Call for Papers

The Call for Papers is now closed!

The Call for Papers was open from June 11 to July 30. 

If you would like to speak at the 2021 AAANZ Conference, you can now apply to join one of the panels detailed below. 

To apply, read the instructions below, and then submit your Paper Proposal Form to the relevant Panel Convenor.

Who should apply

The AAANZ Conference is held every year (although not in 2020), and is the region’s major conference for art workers and researchers.

You should apply to present at the conference if you are an art historian, artist or a curator.  Outside these core areas, we also welcome design and moving image historians, museum studies academics, and arts and design professionals.

We welcome speakers from across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Region, and we especially welcome proposals from Indigenous delegates.

Read more about the conference and its format here.

How to apply

To apply to speak at the conference, you must submit a Paper Proposal Form to the Panel Convenor of the panel you wish to speak on.  (The conference organisers are not accepting or processing applications.)

All Paper Proposal Forms must be submitted to the Panel Convenors by 30 July 2021.

Further guidelines

Panel formats:

• All panels will be allocated 90 minutes.
• Unless otherwise noted, panels will comprise 3 research papers of maximum 20 minutes each, and at least 30 minutes for questions.
• Unless otherwise noted, all panels will be taking place in person at the University of Sydney.  Online panels will take place via Zoom (or equivalent).

Speakers may present only one paper at the conference.

All speakers and convenors must be current AAANZ members to be included in the Conference Program (in August 2021).

Successful applicants must remain in close contact with their Panel Convenors.  Panel Convenors are responsible for assembling their speakers’ details for the Conference Program, and assembling their panel on the days of the conference.  If speakers have questions about the conference, they should first contact their Panel Convenor.

What happens next?

Once the Call for Papers closes, Panel Convenors must notify successful applicants by midnight 6 August 2021.

The Panel Convenors must also provide the conference organisers with their Complete Panel Details by 6 August 2021.

More information for Panel Convenors about their responsibilities and deadlines can be found here.

The Impact of Care

Evgenia Anagnostopoulou (Art Gallery of NSW) & Alexandra Gregg (Art Gallery of NSW)

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If care is an ethical concern, then how do we define and understand it? What is the role of art and our cultural institutions in shaping and challenging the practices of caring for each other?

At a time when public and private human vulnerability is magnified, this session examines the theory, practice and impact of care within the arts. It invites research papers and case studies from artistic, sociological and educational perspectives that critically engage with art and concepts of caring. Presentations might address art and ethics, care as cultural practice, Indigenous practices of care, art and empathy, or the role of artists and art institutions in articulating systems of care.

Colonial Monuments, Decolonising Impacts

Roger Benjamin (University of Sydney)

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Recent campaigns to protest and unseat sculptural monuments of historical figures have ancient beginnings. From the desecration of effigies of Roman emperors to the ruinous iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation, statues have long been the target in contests of political, cultural and religious power.

The main focus of this session is the contestation of statues erected in the era of modern settler colonialism. Its scope runs from the Hyde Park Captain Cook to public monuments in former European colonies, from Hobart to Hanoi, Auckland to Algiers. The session will also consider statues and memorials set up in the cities of colonizing nations.

An allied question is how the process of memorialization is handled by contemporary artists, and by civic authorities in Australia and New Zealand today. How have Indigenous cultures of remembrance meshed with public space in the urban context? Is there a place for the counter-memorial? Does the creation of new memorials effectively produce new histories?

In some places the removal of statues by decolonized state powers often entailed their replacement by the heroes of independence. What purposes do symbolic or violent acts of protest of British slave-masters (for example) serve, and what impacts do they achieve? We might ask if heritage protections and/or the moral rights of artists apply in decolonizing contexts, and if there are citizens’ rights to memory and familiar habit formed around longstanding monuments? Ultimately, who should have rights to the disposition of public spaces and aesthetic resources as represented by memorial statues?

Memory of the Modern: Lived Experience, Heritage and the Impacts of Growing up Modern

Roger Benjamin (University of Sydney) & Virginia Rigney (Canberra Museum and Gallery)

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One of the primary ambitions for architecture, design and art in public spaces in Australasia post WW2 was to create a new way of living. In the planned city of Canberra, but also in new suburbs of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, family life revolved around American labour-saving appliances, European design, the motorcar and the hygienics of modern architecture, all couched in democratic intent. How did those experiences impact the generation which grew up in such conditions?

The focus is on the planned city of Canberra, which achieved its urban form in the years 1950-1975. Papers are solicited from two likely sources: first-hand recall, and critical design studies. The former will contribute to the emerging field of architecture’s oral history. For Canberrans, growing up in a newly established city engendered different feelings about place than those felt by residents of older 19th-century Australasian cities. What is the role of memory in binding together experiences of the planned city as a space of modernity? How does the historian bring criticality to the slippery territory of personal memory and experience?

The second stream would consider modernist architecture and design in the context of critical heritage studies. Issues might include the fad for “mid-century modern” design and furniture by people born after its heyday; the dialogic relationship between immigrant and locally born architects after 1950; or the ethics and economics of modern heritage in today’s era of the “dual occupancy” development that is so impacting the face of Australasian suburbs.

The Power & Privilege of Editing Wikipedia

Sam Bowker (Charles Sturt University)

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Online Panel

For maximum impact across our research and cultural practices, we should collaborate with our colleagues and students to edit Wikipedia and actively contribute to other open-source online resources. Wikipedia is the world’s leading platform for accessible commentary on history, art and visual culture. It is continuously undergoing revision, yet we are in the best position to lead these changes – especially for aspects of art history and visual culture from Australia and Aotearoa / New Zealand. Developing assessment items in which students identify, research, edit and ethically enhance Wikipedia instills the values of public scholarship and critically engages with pressing issues. This is an important space for inclusion and decolonisation, where new voices can contribute to global discourse.

Building on the legacy of collaborative Wikipedia Edit-a-thons and the work of the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA), this panel invites presentations that consider the impact of contributions to online open-source resources. These could include Wikipedia, Smarthistory and the Khan Academy, Trove, Khamseen, podcasts, social media and other initiatives within the digital humanities. How might your work be better represented in these spaces, and what can we do to measure or improve the impact of our online representation?

Contributions may consider case studies in assessment and teaching strategies that contribute to open-source discourse, or examples of how revision / editing initiatives have been developed and applied, or critical analysis of the cultural paradigms and technologies involved in open-source resources, including the limitations of impact when working with continuously changing platforms.

Reciprocal Impact? The Renaissance in Modern and Contemporary Art

Robert Brennan (University of Sydney), Katie Anania (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) & Andrew Leach (University of Sydney)

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These panels explore the relationship between Renaissance, modern, and contemporary art. What uses have modern and contemporary artists made of the Renaissance, and how has Renaissance scholarship responded to developments in the art of its own time? The urgency of these questions lies in the central position that the Renaissance has played in traditional European narratives of modernity. To what extent have artistic encounters with the Renaissance been shaped by competing visions of modernity itself – capitalist, fascist, communist, colonial, indigenous, or otherwise? How have artists confronted the geographical, racial, and gendered exclusions on which standard narratives of the Renaissance have often been based? How might the work of these artists help scholars rewrite the history of early modernity today? How, in turn, might alternative understandings of early modern history help to reorient the art of recent times? We seek applications for papers on artistic engagements with the Renaissance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Papers covering any geographical region are most welcome, as well as papers that address related issues from a historiographic perspective.

