postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory and research of trauma and the aesthetic in contemporary art. Curator and Associate Professor David Teh specialises in contemporary art in Southeast Asia.
The intersection of art and society is where differing worldviews and opposing epistemologies can meet and clash. Art offers a site for modelling political alternatives, questioning dominant discourses, and producing new historical narratives. Responding to the political, economic and environmental tensions of the present moment, the conference explores the relationship of the arts to social life throughout history. Located in a region marked by multiple and overlapping colonial and postcolonial histories and contemporary processes of globalisation, the conference aims to initiate critical dialogues that foreground the complex contexts, diverse practices, multiple histories, and contested trajectories of art.
Keynote Speakers
Genevieve Grieves is Worimi – traditionally from mid north coast New South Wales – and has lived on Kulin country in Melbourne for many years. She is an educator, curator, filmmaker, artist and oral historian who has accumulated nearly twenty years’ experience in the arts and culture industries. Some of her projects include the documentary, Lani’s Story; the video installation, Picturing the Old People; and, she was the Lead Curator of the internationally award-winning First Peoples exhibition at the Melbourne Museum. Genevieve has a role as a public intellectual and speaker and is undertaking her PhD in arts, memorialisation and frontier violence. She is Head of the First Peoples Department at Museums Victoria.
Gabi Ngcobo is the curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale. Since the early 2000s Ngcobo has been engaged in collaborative artistic, curatorial, and educational projects in South Africa and on an international scope. She is a founding member of the Johannesburg based collaborative platforms NGO – Nothing Gets Organised and Center for Historical Reenactments (CHR, 2010–14). NGO focusses on processes of self-organization that take place outside of predetermined structures, definitions, contexts, or forms. CHR responded to the demands of the moment through an exploration of how historical legacies impact and resonate within contemporary art.
Recently Ngcobo co-curated the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, which took place in 2016 at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo, and A Labour of Love at Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main in 2015/16) and travelled to the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2017. She has been teaching at the Wits School of Arts, University of Witswatersrand, ZA, since 2011. Her writings have been published in various catalogues, books, and journals. She currently lives and works between Johannesburg and Berlin.
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CENTRECATH) at the University of Leeds. Committed to creating and extending an international, postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, she researches issues of trauma and the aesthetic in contemporary art expanding her concept of the virtual feminist museum (After-affects I After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Museum, Manchester, 2013); Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration (Freud Museum & Wild Pansy Press, 2013); both offer a feminist rereading of Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula at the intersection with psychoanalytical aesthetics. Since 2007, she has elaborated the novel concept of concentrationary memory in relation to the Arendtian critique of totalitarianism, in four publications with Max Silverman, Concentrationary Cinema (Berghahn, 2011), Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (I B Tauris, 2013), Concentrationary Imaginaries:Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (I B Tauris, 2015), and Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts (Berghahn, 2019). Just published is her monograph: Charlotte Salomon: The Nameless in the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2018) and forthcoming are Is Feminism a Bad Memory? (Verso, 2019), The Case against “Van Gogh”: Memory, Place and Modernist Disillusionment (Thames & Hudson, 2020) and Monroe’s Mov(i)es: Class, Gender and Nation in the work, image-making and agency of Marilyn Monroe (2020).
Ema Tavola is an independent curator based in South Auckland, New Zealand. Having established her practice whilst managing Fresh Gallery Ōtara, a local government funded community art gallery, Tavola’s curatorial concerns are grounded in the opportunities of contemporary art to engage grassroots audiences, shift representational politics and archive the Pacific diaspora experience. Tavola has worked in galleries and museums throughout New Zealand and is committed to curating as a mechanism for social inclusion, centralising Pacific ways of seeing, and exhibition making as a mode of decolonisation.
Recent national projects include Kaitani (2017) for The Physics Room (Christchurch), Dravuni: Sivia yani na Vunilagi – Beyond the Horizon (2016) for the New Zealand Maritime Museum (Auckland) and between wind and water (2015) for Enjoy Public Art Gallery (Wellington). Tavola has discussed and advocated for a Pacific people centred approach to curating Pacific art at institutions and symposia in Australia, Canada, the US and Fiji. In 2012, she was the first curator awarded the Creative New Zealand Arts Pasifika Award for Contemporary Art, and wrote a manifesto on Pacific curatorial practice as Artist in Residence with the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury in 2017. In 2018, Tavola was appointed to the curatorial committee for the 4th International Biennial of Casablanca under Artistic Director, Christine Eyene. (Photo credit: Pati Solomona Tyrell)
David Teh is a curator and Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore, specialising in Southeast Asian contemporary art. His curatorial efforts have included Unreal Asia (55. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2009), Video Vortex #7 (Yogyakarta, 2011), TRANSMISSION (Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2014), Misfits: Pages from a Loose-leaf Modernity (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2017) and Returns, a project for the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018). David’s writings have appeared in journals including Third Text, ARTMargins, Afterall and Theory, Culture and Society. His book Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary was recently published by the MIT Press. David is also a director of Future Perfect, a gallery and project platform in Singapore.
AAANZ Conference Schedule, Full Program of Abstracts and Artistic Program is Now Available to Download
A finalised 2018 AAANZ Conference schedule and RMIT campus map is available to download at this link: https://aaanz.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/AAANZ_Schedule_Final.pdf
The full program, including all session abstracts and bios, is here: https://aaanz.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/AAANZ-abstractsbios.pdf
The conference artistic program is available here: https://aaanz.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/APH_Artistic_Program_EDM.pdf
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Contact
Please address all correspondence and general enquiries to the conference producer, Amy Spiers, conf@aaanz.info.
Conference Co-Convenors
Dr Marnie Badham, Vice Chancellor’s Post Doctoral Research Fellow, School of Art, RMIT University
Professor Daniel Palmer, Associate Dean Research and Innovation, School of Art, RMIT University
Conference Committee
Dr Grace McQuilten, Lecturer, School of Art, CAST, Contemporary Art & Social Transformation, RMIT University
Dr Kristen Sharp, Coordinator Art: History + Theory + Cultures, School of Art, RMIT University
Dr Gretchen Coombs, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform, RMIT University
Mr Stephen Gilchrist, Associate Lecturer of Indigenous Art, University of Sydney
Dr Francis Maravillas, School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney
Dr Anthony White, AAANZ President, Senior Lecturer, Cultural and Communications, University of Melbourne
Dr Ngarino Ellis, Senior Lecturer, Art History, The University of Auckland
Dr Jacqueline Millner, Associate Professor Visual Arts, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University
Professor Barbara Bolt, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
Professor David Cross, Visual Arts, Deakin University
Zoë Bastin and Clare McCraken, RMIT HDR Student Representatives
Amy Spiers, Conference Producer
Giles Fielke, AAANZ Business Manager
Supporters
The AAANZ Conference 2018 is supported by RMIT University School of Art, RMIT University’s Design & Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform (DCP ECP), International Visiting Fellowship, the Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) research group, and the Ian Potter Foundation. David Teh’s visit is additionally supported by Monash University’s Department of Fine Art, with the Network for Asian Art Research in Australia and New Zealand.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.
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