The Call for Papers is now open!

The Call for Papers is open from June 3 to July 29. 

If you would like to speak at the 2022 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, and is the region’s major conference for art workers, artists 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 in 2022 we are offering bursaries to Indigenous Australian, Māori and Pacific Indigenous participants from the region.

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 29 July 2022.

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 online 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.

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 will make a decision about the final details of their panel, and then notify successful applicants.

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

Panels Open for Submissions

Demonstrations of Modern and Contemporary Asian Art 

Michelle Antoinette (Monash University)

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This panel invites papers on the 2022 AAANZ conference theme of ‘Demonstration’ with a broad interest in modern and contemporary Asian art and its contexts. This includes demonstrations of Asian art through art practice itself, exhibition-making and other kinds of curatorial practice, as well as art history. These demonstrations may be wide ranging in their intent, for instance: politically-motivated art demonstrations to engender change, protest, and propose alternative realities in Asia; educative or pedagogic demonstrations that literally show, teach or explain through art; and the development of modern and contemporary Asian art histories or exhibitions as forms of demonstration, to evidence or reveal the existence of art practices in the past or the present. Asian contexts are broadly defined and may include a consideration of demonstrations of Asian art outside Asia, including in Australia.

Tastes of Justice: the Politics of Food-Art Practices in Asia and Australia

Marnie Badham (RMIT University), Stephen Loo (University of New South Wales) & Francis Maravillas (National Taipei University of Education)

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The diverse food-art practices in Asia and Australia highlight critical issues relating to the ethics and politics of curating relational practices of commensality and hospitality (Badham & Maravillas, 2019). These performative, social, and material practices engender diverse forms of cultural expression and creatively mediate cultural relations by tapping into transnational and diasporic vectors of connection to an imagined ‘home’ (Ang et al., 2000). While artists engaging with foodways can draw our attention to pressing concerns of sovereignty, race, migration, gender, labour, and climate change – the curation and exhibition of these practices raise both practical and conceptual issues. Cooking and galleries rarely mix, foodstuffs are difficult to collect, and eating creates unpredictable experiences (Badham & Maravillas, 2022). Gallery exhibitions can remove these practices from their cultural and community contexts, uncritically staging demonstrations of food cultures as spectacle, flattening their sensory and social complexities (Badham & Maravillas, 2019), as well as overlooking non-normative affects and dissonant perceptions (Loo, 2022).

For this panel, we will explore ‘the tastes of justice’. We welcome proposals through both performative lectures as ‘cooking demonstrations’ and critical examinations of ‘curation as demonstration’ to consider the affective, sensuous, and culturally and politically attuned potential of food-art practices.

Balance 1990 and Beyond: Indigenous Art Collectives, Exhibitions and Art Education

Susan Best (Griffith University) & Bianca Beetson (Griffith University) 

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In Brisbane, the exhibition Balance 1990: Views, Visions, Influences held at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1990 catalysed a number of important developments for the Indigenous art community in South East Queensland. The four main developments are: the formation of the Brisbane-based art collective the Campfire Group comprised of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists in 1990; the establishment of the Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art (CAIA) degree program at Griffith University in 1994; the founding of new art galleries specialising in Aboriginal art, most notably FireWorks Gallery in 1995 directed by Michael Eather co-curator of Balance 1990; the subsequent formation of the Brisbane-based art collective proppaNOW in 2000 comprised of major Brisbane-based Indigenous artists including staff, students and graduates of the CAIA program (Jennifer Herd, Megan Cope, Tony Albert).

Curated by Michael Eather and Marlene Hall with an Aboriginal advisory committee, the exhibition sought to combine Indigenous art (both remote and urban) as well as non-Indigenous art as evidence of a “shared aesthetic” as Doug Hall put it, then director of the Queensland Art Gallery. Leading Aboriginal artist Vernon Ah Kee argues that the importance of this exhibition was that it focused on political ideas and was staged in a major public art institution. Its significance, he argues, has only increased over the years; as he states there has “never been an exhibition like it since”. 