Making an Impression in the Contact Zone

Alex Burchmore (University of Sydney)

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This session will consider the collisions of the personal and material that occur when a sense of self arises between or across cultural or ontological categories, tracing the embodied formation of racial and sexual identities through artistic practice from the antique to contemporary. Anne Anlin Cheng (2019) has provided a potent theoretical touchstone for the study of such collisions with her concept of ‘ornamental personhood’ as ‘an alternative track within the making of modern [identity] that is not traceable to the ideal of a biological, organised, and masculine body [but is] peculiarly synthetic, aggregated, feminine, and non-European.’ She locates this primarily within the realm of the material and processes of accumulation, classification, and combination through which subjects and objects are brought together.

Building on Cheng’s ideas, the session will invite proposals that focus on expressions of personhood through the impressing, stamping, striking, or otherwise impactful manipulation of materials. This could include ceramics; stone, wood, and other sculptural media; and printmaking. Speakers will be invited to consider the role of such practices as registers of contact or intrusion across various boundaries (cultural, interpersonal, physical, material), including (but not limited to): the psychological and social separation of self and other; the tangible division of void and mass; the ‘contact zones’ of colonies, diasporas, and migrant communities; the politics of autoethnographic impression and imitation; and the frictions generated by the intersection of cultural curiosity and mercantile opportunism in the production and consumption of export art.

World Vision and the South Pacific, 1850-2000

Rex Butler (Monash University) & ADS Donaldson (National Art School)

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Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850, is a study of the way the artist-scientists on board the European colonisers’ ships saw the Pacific, and conversely the effect the encounter with the Pacific had on Europe. But Smith’s study ends in 1850 with Louis Daguerre’s invention of photography.

The question this panel seeks to ask is what happens after Smith’s account concludes? How do no longer European colonisers but artists from around the world see the Pacific? And, again, how does the Pacific continue to influence the way the world sees itself? In other words, as a complement to the necessary national histories of the various Oceanic cultures, how might we imagine a new non-national history of these same cultures? Might we speak not just of Oceanic cultures in themselves but of all the world’s Oceanias? How does a study of how Oceania has been seen over a period of 150 years open up a model of cultures connected and not separated by water, as Oceanic cultures themselves have taught the rest of the world?

We are looking for papers on artists from around the world who have visited the Pacific Islands and made work about them, either while there or upon returning home. We are also looking for papers on artists who have never visited the Pacific Islands and yet made work about them. Finally, we are looking for papers on how the Pacific Islands themselves have responded to their depiction by artists from around the world.

Art Writing Now

Gretchen Coombs (RMIT University)

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This roundtable panel will engage with the question of art writing in 2021. What kinds of narratives can be told of, through, and around, art works; and how should we tell them? In what ways does art writing encourage allegorical practice about the role of the image, and how might we develop the fictions of art history without losing track of the object? Is art writing a form of memoir? Should it be? Is the art work always a mediator of writerly events, or an emergence of its own. How is writing about art ‘work’ in its own right? When and how does art writing encroach on the gallery space? What is the ‘impact’ of art writing on how we think about art in an age where less and less of us can approach art objects directly? How can art writing do the work we need it to do in an age of cultural and environmental transformation?

In this 90-minute online-only panel, panelists are invited to engage with these questions and more, through the preparation of short 750-word (5 minute) provocations. The prepared provocations should model specific concerns and approaches. Panelists will be selected for a mix of fiction and non-fiction, story-telling, and critical provocations. There will be a maximum of eight panelists, and the session itself will be a conversation that steps off from the prepared provocations, in order to develop a collaborative statement about art writing now. The panel will involve a collaborative written record of the conversation for future development.

The Aesthetics of Indeterminacy: Avenging the Imaginary of Impact

Gretchen Coombs (RMIT University) & Nancy Mauro-Flude (RMIT University)

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Rarely encouraged to imagine an artistic practice without impact, art as a practice is at an impasse, in dire need of a new habitat (Lind 2021). Yet, art and culture are everywhere as never before. This condition should not be interpreted along lines of reasoning that artists ‘value add’ to the economy, attracting holidaymakers, determining cultural policy, defining national identity and so on. Rather than seeking to attain equivalence with existing institutional procedures, we wish to make a case for an artistic slant entirely distinct from that increasingly and urgently voiced in the artistic field and the wider public sphere. How can calls for impact be destabilised – can we just ignore it – despite the fact the infrastructures to support creative practices, subcultures and experimental spaces are laid to waste?

The agency of artistic making and its potential is less about defining a mythologised prospect for a utopian arts practice, but rather extends upon artists’ indeterminate ability to merge matter through a fabric of ideas, lores and beliefs in an abundance of ways that is their providence – it is those art practices that posit to be imperilled. This coven of artistic researchers summons wild acts that draw a five pointed star around being coerced to make a mark, or measure their worth by social impact, and rebel against the temptation to ascribe fiscal worth to arts practice. We invite researchers and artists to take part in our lively and performative roundtable where we concoct ways to avenge the imaginary of impact. Please describe how you intend to participate in the performative round table.

The topic of our panel lends itself to a conversation, one that is animated with ideas and populated with subversion. If we are to think things otherwise, every element in these covens is distinctive and must be considered as such, therefore, this format enables us to transport the panel theme into high relief. The affordances of a public roundtable emphasising revelation and chance, we intend the subject matter to shift from a discursive, quantified terrain into a more experiential zone.

Let’s talk about expanded cinema

Louise Curham (Charles Sturt University) & Sally Golding (Artist)

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Online Panel

Some artists in the 1960s began exploring what moving image could be by mixing up and investigating the elements of cinema in the not-so-well known practice of expanded cinema. Approaches differed, among them embracing new technology, a mix-all-the arts attitude and paring back the elements to no film at all. Both an historical moment of technological utopia and an evolving contemporary dialogue, expanded cinema can be seen as an underlying inspiration within wider moving image and digital art cultures. There has been significant scholarship in recent years on expanded cinema. There has been practice in our region (Australia NZ) at other times but did we know about it then and do we know about it now? Why not? Does that past practice have critical bearing and impact on contemporary practice in ways that are less obvious? Scholars argue expanded cinema starts or advances the dialogue/practice of institutional critique by artists (Uroskie 2014), it’s the site of avant-garde film right now (Walley 2020; Knowles 2020), historically, it was the banner under which forms like video art, interactive art and computer art began (Walley) and contemporary practice makes an important contribution to eco materialist practice (Knowles). This panel will flush out our base knowledge about expanded cinema and what we think about it now.

This online panel takes the form of a ‘talking circle’ that applies a ‘lightning talk meets Q&A’ approach. In place of a traditional conference paper, we invite prospective panellists to submit 3 ideas responding to the panel description. To recap on the questions the panel will discuss: what do we know about the practice of expanded cinema in our region (Australia NZ) at other times? Is that history poorly known? Why? Does past practice in expanded cinema have a bearing on contemporary practices? Scholars have made claims for why expanded cinema is important. Can we extend that thinking?

During the panel, the hosts will lead an 8-10 min conversation-Q&A with each contributor. Each conversation is followed by discussion with other panellists and the audience. What emerges is a focused but inclusive conversation that works effectively on Zoom. We welcome responses from a wide pool of practitioners (artists, researchers and curators) as the purpose of the panel is to draw together those of us interested in this conversation within the AAANZ community. The talking circle model assigns increased status to the audience, acknowledging that the participants will surface key points but it is in dialogue with the audience that new knowledge and relationships will be generated.

Art History: the next 10 years

Anne Dunlop (University of Melbourne) & Mark Ledbury (University of Sydney)

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This panel is a joint initiative of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney and the Australian Institute of Art History at the University of Melbourne. It asks: what is the future of Art History in Australia and New Zealand ? How might we nurture, develop, and change our field so that it can thrive for the next ten years and beyond? What issues and questions are most important or promising going forward, and how do we address them? In short, how can art history remain relevant, exciting, and compelling at a moment of intense change and challenge?

We seek papers and interventions of 10-15 minutes for a round table which we hope will be both pragmatic and visionary, driving a national conversation about where we are now, and where we want to be going forward.