This panel seeks to explore key moments like this in the history of Australian Indigenous art.  

Prints and Printmaking: Past, Present, and Future

Louise Voll Box (University of Melbourne) & Kerrianne Stone (University of Melbourne)

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The creation of images through a transfer process — woodcuts, etchings, engravings, screenprints, lithographs etc — has been central to art practice and scholarship over time. Study of the history of printmaking encompasses technical and aesthetic innovation, commercial imperatives, collaborative art making, patronage, and collecting. Prints exemplify the power of images to inspire, influence, and shape ideas. 

This panel celebrates the demonstration of philanthropy by historian, curator, and collector, Dr Colin Holden (1951-2016). Dr Holden generously shared his knowledge of art, literature, music, and gardens, and his legacy now supports scholarship, publishing, and exhibitions connected with prints and printmaking through the Colin Holden Charitable Trust. His significant and wide-ranging print collection, now regularly displayed at Geelong Gallery, features important French portrait prints (1640-1770); reception engravings for the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture; prints after Rubens and Van Dyck, depictions of cities and architecture (including Roman ruins and 18thC Venice); social realist prints (1940s-1960s); and prints by post-WWII émigrés and contemporary Australian printmakers that reinterpret European historical themes or consider social justice issues.

The convenors invite 20-minute papers from scholars, curators, and artists that explore the multi-faceted world of prints — historical and contemporary — on any topic that furthers print scholarship. Papers that address aspects of Dr Holden’s collecting and scholarship are particularly welcomed. To encourage participation by panellists outside major art institutions and universities, conference registration and AAANZ membership fees will be supported by the Colin Holden Charitable Trust. 

Reveal Yourself: Masking and Masquerade in Art and Fashion

Laini Burton (Griffith University) & Harriette Richards (University of Melbourne)

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Discursively constituted through their relation to the body, masks are a compelling strategy through which to demonstrate and rethink concepts of representation and power. Practices of masking and masquerade have long proven generative for art and fashion practitioners, who have employed the transformative potential of masking both literally and metaphorically.

Complicating notions of revelation and concealment, the public and the private, self and other, and truth and deception, practices of masking and masquerade challenge our understandings of identity, authenticity and truth. This panel invites papers that critically explore or reimagine masking and masquerade in art and fashion, especially in the gallery/museum context, as forms of resistance and in relation to new digital environments. Papers may consider but are not limited to:

• digital masking (avatars, filters, social media, VR, etc.)
• everyday masking (i.e., Covid-19)
• First Nations masking in practice
• historical masquerade
• masking and anonymity, protest, and/or resistance
• masking/masquerade and gender
• masking/masquerade and in/authenticity
• masks in the gallery or museum (acquisition, display, restitution, etc.)
• masquerade in practice (Carnival, Pride Parades, ritual and ceremony, etc.)

Other Australian Stories In Britain 1920-1960

Rex Butler (Monash) and ADS Donaldson (Independent)

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The recent Queer exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria draws our attention to a number of gay Australian men who lived and worked in the visual arts in Britain before and after the Second World War: James Gleeson, Loudon Sainthill, Roy de Maistre, Sidney Nolan and Harry Tatlock Miller. And there were others: Rex Nan Kivell, Douglas Cooper and even in a way Francis Bacon. Bernard Smith wrote a famous polemic, ‘The Myth of Isolation’, lambasting English critics for seeing Australian art as exotic and isolated, but even he did not know or did not see fit to record the extent of English-Australian artistic connections during this period, especially featuring gay men. In this regard, it is like his writing out of the women, and especially lesbian women, who worked in Paris before and after the Second World War. What other kinds of “Australian” stories can we tell in Britain that are not the usual ones featuring the Australian writers and intellectuals of the 1960s and the straight Sidney Nolan? This session is looking for papers that tell these other Australian (and sometimes New Zealand) stories.