Contexts and Relations: Mapping the Impact of Non-Normative Sexualities on Art

Jeremy Eaton (University of Melbourne)

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This panel aims to explore the way contexts, visual cultures and social relations implicit to non-normative sexual histories have fed into, and radically altered artistic trajectories. The core proposition to be discussed, is that the non-normative sexuality of an artist or collective creates a network of subjective and communal relations that incorporates social context, activism, critique, alternative lifestyles, and a range of non-dominant ideological perspectives, which have, in turn, precipitated and impacted modes of creative practice throughout history. Thinking through recent studies that re-read early minimalist practices through the lens of transgender studies, the social impacts of censorship on exhibition histories and the turn to activist practice during the AIDS crisis, we can begin to chart sexuality’s role in cultural and artistic history. This expands to encompass recent studies that draw relations between art and maligned, supposedly “effete” fields, including visual merchandising and erotic film, that have broader implications for avant-garde artistic discourse. The panel looks to cut through a critique that subordinates sexuality’s role in the formation of artistic practices and broader art history, by mapping art, cultural production, non-normative sexualities and broader social contexts as intra-related in vital ways.

This panel is open to submissions by artists, curators and art historians who look to map alternative art historical trajectories, the impacts of censorship and activism on artistic production, and re-readings of artworks, artists or movements through the lens of sexuality. The panel also invites research papers proposals on integral yet under recognised artworks developed on the basis on non-normative sexuality.

Artist Colonies as Alternate Models for Writing Art History

Jane Eckett (University of Melbourne) & Ian McLean (University of Melbourne)

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Models for writing art history oscillate between globalised world views, national histories, microcosmic regional or local histories, and the enduring individual monograph. None of these, however, can comfortably accommodate the artist colony. Colonies usually attract artists from elsewhere, of differing nationalities, brought together in a single geo-spatial frame. They may cohere owing to the appeal of a particular ‘master’, such as Gleizes at Moly-Sabata, or location renowned for natural beauty, such as Pont-Aven or Taos, the invitation of a wealthy patron, as at Darmstadt, or the simple expedient of affordable studio accommodation. Regardless, artist colonies bring disparate artists into close proximity with one another, generating a wealth of anecdotal records that can obscure or illuminate depending on the adopted model of writing. They also physically occupy a space that is not, by rights, the residents’ own.

Stemming from a current ARC discovery project examining the Abbey Art Centre, in New Barnet, England, we invite researchers working on artist colonies from anywhere and any period to consider the impact of the artist colony experience on either the individual or wider artistic community. Potential avenues to explore include: does the artist colony produce a recognisable style? How do we meaningfully include resident artists who do not self-identify with the colony as a group? Are there parallels between artist colonies and colonial settler ideology? How do artist colonies differ from indigenous-run artist centres? In particular we welcome papers that attempt to theorize the artist colony as an alternate model for writing art history.

Art and Oceans: Critical Reflections on the Impact of the Surrealist Imagination

Ann Elias (University of Sydney) & Victoria Carruthers (Australian Catholic University)

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The ocean has long been a source of inspiration for artists and poets, including as a metaphor for journeying into the unknown. Represented as a sublime force, as chaotic, mysterious, and filled with magical creatures, the surrealists drew on this rich tradition. Attracted to its rich Freudian associations, and enthralled with the idea of the ocean as a symbol of transformative potential, the surrealists claimed the ocean as a supreme space in which radical opposites could coexist.

Recently, an appreciation of surrealism’s political opposition to a blind faith in the idea of progress, ostensibly built upon the promises of technological advancement (Breton Manifesto, 1924) has attracted attention from scholars wishing to reconsider the problematic relationship between discourses of progress and the crisis in ecology (Donna Roberts, Gavin Parkinson, David Hopkins). Added to this is the contemporary theorisation of the ocean as a contested, political space, a smooth space of deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari) and a domain highly sensitised to effects of climate change and economic activity (Latour).

This session will explore the impact of the surrealist ocean in contemporary art and thought in terms of its transitional and liminal traits and its ability to both separate and connect land mass, peoples, and ideas. The ocean is offered up as a catalyst for thinking about the politics of transformation and ways to address how climate change and the environmental state of the oceans has brought sharper focus to surrealism’s historical interest in the sea.

Montage in a Single Shot

Giles Fielke (University of Melbourne) & Ivan Cerecina (University of Sydney)

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This panel explores the place of filmic montage as a mode of art historical inquiry, examining the re-distribution of still images from the history of art via processes for the assembly of images. Following recent re-evaluations of the term’s valence by the likes of Georges Didi-Huberman, Nicole Brenez, and Harun Farocki, filmic montage is posited here as an aesthetic and historiographical gesture that suggests both conflict within and kinship between fragments of visual culture. It frames cinema’s interventions into art history in terms of a mid-20th-century tradition of montage as a theory and practice, elucidated in particular by Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and André Malraux. There, across art books, didactic texts and so-called ‘image primers’ [Bilderfibeln], is an attempt to bridge the constitutive blank between photomontage, collage, and filmic montage, placing the latter within an art historical lineage concerned with the mechanical dynamism of images. This session tests the impact of these cross-medial provocations on montage from midway through the previous century in more contemporary filmmaking and film exhibition practices. It examines the art documentary (from Alain Resnais to John Berger), looking to modern and contemporary gallery exhibitions of moving-image-based works as inheritors of this modernist tradition of montage. In so doing, it asks what the re-circulation and re-assemblage of images in these moving image works has adopted from this fertile terrain.

The panel will comprise of three, 20-minute papers, delivered in person at the University of Sydney. Two of these papers will be delivered by the convenors.

Repositioning the Past in the Arts of Islamicate Societies

Peyvand Firouzeh (University of Sydney) & Wulan Dirgantoro (University of Melbourne)

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Historicism, as an artistic practice with a regard for past forms and styles, has more commonly been discussed in Islamic art and architecture in the post-1800 period, especially in relation to “archaeological historicism”, revival styles (i.e. Mamluk Revival, Neo-Achaemenid, etc.), and traditionalism. This proposal aims to expand the question of conscious treatments of the past both temporally and conceptually, inviting papers that pose the following questions in relation to Islamic art, broadly defined, for any time period or geographical area. How has the past – not merely historical forms and styles but also the idea of history itself – been treated in art and art writing? How do we think about historicism in relation to cross-culturalism? Who did the past belong to, and as a corollary, how does cross-cultural historicism relate to nationalism, transnationalism, and the vexed terms “impact” and “influence”? How do our interpretations of art and material culture in light of referencing the past relate to the reception of the art after its production, or to its contemporaneity?

Linked to a larger group project that both chairs are undertaking, the goal of this series of panels is to bring more visibility to research around Islamic art at the AAANZ conference – a historically under-represented area both at the conference and regionally. We invite proposals from scholars (of all levels) and artists, who work with themes in Islamic art and related fields of South Asian, and Southeast Asian art. Our goal is to have a stream of 2-3 research panels (3 speakers each), ending with a 90-minute roundtable of scholars and invited artists. Please specify whether you will deliver your paper in person or online.

Precarious archives: networks of care

Louise Garrett

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What impact does caring for and providing access to precarious archives have on narratives and memories of art and cultural histories? Precarious, marginal or invisible archives don’t necessarily “belong” in official archiving systems or are yet to find (or have lost) a “home.” What kinds of networks of care are being produced to provide access to hidden or un(der)represented archives and what forms of caretaking are being used to preserve untold and undervalued art and cultural collections? How do we bring to bear feminist, decolonial, indigenous, immigrant or working-class vocabularies on taxonomies of “official” institutional archives? What techniques and protocols are being developed to ensure hidden experiences and immaterial events can be inherited in order to colour future re-inscriptions of art and cultural histories? How have archivists, artists and other knowledge producers disrupted the power dynamics of the objectification machine in the logic of the archive?

This panel encourages contributions from researchers, artists, archivists and other cultural agents who are interested in novel approaches to archiving precarious cultural histories, particularly in relation to the Asia-Pacific region. How are safe havens and innovative forms of access to the histories and memories of marginal and underrepresented cultures and groups produced? What does the future of the archive look like?

Invisible Forces: Subtle Bodies In and Around Works of Art

Pia van Gelder (Australian National University) & Jay Johnston (University of Sydney)

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Subtle bodies refer to a concept of the subject as composed of invisible, ‘energetic’ agency that interpenetrates and exceeds the physical body. This idea is widely found in historical and contemporary cultures from Platonism to south Asian religious practices. In the late 19th century these concepts were appropriated by esoteric movements including Theosophy and Anthroposophy which variously proposed embodiment to be composed of layers of subtle matter vibrating at higher rates than those energies already scientifically detected (Samuel & Johnston, 2013).

Today these concepts have persisted in traditional health practices and have been adapted by popular spiritual practices (Barcan, 2011). In the past twenty years, attention has turned to the significance of esoteric worldviews for modernist artists; Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky are well known examples. Explorations appear via production of subtle body representations. However, these ontologies have also informed aesthetic relations and artistic methodologies, as they figure complex relationships with matter and energetic phenomena including light and sound. In many of the same ways as that of popular ‘turns’ in the Humanities, like New Materialism, Subtle body ontologies disrupt conventional subject–object relations, profoundly refiguring our relationships with the material world and the environment. Consequently art works that interact with these relational ontologies participate in rethinking these different configurations.

This panel invites papers that discuss (i) Subtle bodies as content or method in artistic practice (ii) how artists work with Subtle bodies in the works they produce inclusive of audience reception. Keywords: subtle bodies, esotericism, intersubjectivity, relational ontologies.

Fashioning Art/Artifying Fashion

Michelle Guo (Independent Scholar)

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This session seeks papers on meetings between art and fashion and what has come of them. Fashion and art have always coexisted and continue to inspire each other in dynamic ways.   Contributors may consider presenting papers on, but not limited to, the following topics:

-Processes of artification in fashion;

-Historical or contemporary collaborations between designers and artists;

-The increased presence of fashion in art spaces/art in fashion spaces;

-The nebulosity of the art/fashion divide.

The Impact of the Digital

Michelle Guo (Independent Scholar)

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This panel will focus on the impact of new digital technologies on the display of culture. COVID-19 has pushed the art and culture industry to more seriously and urgently consider virtual alternatives for their in-person programming that they previously may have been hesitant to adopt. Digital technologies became a fundamental medium through which museums and other cultural institutions can remotely engage with their travel-restricted audiences. They can function as a supplement, compliment or even an alternative to the physical exhibition. With the cautious gradual re-opening of museums and galleries worldwide, digital technologies will remain a core tenet of exhibition planning and programming.  

Papers may consider but are not restricted to:

-Gamification in art/culturel

-Virtual exhibition tour experiences;

-Interactive technologies and the rise of Virtual and Augmented Reality

-Audience engagement and museum social media strategies (Uffizi as an early adopter of TikTok, Getty Challenge);

-Digitisation projects and the museum as knowledge repository;

-3D technologies and museum accessibility;

-The limitations of the physical museum space;

-The challenge of contextualising artifact in the virtual space;

-The power of social media and the Instagrammable exhibit.

Early Modern Encounters

Victoria Hobday (University of Melbourne) & Anne Dunlop (University of Melbourne)

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We are proposing two panels on the impact of encounters in early modern art history. The period between about 1250 and 1650 saw new and accelerating contact and exchange – of artists, patrons, places, materials, technologies, and objects – on an increasingly global scale. Some of these encounters were voluntary, and others forced (by war or colonisation, for instance); some forms of encounter were themselves imagined through objects and artworks that moved, or written sources about other people, places and things.

We seek papers that explore the impact of this mobility and exchange on art and art historiography in the period. The division between the two panels will depend on the papers received, but we envision that one might take Northern Europe as a focus.

Contemporary Art and Depression

Helen Hughes (Monash University) & David Homewood (University of Melbourne)

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Along with anxiety, today depression is one of the most common mental health disorders globally. Most people who have not been diagnosed as clinically depressed themselves will at least know someone who has been severely impacted by it. Accordingly, depression is a key condition subtending the production, purpose, and reception of art in the twenty-first century and should be analysed as such.

This panel welcomes papers that examine the relationship between contemporary art and depression (as distinct from melancholia). Angles may encompass: Big Pharma and the medicalisation of depression; the politics of depression vis a vis the decline of the welfare state; social justice and depression; climate grief and anxiety; the rise of the wellness industry as against the backdrop of late capitalist/neoliberal individualism; the feminisation of depression, its intersection with mothering/postnatal depression, as well as imposter syndrome; art as a form of therapy for depression; depression and issues of access; the temporality of depression (i.e., slow, stretched, wasted, cyclical); and the aesthetics of depression (i.e., slowness, stillness). This panel is also interested in papers that, in contrast with widespread characterisations of depression as a state of disengagement and withdrawal from society/the other, might attempt to articulate a solidarity politics of depression.  

Feminist Collaborations Across Arts and Bioscience Technologies

WhiteFeather Hunter (University of Western Australia) & Molly McKinney (American Nurses Association) 

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Online Panel

This panel means to explore some of the impacts of feminist collaboration across the fields of art and science, with a particular focus on the use and/or critique of new biotechnologies. Inter-, cross- and trans-disciplinary collaborations provide fertile ground for expanding necessary dialogue around technological tools and their broad social applicability in the arts and sciences. We are especially interested in how the collaborative, subversive use of (bio)technologies can intersect or interrupt capitalist and/or colonial agendas that impact women’s, queer and other non-normative bodies. Tissue engineering and prosthetic implants, reproductive technologies and femtech, hormone therapies, stem cell uses, genetic modification, microbiome transplants, or any other technologies concerned with the body as a nexus of tinkering and transformation are welcome as case studies, art projects or points of critical debate. Biotechnologies can also include so-called low-tech approaches, including lay/folk medicine or biohacking, grassroots pharmacology and creative revivals of ancestral herbalism, and medico-spiritual techniques of community care. Feminist concerns such as the instrumentalization of women’s bodies and the exploitation of women as subjects for high tech development, body colonization/ de-colonization, as well as the differences in ethical approaches in the arts and the sciences, are some of the core issues we hope to raise. We are particularly interested in intersectional approaches that focus on how technological instrumentalization/ exploitation most impacts and relies on certain marginalized groups.

Research paper presentations and artist talks are welcome formats for presentation. This panel will be convened online, allowing flexibility for a diverse, international roster of presenters.

Energies as Method

Douglas Kahn (University of NSW)

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The recent field of energy humanities could more properly be called energy resource humanities. Its effectively exclusive focus on sources and systems of fuel and power generation omits how broader experiences and understandings of energies have varied widely throughout history and across cultures to the present day. Research in literature and the arts by Bruce Clarke, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Dee Reynolds, Douglas Kahn and others has observed shifts among technoscientific, institutional, philosophical and esoteric contexts since the late-19th Century. Yet, despite centrality and significance, many areas, approaches, artists and works remain unexamined and under-examined.

This panel aims to understand how energies have been manifested and interpreted in creative practice and scholarly research, and what methods may be developed for further investigations to help articulate this often daunting topic. We invite presentations that can assist in this project, with emphasis on how plural senses of energy, their cognates, translations and correlates, might exist congruently or modulate across fields, not limited to: cosmopolitical and many-worlds approaches in Indigenous studies, traditional and religious cultures and esoteric communities, science and technology studies, the place of energies in cybernetics and media, energies in performance, in healing and remediation, psychotropics, and in ecocritical studies, including those instances where plural energies may relate to energies-as-resource.