Soft Actions

Boni Cairncross (University of Wollongong)

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Historically, craft as often been positioned as ‘other’ to art. In Modernist thought, craft practices, such as textiles, were framed as too conservative, uncritical and embedded in daily life to be the ‘stuff’ of visual arts. In recent years, there has been a revaluing of craft practices. The processes and materials associated with craft have been employed by artists and designers as critical sites for discussion, advocacy, activism and protest. These actions are wide-ranging: from collective making spaces, to projects that seek to open conversations and debates, to artworks that employ craft to interrogate intersecting or overlooked histories, to craft-as-protest. In these creative strategies, the familiarity, the ‘softness’, and embodied knowledges of the craft processes are powerful devices that are drawn on and utilised by creative practitioners.

We welcome papers from artists, scholars and makers that consider these ideas and the seemingly ‘soft actions’ of craft and their impact. In doing so, this panel seeks to explore how contemporary craft practices have been, and continue to be, employed in the visual arts as an embodied and critical site of debate, exchange and knowledge production.

Why We Should Care: Art Writing and Care Ethics

Gretchen Coombs (Independent) & Jacqueline Millner (La Trobe University)

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As we endure vexing and intertwined assaults on culture, arts writing faces difficult questions about its relevance and survival. This roundtable panel considers how art writing can demonstrate an “ethics of care” as a possible way forward. A focus on care ethics in contemporary art explores how creative practitioners interpret and enact new models of care. These practical solutions and models of practice offer new ways to think about contemporary art and its social function, but might also be the basis for alternative ethics and aesthetics to counter the harms of neoliberalism.

What role can art writing, in its myriad forms, play in reconfiguring how artists, communities, social issues are re-presented and understood, and therefore valued? How might we develop art writing that will breach arts’ boundaries into ethnographic, journalistic and decolonial praxis in an effort to imagine different futures? Can art writing be a form of alliance or accomplice building? What formal qualities will demonstrate these shifts at a time of social, cultural and environmental uncertainty? What kinds of changes can and should be made to our current practices and which platforms seem best equipped for the current dynamics? How do we best organise ourselves and our writing?

This panel invites papers that address any of the above questions and welcomes viewpoints from journalists, critics, art historians, and artists themselves. In this 90-minute panel, panelists are asked to prepare a 5 minute provocation to which other panelists will respond. There will be a maximum of eight panelists, in order to develop a collaborative folio about how art writing may reflect an ethics of care.

We ask that each panel member speak for 5 minutes and then we will have a larger discussion amongst panelists. We have outlined this in the proposal above.

Temporal collectivities: demonstrations of working with one another, the past and the future in the present

Heather Contant (University of New South Wales and Sydney University)

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When thinking about artistic collectives, we often think of spatial phenomena: human and/or more-than-human beings traversing distances to work together on a physical or virtual site. This panel proposes a temporal dimension to our understanding of artistic collectives. It investigates what happens when a collective and its members literally and figuratively traverse temporal distances to ‘meet’ and work with others from the past and/or future. Practices used by such collectives include archival, oral historical, occult, speculative, historical materialist and other creative tactics that allow members to become ‘present’ in a larger intergenerational project. Notable examples of this temporal collectivity include the Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), the Māori Mata Aho Collective (2012-present), the Slovenian Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung (1995-2045), the Futurist movements, and the new Bauhaus at the Ulm School of Design.

We invite papers that highlight other instances of this temporal dimension within artistic collectives. Papers may also address:

• The practices and conceptions of ‘collectivity’ used to make past and/or future beings ‘present’ in collective work
• The intended and unintended outputs of such collectives
• How this temporal dimension shifts our understanding of collectives
• What we can learn from previous demonstrations of this temporal collectivity in the arts and design

Machine Metaphors in Art

Tony Curran (University of Tasmania)

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For over a century, the machine has been an enduring metaphor for artists, philosophers, theorists, and historians commenting on the production, distribution, and consumption of art. This panel welcomes papers on the prevalence and impacts of machine metaphors, illuminating how such metaphors frame our thinking of artists, artworks, and arts workers, as well as considering what is at stake for communities when these metaphors are naturalized.