Asymmetry

Ariel Kline (Princeton University) & Keren Hammerschlag (Australian National University)

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‘Asymmetry’ is defined by what it is not: it is the lack of symmetry, the lack of equity, and the lack of equivalence between parts. Western art and its histories have often privileged classical symmetry wherein, for example, bodies stand in balanced contrapposto as the epitome of vitality and beauty. Otherwise, symmetry has been associated with justice and divinity, a mark of moral perfection. And yet, asymmetry can have an aesthetic and political impact—asserting pressure and creating accents in unexpected places. This panel seeks to challenge, amend, or otherwise disorder the symmetrical by exploring concepts and representations of asymmetry in art and visual culture. What impact might asymmetry have as a framing concept for viewing images and bodies? How should we as art historians account for asymmetries of power, justice, and archival or artistic representations? What does it mean to write asymmetrical histories, attend to historical imbalances, or engage in looking askew?

This in-person panel seeks to look critically and creatively at asymmetry in art, art history, museums, collections and the archive from any location and time period, with a focus on asymmetry in representations of gender, sexuality, disability and race.

Museums as Sites of Civil Society: Cultural Leadership in times of crises

Anna Lawrenson (University of Sydney) 

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While the world has undergone a major revolution as a result of Covid, the changes that have been witnessed in art galleries were seeded well before the pandemic. From their inception, art galleries and the artists that they exhibit, have reflected and engaged with the social and political currents of their time. Never before however, have we seen galleries called to account on such an array of issues: #MeToo, the climate crisis, decolonisation projects and BLM, relationships with big business and the questioning of the neutrality of institutions.

In the current climate, where financial support is limited and reliant on sources beyond government, how can galleries engage in risky topics that advance discourse while also preserving their supporter base? This panel is interested in foregrounding galleries that have taken a leadership role in reflecting societal uprisings and current affairs and in doing so, are moving towards an activist role themselves. This returns to the original Enlightenment foundation of the art museum as a space for public discourse and debate. How ‘public’ are galleries today and what role do they currently serve in society?

This session welcomes proposals that engage with the role that art galleries play in advancing social and political activism. This is planned as a joint panel with “Museums as Sites of Civil Society: Audiences and Impact” convened by Dr Chiara O’Reilly.

Obsolescence and the loss of impact

Hannah Lewi (University of Melbourne)

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What duty of care and custodianship prevails when public art works are no longer wanted and no longer command impact?

This panel aims to discuss issues surrounding the loss of impact, whether through obsolescence, a fall from fashion, or shifts in social and cultural expectations and tastes about public sculptures and works that are integral to buildings, landscapes, urban and architectural conceptions. All too often these kinds of works have been casualties of redevelopment — merely in the wrong place at the wrong time —and have been destroyed without record, left to die a natural death through neglect, or have been moved away from their meaningful original settings. Paper contributions are sought by academics and practitioners in the disciplines of art, architecture and heritage that critically interrogate case studies, explore policy successes and failures or tease out theoretical implications of the cycles of forgetting and obsolescence in this realm.

Primitivisms in Southeast Asian Modern Art

Yvonne Low (University of Sydney) & Phoebe Scott (National Gallery Singapore)

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This panel seeks to rethink the impact of Euramerican modernism on art in Southeast Asia, through a critical analysis of the reception of the discourse of primitivism. In Southeast Asia, much has been made of the influence of Paul Gauguin and other modernists on the portrayal of (oftentimes semi-nude) Indigenous women, depicted in lush tropical and idyllic scenes of Southeast Asian environs. Similarly, the impact of primitivist modernism is arguably discernible in formal innovations in works of Southeast Asian modern art, which adapt stylistic elements of local aesthetic traditions (like batik, weaving or wood-carving). But what specific relation do these developments bear to the broader history of primitivist modernism, and what was their meaning and critical function when engaged in Southeast Asia? Within Western art history, modernist primitivism has been subject to a stringent critique, noting its underlying presumptions of a racist cultural hierarchy, and its embeddedness within various colonial projects. To what extent is this critique also applicable to Southeast Asian modernisms?

This panel proposes a re-thinking of reductive perspectives regarding the “influence” of Western primitivism, in favour of a more nuanced consideration of reception and context – including the impact of factors like regionalism, diaspora and post-coloniality. We invite contributions on this subject relating to modern art from any part of Southeast Asia, taking any disciplinary approach.

UnAustralian Art in the Eighteenth Century

Zoe de Luca (McGill University) & Helen Hughes (Monash University)

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From the field’s founding moments in the work of Bernard Smith, scholars of Australian art history have pushed for works of art produced on this continent to be considered within a non-nationalist framework. This panel turns to art of the eighteenth century bearing in mind this particular lineage, which comes to include more recent intellectual work by Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson, and the question of the postnational posed by Charles Green and Ian McLean, amongst others. Of course, one could say that there is no eighteenth-century Australian art of which to speak, and so the premise of this panel is, at best, half-cocked. What is actually significant about the eighteenth century in this context is the fact of British invasion and the imposition of settler colonialism upon these shores. ‘UnAustralian Art in the Eighteenth Century,’ then, is a provocation to remap, redraw, return, or otherwise to field defining projects like Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific with contemporary political imperatives in mind.

We welcome papers on eighteenth-century Australian art and its historiography, as well as on the art and art historiography of Empire. We also invite papers concerned with broader networks of circulation in the pre-colonial period and during the first decades of invasion.

Screen Engagements

Charu Maithani (University of NSW)

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Online Panel

This session invites articulations on our contemporary postmedial relationship with screens. Proposing to look beyond the functionality of screens as mere display devices, the panel assembles multiple perspectives on the role of screens in interconnecting, rearticulating and reconfiguring relations. This panel aims to interrogate the agency of screens, their enactments and operations as part of different assemblages, connected to multiple media, occurring in varied contexts of media art and visual culture.

We are confronted by various kinds of screens in our daily life – touch screen mobile phone displays, ATMs, film projections, television and computer display. These numerous encounters with them offer varied experiences ranging from information to immersion. To account for this overwhelming presence of screens, the panel proposes various ways to attend to the relations enacted by screens in specific set-ups. The panel is interested in foregrounding the works of screens in configuring and assembling relations of image, viewer/participant, and producer/maker in media art works and visual culture.

Thinking of various ways that screens cultivate the dynamic potentiality of media, relations and practices, the panel invites proposals that examine the following:

-Multiple capacities of screens, their potentialities, and their activities and connections across different media, thereby commenting on the inter- and intra-medial operations of screens;

-Functionalities of screens where they transform the relationship of users with media;

-Various becomings of screens that address the dynamicity of postmedia;

-Modes of screens that complicate relations with images, frames and other components which highlight different medialities of screens.

The Impact of Science on Art and Art on Science

Gregory Minissale (University of Auckland)

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This panel presents papers on the different ways in which artistic practices have responded to, transformed, and resisted the influence of scientific thought. Humanism, decolonialism, feminism, and queer politics have helped artists become aware of science’s universalising and homogenising tendencies. Instead, many art practices have revealed the value of idiosyncrasy, difference, and the nonlogical aspects of creativity, revealing that there is more to human existence than scientific reason. Yet artists and theorists have taken on board what is useful in science for art: technology, non-anthropocentric perspectives, human-AI interfaces, algorithmic and digital art, and new materialist practices. Early modern, modern and contemporary art has revealed visions of futurity that range from utopian to dystopian.

How far has art held up an ethical mirror to the unbridled power of science? How has art politicised and harnessed science to realise its own power to change the world?

Topics and fields of interest: Posthumanism; Decolonialism; New Materialism; Bio art; Robotics; Psychology and neuroaesthetics; Schizoanalysis; Queer and feminist politics; The global pandemic; The politics of medicine and bio-engineering; Climate politics; Human-Animal relations; Physics and metaphysics.

Spatial Performativity: What Happened When We Lost Space?

Nevena Mrdjenovic (Independent Scholar)

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An empty space does not exist. All spaces are mise en scenes previously inscribed with traces of past and present narratives and events, notions of performativity and transformation. They also contain already established signals for future encounters. Space is thus always active. Conceptually speaking, space exercises its own agency and effect. It is performative, just like it allows for a performance to take place in it. In 2020, we collectively witnessed a wide range of spaces being emptied. At this unique moment of history, when we temporarily lost physical access to most spaces, the nature of spatial performativity changed. Public spaces suddenly became stages of newly devised choreographies, gestures, costumes, and scripts. Private spaces, on the other hand, emerged as virtually public mise en scenes of our active daily performances.

This panel is interested in exploring contexts in which these events have affected spaces of and for performance. Did we lose the spatial performativity in this period? Or has it become active through the sound absence of human performers? Did we gain a new heightened sense of performativity? Did all spaces become more performative than ever before? The panel invites papers that unpack these concepts through a wide range of notions of both performativity and space. Hence, we are inviting research papers, case studies, artist/designer/performer’s reflections that critically examine such ideas in relation to conventional and non conventional performance venues, public spaces, domestic mise en scenes, virtual settings, etc.

The panel accepts research papers, case study examinations, artist/designer/performer’s reflections. Taking into account the theme of the panel, hybrid formats that include performative elements are also highly encouraged.

Queering the Museum

Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Carriageworks) & Maura Reilly (Arizona State University)

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Museums are complicit in the reproduction of inequitable power relations, privileging white, cis-gender heteronormative paradigms. At a time when art institutions are facing up to large scale diversity issues, how are museums reconciling with the LGBTIQ community as an underrepresented group whose lives, their/her/histories, and practices have been rendered insignificant or invisible?

In December 2021, the National Gallery of Victoria will open the largest queer exhibition to-date in Australia. This exhibition represents the latest in a long history of canonical LGBTIQ exhibitions in Australia, from Becoming Visible (1982) and Don’t Leave Me This Way (1994) to The Gay Museum (2003) and, more recently, Queer Economies (2018). The exhibitions’ curators employed varying curatorial strategies, from approaching objects with a queer eye and institutional critique to tracing object biographies and facilitating the emergence of previously underrepresented voices. There is little scholarship examining the historiography of these queer exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand and we seek research papers that help fill that void.

Another Art School is Possible

Anastasia Murney (University of NSW), Melinda Reid (University of NSW/University of Technology, Sydney) and Aneshka Mora (University of NSW)

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The ongoing effects of COVID-19 have transformed the Australian higher education landscape in profound ways. The rhetoric of ‘futureproofing’ is a common rationale for cutting and shrinking faculties in the arts and humanities that do not fit into the language of ‘impact’, ‘engagement’, and ‘end-users.’

We want to examine the neoliberal instrumentalisation of research in these terms and push against the devaluation of teaching in our universities. We are casual teachers – shock absorbers and ‘warm bodies’ – who have worked through the period of ‘emergency remote teaching.’ For this panel, we are interested in both critique and proposition. This interest emerges from our own theorising of ‘disco pedagogy.’ We offer this as an alternative pedagogical model that foregrounds the value of joy and improvisation as collective resources for (and reprieve from) the ongoing crises unfolding in our art schools.

We invite papers that respond to:

-The post-pandemic remaking of art schools and the higher education sector;

-The devaluation of the humanities and the impact of federal government funding;

-The over/underrepresentation of casual labour;

-Collective strategies and teaching models born from crisis;

-Radical pedagogies (inclusive of Marxist, critical, anarchist, feminist, and decolonial pedagogies) and the legacies of experimental art education

-Artistic and cultural practices exploring the recent impact of the pandemic and casualisation;

-The neoliberalisation of various forms of creative labour before and during the pandemic.

We particularly encourage proposals for papers from casualised or precariously employed workers, emerging artists and scholars, and FNPOC scholars and teachers.

Latin America Art and Social Resistance in the Global/Glocal Perspective

Tatiane De Oliveira Elias (Independent Scholar)

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Online Panel

The theme of this session is art and social resistance in Latin America and Caribbean in the era of post colonialism and global/glocal perspective. We will therefore look at Latin America and Caribbean contemporary artists whose work blends art, politics, democracy, resistance and identity. Artists in different contexts, and particularly in Latin America and Caribbean countries, have increasingly positioned themselves to usher in political and social change, in areas ranging from climate change and dictatorship to human rights. The current political crises, the coronavirus 19 pandemic crisis and its consequences for the Latin America economy and democracy, as well as the social struggles that lead to large influxes of Latin America migrants into the United States, Europa and Australia and massive flow of immigration from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti has inspired many artists.

The panel will discuss crucial themes such as social and cultural identity, minority identities, ancestrality, religiosity and tradition. It will also highlight initiatives by artists who have demonstrated how art can break down barriers and be more inclusive in terms of reframing minorities.

We invite contributions on the following topics: art and activism, indigenous art, feminism art and black community. Our aim is to socialize emerging themes in the field of art history in dialogue with the various areas of knowledge and highlight its rich diversity and foster intercultural dialogue. In this panel, we will discuss the importance of maintaining the Latin American historical memory and raise questions about preserving the history of the Latino identity.

Museums as Sites of Civil Society: Audiences and impact

Chiara O’Reilly (University of Sydney)

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Art galleries have revolutionised their relationship with visitors in the twentieth and twenty first centuries with a greater focus on relevance, inclusion, participation and collaboration. Embodied in that shift is a recognition of audiences as central to the work of museums and galleries. When Covid struck, galleries were left without audiences. How have galleries transformed their practice to chart their unique impact within the Covid stricken world and beyond? Aside from the rapid pivot to online delivery, what will be the lasting impact of Covid on the cultural sector and how has it inspired change and innovation? How will cultural institutions seek to reinvent their impact and maintain relevance? What social role will art galleries come to play?

The panel seeks to open a discussion on change across the cultural sector and welcomes papers from people inside cultural institutions and across academia that interrogate the role and impact of galleries today and into the future. This is planned as a joint panel with “Museums as Sites of Civil Society: Cultural Leadership” in times of crises convened by Dr Anna Lawrenson.

Amateur or DIY aesthetics in Australian art

Victoria Perin (University of Melbourne)

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Some artists prefer to remain non-professionals. Australian artists, despite any formal training or mentorship, have relished a streak of rawness, and this panel invites papers trying to understand why that is. Reiko Tomii, the Japanese-American scholar of conceptual art in Japan, uses the commonplace term ‘do-it-yourself’ or ‘DIY’ to define the aesthetics of radical avant garde artists who created work in the “wilderness” of provincial, post-WWII Japan. Tomii ties the idea of DIY aesthetics to ‘experimental art’, particularly of the kind made by interdisciplinary collectives. Tomii’s work might lead one to contend that amateurism in art is a fundamental condition of the provincial. For what can be truly ‘professional’ in a place defined by its distance from authoritative and certifying powers?

In an incomplete outline of Melbourne postwar, interdisciplinary art collectives, amateur aesthetics were nurtured in the outer-suburban flourishing of modernist ceramics at ‘Open Country’ (the Boyd dynasty’s Murrumbeena property) and throughout nearby Eltham, where mud-brick architecture thrived. Communal printmaking groups in the 1950s foreshadowed other important enclaves of the DIY, such as the La Mama Theatre (and poetry group) in Carlton and the anarchist visual-poetry collective that emerged after it. This activity was parallel to the independent film-making duo Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, who can be linked to later Super-8 communities.