The Futurist’s dream to merge with machines still resounds in contemporary art. Andy Warhol famously wanted to “be a machine” as he and his “employees” worked away in the Factory.  More recently, authorship has been attributed to algorithms as co-authors (vis-a-vis Harold Cohen and AI robot AARON) and as sole-authors in the 2018 Christies’ auction of The Portrait of Edmond Belamy (2018) by French collective Obvious. Levi-Bryant’s Machine-Oriented Aesthetics (2011) proposed that artworks are engines that produce, anticipating Olafur Eliasson’s Reality Machines (2015), an exhibition title which positioned the artworks as reality-producing machines.  Increasingly, the machine’s elevated position of value has become palpable in the representation of the artworld machine through the launch of Merek Classens AI and data driven art market App Limna, which calculates artists’ value in the attention economy.

This panel welcomes papers considering what is lost and what is gained from looking at artworks or arts communities through machine metaphors?   

Art History: Old Tropes, New Criticality

Nerina Dunt (Adelaide Central School of Art) & Sasha Grbich (Adelaide Central School of Art & Flinders University)

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As knowledge continues to be mobilised through decolonising processes and diverse methodologies for enquiry, art history is increasingly prone to renewed criticality that disables its dominant narratives. Consequently, there are opportunities to engage learner practitioners of contemporary art in reconsidering art histories. Through innovative encounters in the art history classroom with the past, emerging artists are equipped for activism as they shape an alternative present and imagine novel futures.

We invite submissions for papers addressing how pedagogies may activate students to enquire into potential and alternatives histories and bodies of knowledge through their art practice. How might teaching art history reframe old disciplinary tropes to embed criticality within foundation contemporary art studies?

Sculpture Exhibitions as Demonstrations of Revisionist Histories

Jane Eckett (University of Melbourne)

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Curators of historical exhibitions rarely set out to present ‘the already known’, instead revisiting works from the past to propose new interpretations. Paradigmatic shifts, changes of perspective, engagement with historically underrepresented groups of artists, reassessments of individual artists, and recently re-discovered artworks all help transform existing art historical narratives. In this sense, historical exhibitions effectively enact or demonstrate revisionist histories. This is particularly relevant in the case of sculpture, where exhibitions offer a palpable three-dimensional and temporal experience that is almost impossible to convey through printed text or photographic reproduction. But can complex revisionary narratives and arguments plausibly be proposed through the exhibition format? And are such revisionist histories even necessary for audience engagement? In light of a new exhibition revisiting the Centre Five group of modernist sculptors, opening at McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery in November 2022, this panel invites both curatorial reflections and critical analyses of historical sculpture exhibitions including institutional collection re-hangs. Papers addressing sculpture exhibitions from any historical period and geo-cultural framework are welcome. ‘Sculpture’ may be interpreted broadly, as any work with a significant three-dimensional and/or temporal aspect, provided the exhibition in some sense proposes or demonstrates a revisionist narrative.

Adorning Indigenous Bodies: Maori, Pasifika and Other Indigenous Perspectives

Ngarino Ellis [Ngapuhi, Ngati Porou] (The University Of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau)

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Adornment is an important global practice which enables makers and wearers to demonstrate their social, political and economic identities. These operate within complex and ever-changing landscapes. In Indigenous communities such as Maori and Pasifika, the selection of different materials and technologies create works which respond to contemporary issues and events. The practice of wearing and layering adornments themselves asserts sovereignty over the body, often disrupting narratives of gender, mana and tapu. We welcome papers that explore the dynamic of adornment, both physical forms as well as the practices which enact values and histories. Nau mai, haere mai – welcome.   

Embodied material transformations

Heather Galbraith (Massey University)

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This panel explores how contemporary acts of making and material transformations in Aotearoa and Australia can embody kinship, and/or critical enquiry in craft/object-based practices. Inviting makers, curators and writers to reflect on current practices situated across jewellery, textiles, object making where hand-crafting is a means of embodied exploration and knowledge sharing. Processes involving conscious cultivation or collection of materials are especially welcomed. The panels will reference current project Deep Material Energy, and seek to expand the dialogue further.

Format-wise this panel will include two linked sessions; a group discussion drawing from the Deep Material Energy eight makers and curator www.deepmaterialenergy.com (duration 30 mins), plus four x 20 minute presentations (selected from paper submissions), and ten minutes Q&A making up two 90 minute sessions.

Brunelleschi’s Demonstration of Space

Gail Hastings (Independant)

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In Florence in the early fifteenth century, Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated single-point perspective with a picture panel and mirror while he stood in the central portal of Santa Maria del Fiore. Painters adopted the demonstration’s technical ramifications, and the Church celebrated their more life-like paintings. Yet the demonstration’s philosophical and scientific ramifications promulgated by Nicholas of Cusa led Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake. It presented questions on the nature of space that contradicted an Aristotelian Universe with anisotropic matter-filled places, not isotropic space. Much, nevertheless, remains contested. Not only Brunelleschi’s method but also perspective’s replacement of a theocentric viewpoint with a subjective or anthropocentric point of view in today’s ‘posthuman’ world. 

The panel welcomes 20-minute papers that explore the history of perspective and the ensuing nature of space in contemporary art. 

This includes, for instance, its first art historical treatment by Erwin Panofsky in his essay ’Perspective as Symbolic Form’. Here, perspective’s ‘reality’ accords with a Kantian dichotomy in which space is an empty ‘form’ of thought separate from any content of the world outside. Yet, in 1960s New York, artists contested ’a priori space’ with the art of the real. Were they unrealistic to do so?

Embodied Consciousness

Jennifer Hickinbotham (RMIT)

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The artist speaks across practical, conceptual, and ethical issues of performative practice: sharing song and video.

Professor Antonio Damasio, Portuguese/American neuroscientist and author of Feeling and Knowing discusses the body’s thought-less primitive bacterial-like brain’s autonomic behaviours which link to elements of Dr Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory. The paper’s author discusses fight/flight impulse through emotionally challenging ‘voice hearing’ type experiences. Emotions transmit inside the body while sensory information is gleaned through an environmental lens. Emotion and sense information meet in the brain culminating in the reasoning or logical brain’s conscious experience.

Issues considered:

• How can human senses support engagement with our environment?
• What does sense engagement mean for an ethics of participation?
• How does the artist’s singing performance impact sensory engagement and emotional engagement?
• Where can embodied engagement between, the primitive mind and fight/flight mind, create consciousness or the reasoning mind. (REF Professor Antonio Damasio).
• How can performative art embody consciousness?
• What does it feel like to communicate through performance?

Embodied Consciousness will be considered in light of the dis-embodied online audience’s sensory, emotional and reasoning know-how. Do sensory experiences, listening and vocalising, usurp a whole of body online engagement? Audience participation is encouraged.

Venus in Tullamarine: Norman Lindsay Now

Cameron Hurst (independent)

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Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) was a prolific, popular and controversial Australian artist. He is best known for his children’s book The Magic Pudding and his skilled prints, which mostly draw on Greek and Roman mythology and 19th century literature and philosophy. The white Australian cultural consciousness is indelibly marked by Lindsay’s output, his prominence in the Sydney bohemian intellectual scene around figures like Rose Lindsay, Ken Slessor and Francis Webb and The Magic Pudding, which entrances the imagination of generation after generation of Australian children. This consciousness is marked too by the paradoxical conjunctions of Lindsay’s artistic life: artistic bohemia and fascistic tendencies, avant-gardism and the rule of law, libertinism and conservatism, worship and denigration. Paper proposals that investigate these tensions by examining Lindsay’s artworks, writing and theoretical ambitions are encouraged. Is Lindsay a figure strangely prescient to the impasses faced when practicing and writing about Australian art today?