I welcome the submission of papers on groups or individuals, especially from the postwar period, who can lay claim to this submerged tradition of amateur aesthetics in Australian art.

#MeToo in the Art World

Ashley Remer (Australian National University / Girl Museum)

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When actress Alyssa Milano tweeted #MeToo in October 2017, it felt like a watershed moment for women and girls, sharing their experiences of sexual assault—finally being heard and believed. It is no coincidence that the most well-known instances of men abusing their power have occurred in the arts. While predatory behaviour and sexual assault happen across the globe in every industry, the arts are particularly susceptible to abuses of power that are readily accepted, explained away or consumed and re-packaged as part of the process. In the art world, there have been powerful men called out, with only a few experiencing real consequences of their behaviour —an extremely low rate compared to the likely instances of abuse. As well, there has been a backlash and much resistance to the reclamation of power by women through public platforms. While many think the moment has already passed, some are now using the concept of ‘cancel culture’ to counter the idea that women should be able to speak out. Four years on, what has been the impact of #MeToo in the art world? In art history, has it affected how we think about, view or teach artists and artworks? In museums, has it provoked us to reconsider what we put on display and how we talk about it?

I invite art historians and art curators (encouraging those from art historical perspectives as well as contemporary) to participate in a roundtable discussion of the impact of #MeToo on the art world.

Remotely Yours: Creative Fieldwork Across Closed Borders

Una Rey (University of Newcastle & Alison Bennett (RMIT)

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In early 2020 as fires raged across the country, artists Alison Bennett & Una Rey proposed “Inside Elands” for The Lock-Up in Newcastle, NSW. Part counter-culture-documentary and part regional, intergenerational art-history, the production also became a dance of imposed, remote fieldwork experiments as the impact of state lock-downs took hold. What emerged from these essential rather than intended creative collaborations was a series of work in which an expanded (and yet intimate) exchange generated new work in unexpected ways.

This panel invites papers (or alternative modes) about projects in which the rhetoric of collaboration and interdisciplinarity are untethered from the academy and released into the wilds of artistic practice; where necessity is the mother of invention and ad-hoc, DIY tech. meets sophisticated modelling or vanguard thinking; or where isolated/remote communities build artistic legacies by accident as much as by design.

The Impact of Geography: Towards an Australian Asian Art History

Claire Roberts (University of Melbourne) & Chaitanya Sambrani (Australian National University)

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Through an analysis of visual archives of key scholars, this panel focuses on the formation of Asian art history in Australia, the origins of which may be traced back to contact between First Nations people and travellers from islands of the Indonesian archipelago as well as émigrés lured to this continent by the promise of forging a visionary new society based on its location in the Asia-Pacific region. Art history departments in Australia, as in many parts of the world, were founded on the discipline as it developed in Europe and a widely accepted idea of art history as the history of Western art. Introductions to the history of art from other parts of the world tended to take place in departments of languages and non-Western civilizations.

Established in 1946 in the aftermath of the Pacific War, the Australian National University designated Pacific and Asian Studies as a key area of strategic research. Arthur Llewellyn Basham (1914-1986), Foundation Professor and Head of the new Department of Oriental (later Asian) Civilisation(s) in the Faculty of Oriental (Asian) Studies pioneered the teaching of South Asian history and culture at ANU. Belgian-born Pierre Ryckmans (1935-2014), who had trained in law and art history at the Catholic University of Louvain and completed a PhD in Chinese art history was appointed to the ANU in 1970, where he taught Chinese language, literature and culture. Scholars like Basham and Ryckmans were important figures in the development of Asian art history in Australia.

We seek a third panel member working on the historiography of Asian art in Australia.

Rebellious Acts: the Impact of Arts Protest

Louise Rollman (Queensland University of Technology)

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This session examines the impact of art and protest, and by extension, the role that artists and artsworkers have played in instances of social, economic, and cultural unrest. With strife on the rise, there are increasing incidents of communities rejecting art, calling for its censorship, and there are examples of art raising social issues, applying political pressure and prompting community action. From censorship to artist boycotts to ideologically-driven funding cuts, the arts and cultural sector is evermore beleaguered by its political and economic precarity.

This session seeks to explore how the arts and cultural sector rebels against overbearing situations, and invites papers that question: How effective is art as a form of protest? It invites subtle, subversive, overt and/or extreme examples that may address labour, the environment and gender rights or reveal examples of arts protest that influence and reshape policy discussions and/or the processes of art and exhibition-making. Conversely, examples may explore situations where art is the subject of protest. Ultimately, the session aims to discover the ways arts protest can influence radical and profoundly transformative change, particularly in its own sector.

Crafting Change

Niklavs Rubenis (University of Tasmania) & Elizabeth Shaw (Griffith University)

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This panel proposes a discussion around the opportunities and challenges of contemporary studio craft practices in Australia/NZ. Our interests lie in both how studio craft is perceived, as well as the realities and future of practice when faced with an ongoing slew of issues relating to environmental, social, economic and political agendas. Although the 2020 impacts from the pandemic possibly provided a time for reflection and a ‘slowing down’ to consider alternatives/possibilities of change, this was concurrently met with—amongst countless other disruptions—the disestablishment of programs across the tertiary sector. Does this suggest that craft does not, or for that fact the creative sector as a whole, hold enough value to warrant continuing support? If craft does have value and impact then how is this defined, and further, how are craft practices expanding to be adopted into wider circles of significance?

Our intention is to prompt a discussion around craft’s capacity to meaningfully respond to a world under rapid transformation through a) expanded, critical or experimental craft practices and the way in which they operate; b) the ethical implications pertaining to concept, process and/or materials and how these can lead to scalable approaches and; c) the future of craft and how it will remain current and relevant within the context of a world that is rapidly changing.

Ten Thousand Saplings: the Birth of Modern Chinese Art in the Republic Period (1912-1949)

Yuexiu Shen (Art Gallery of South Australia) & Russell Kelty (Art Gallery of South Australia)

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The fall of the Qing Dynasty had a profound impact on artists throughout China. In spite of the turmoil of the Republic Period (1912-1949) artists across a diversity of media embraced the new found freedoms to innovate in their respective fields. Artists reacted to this dynamic shift and transformed their practice embracing new subjects and styles and at times integrating western artistic conventions. These works were no longer created to service the Empire but instead created to suit the interests of private collectors in China and abroad. While academics and scholars in China have been examining this period for some time, it is only recently that the art and artists of this period have aroused interest of academics in Australia, America and Europe.

This session seeks to examine the impact of the collapse of Qing Dynasty of Republic Period artists. It is scheduled to be 90 minutes in length, including three speakers each delivering a research paper of maximum 20 minutes, presenting case studies of the artistic transformation across various disciplines during the Republic Period in China.

The Impact of Surrealism on Contemporary Female Corporeal Imagery

Victoria Souliman (University of New England) & Amelia Kelly (University of Sydney)

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In 1929 founder of the Surrealist movement, André Breton, stated that “the problem of woman is the most marvellous and disturbing problem in all the world.” The female body was a central motif of Surrealism. Its appropriation was used by the (mostly) male artists of the period to project concepts of violence, metaphoric breakdown of societal morals and their own repressed fears and desires towards the female body. Representations included the augmented, fragmented and violated body, and woman as infantised, eroticised and fetishised. While female surrealists similarly used recurring surrealist tropes, they often co-opted them in order to subvert male privilege and significantly bring new insight to female selfhood. Today, contemporary artists and cultural producers continue to draw on surrealist aesthetics and individual conceptual logic in their portrayal of the female experience.

This session examines the impact of Surrealism on art and popular visual culture of recent decades, particularly on corporeal imagery. This panel asks: where can those traces of Surrealism in contemporary depiction of the female body be identified? Paper proposals are invited which discuss the ways visual artists, performers and social media figures make use of surrealist tropes to communicate counter-hegemonic discourse on female subjectivity and fluid notions of femininity. Contributions on how tensions between gender identity and surrealist imagery are discussed in the art history classroom are also welcome.

An Oceanic avant-garde?

Ann Stephen (Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney) & Andrew McNamara (Queensland University of Technology)

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Is it possible to speak of an avant-garde in Oceania? Once again the avant-garde is declared obsolete, in the wake of contemporary debates on identity politics, by zeitgeisters of the net who opine that “… the gesture of cutting something loose from its moorings is no longer radical: its just the quotidian stuff of social media … The Readymade only works in the quiet of the gallery. The internet dumps it back into the din of the everyday, taking the urinal off its pedestal and putting it back on the lavatory wall to be pissed in.” Yet might it be possible to argue that the avant-garde has indeed an after-life in Oceania? If a case could be argued for an Oceanic avant-garde, what would be its boundaries in time and space? & how to characterise the relation of Australian avant-gardists to those in Oceania’s ‘sea of islands’, as describe by Epeli Hau’ofa? Is it even valuable or advantageous to speak of the Australian and Oceanic region in terms of an avant-garde?

Concepts of (Mis)translation

Hilary Thurlow (Monash University)

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Since the acceleration of a more pervasive globalism, alongside the proliferation of the biennale; curators, critics, artists, and art historians have grappled with translating practices between geographic, linguistic and cultural barriers. These turns toward the global have implications for local communities and the translation of diasporic experiences and paths of migration both historical and present-day. There are also significant implications when artworks, histories and ideas travel across contexts and adopt an alternate, and often unintended, series of connotations.

This session welcomes papers that interrogate—in the broadest sense—translation and how it traverses questions such as: is a lingua franca needed to develop mutual understanding across geographies? How can translating indigenous practices between sites of colonialism effect and impact cultural meaning? Or do frameworks of cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and créolité render this kind of questioning null and void? In a more literal sense, how do we translate writing between languages or mediums to access epistemologies and new sites of knowledge yet retain a respectful elucidation of the original text? These questions seek to draw out the impact of (mis)translation when engaging with art, its histories and display.

Contemporary Encounters in Installation, Sound and Performance Art

Aneta Trajkoski (University of Melbourne)

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This panel calls attention to the encounters between installation, sound, contemporary performance and dance, and contemporary art spaces such as museums, galleries, festivals and biennials. Scholars, curators and artists are invited to propose papers that examine the tensions, shifts and expansions emerging from, for example, the ‘sonic turn’ and ‘new performance turn’ in contemporary art, or between theories and global and local contexts.

Shift Happens

Emrah Baki Ulas (University of Technology)

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This panel focusses on the impact of technological shift and technical advancements on the status quo of common practice of art and design. It explores the terrain of art and design practice in the context of rapid changes of our times, through asking a series of key questions that the panelists approach from different angles. Can the impact of technological shift on practice be predicted? How can practice catch up? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities?Are there instances where the opposite may be the case; whereby common practice drives technology towards advancement..? How does all this drive political change?

Within Lies the Problem

Jen Valender (University of Melbourne)

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Online Panel

What happens when an artist researcher is at odds with their own research? This panel will dig into processes of surfacing and identifying problems within visual culture and arts research. The focus is on the poetics of finding and living with dissonance in order to identify aporia, ethical problems and to describe issues that are coming up while artist researchers are creating their work. This may include subtle frictions between domestic spaces and the landscape, environmental inconsistencies, cultural conflictions or historical complexities.

To introduce this panel, the term “cross-dissonance” will be unpacked to describe the process of identifying elements in an artwork or body of research that are at odds with the artist/researcher’s own personal beliefs and morality. These may present themselves as contradictions, problems or insecurities. Usually, it is identified first as an ineffable bodily response, an uncomfortable sinking feeling that surfaces from the work.

Panellists are invited to present their experiences of cross-dissonance and any methods used to reason with, or overcome, its affects.

Unruly Objects: the Impact of Material Culture on Art History

Mark De Vitis (University of Sydney)

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In the last decade, art history has been challenged and expanded by the neighbouring field of material culture studies. While objects are being increasingly recognised by art historians as agents of social and cultural change, they often remain occluded in conventional definitions of art and art history discourse. This panel aims to draw attention to objects that do not easily fit the criteria of art and to explore productive interdisciplinary methodologies for interpreting them. Building on the material turn in art history, we seek to explore the intersections of art history and material culture to develop new areas of scholarly research.

Papers may address an object’s material and sensorial properties and the specific aesthetic frameworks through which it has acquired meaning and value, including how production, use, circulation and exchange has shaped the life of the object. Papers may also consider how these objects connect with, undermine, or complicate notions of art, taste, authenticity, tradition, value, identity, and nationhood broadly defined. The proposed session is designed to be broad enough to encompass diverse research interests and is likely to appeal to curators and GLAM professionals as well as academics.

Collaboration and Art History

Robert Wellington (Australian National University) & Marni Williams (Australian National University)

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Collaboration has always been an essential element of art-historical study. From the scholarly networks of early-modern humanists to recent interdisciplinary and comparative projects that traverse languages and cultures, the interpretation and theorisation of art and design has always been discursive process. Ideas are never the property of a single mind; they are built upon and refined in reference to the work of our predecessors and peers. Like all academic disciplines, the impact of art-historical work is measured by the engagement of our peers with our published works. And yet, despite those networked aspects of our work—encouraged anew by ‘socially-engaged practice research’, ‘mutual engagement’, ‘generous scholarship’ and ‘communities of practice’—the single-author monograph remains the gold standard as a measure of academic achievement.

This panel invites participants to engage with the history of collaboration in our discipline as both method and practice. We invite proposals for papers that discuss any aspect of collaboration as it relates to the development of art-historical knowledge. Topics might include but are not limited to: collaborations between academic and non-academic professions; collaboration as a critique of colonial knowledge structures; new dynamics of collaboration through technology and computational methods; collaborative writing and publication; professional openness, non-hierarchical structures and mentorship; attribution and the measures of academic excellence.

Japanese Artistic Responses to the Impact of Modernisation on New Technologies and Travel Opportunities in the Late 19th Century

Mei Sheong Wong (Art Gallery of South Australia/University of Adelaide) & Jennifer Harris (University of Adelaide)

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After 250 years of enforced isolation, the “opening” of Japan in the Bakumatsu era (1853-68) was the catalyst for rapid modernisation. Foreigners were able to enter the declared ‘treaty ports’ and Japanese were able to travel abroad. This presentation explores the combined impact of travel and technology in adapting and developing new genres of Japanese artistic production. Photography, introduced by Western photographers such as Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz and Adolpho Farsari, provided a new field of endeavour for early Japanese photographers including Tamamura Kozaburo, Kusakabe Kimbei and Ogawa Kazumasa. These early photographers documented the transformation of Japan throughout the Meiji era (1868-1912). While most were introduced to photographic techniques by Western photographers operating in ports like Yokohama, some Japanese photographers managed to travel abroad. Travel beyond Japan’s shores exposed many Japanese artists to the arts and crafts of other cultures and their practitioners, and so it had profound impact on their practices. While most travelled to Europe and America, the Japanese carver Jonaski Takuma (born 1868) for example, came to Australia. Adapting his traditional training and skills to a vastly different artistic milieu he ventured into carving emu eggs and opened a shop in Sydney’s Imperial Arcade.

This panel will consider the transformative experiences of such Japanese artists as they negotiated the challenges of modernisation. Their undertakings enhanced cultural exchange and technical innovation in sometimes surprising ways.