This panel will build on research conducted during Venus in Tullamarine, a 2022 exhibition of the University of Melbourne’s Norman Lindsay collection.

Wowsers are not invited.

Re-conceiving Artistic Practices in Glass in Australasia

Alison Inglis (University of Melbourne) & Bronwyn Hughes (Independent)

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This panel takes up the agenda of the United Nations’ International Year of Glass (IYOG 2022), which seeks “to demonstrate the role of glass in advancing civilization throughout recorded history; to reaffirm the links between glass, art and culture; [and] to stimulate research on glass in the public domain, including museums.” Accordingly, the panel will investigate the significant but often under-recognised role of glass in the art history of Australia and New Zealand, especially during the twentieth century, when artists were inspired by innovations ranging from the invention of float glass to the rise of the Studio Glass Movement.  In addition, the panel seeks to highlight the contemporary resurgence of interest in this medium, especially among First Nations artists (as reflected in the work of Yhonnie Scarce, Tony Albert, Te Rongo Kirkwood and Maree Clark, among others).

The convenors welcome papers that address the following three areas of research: 

• The challenge presented by twentieth-century Modernism to traditional glass practice in Australasia (this extends from glass objects to the interaction between glass artists and architects);
• The potential of glass as political advocacy in the practice of First Nations’ artists;
• Past and/or present demonstrations/display of glass in art museums and/or the built environment (such as churches and civic buildings) in the Australasian region.

Art and Design in the Transition to a Low-Carbon Future

Geoff Isaac (University of Technology Sydney)

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This session examines the role of art and design in forming visions and guidelines for the transition to a low-carbon future. The role of creativity in guiding the direction of change and mapping a path toward a more sustainable future is widely acknowledged in transition management literature. Visionary paths toward plausible future alternatives provoke debate and provide guidance on system innovations, highlighting the technical, institutional, and behavioural problems that need resolving.

Graphic designers and product designers are inundated with manifestos, check lists, and tools to improve the sustainability credentials of their work. Artists and museum professionals too are under increasing pressure to consider the carbon impacts of their practice. Establishing protocols for instrumental change towards lower carbon emissions is essential for human industry, the world of art and design plays a powerful role demonstrating utopian and dystopian visions to guide that process.

This session invites proposals for 20-minute papers and interventions from across the AAANZ membership that rethink and reimagine what a low-carbon future looks like and how we can get there. Proposals that use creative, participatory, or experimental methods to demonstrate visions and pathways toward a low-carbon future are especially welcome.

Demonstrations: The Body Across Borders

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

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In recent artistic practice, representation of selfhood has often been one of self-reflexive transformation that responds to changing conditions of geographic place and personal space. This includes migration, displacement, colonial legacies, diaspora, the transitory and more recently, the digital realm. The constructions of identities that respond to shifting borders or the liminality of the digital realm, often have the potential to reject fixed notions of self notably relating to bodily ‘ideals’, gender, sexuality, culture and race. In this context, the formation of identity and aesthetics are imprinted by the potential of reinvention and reconfiguration. This includes the ability to complicate conventionally proscribed or limiting concepts related particularly to the gendered subject. This panel welcomes papers that examine artistic practices that actively demonstrate how selfhood, mediated through the influence of displacement, translocation, or the transcendence of national borders, can become a site of confrontation, resistance, liberation and more broadly, identity construction.

Making Spells to Break the Spell

Tessa Laird (University of Melbourne)

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In Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2011), Phillipe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers define capitalism as a “system of sorcery without sorcerers”, and posit the reclamation of women’s ritual practices as compelling techniques for wresting authority from “invisible powers”. Likewise, Michael Taussig advocates for “apotropaic”, or talismanic writerly and artistic practices, in order to “break the catastrophic spell of things”, the “magic of the state” and the “Shaman-in-Chief” (Trump at the time of Taussig’s book Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, 2020, but you can insert your own force of evil). Increasingly, artists and activists are drawn to magical thinking, incantations and rituals, such as Linda Stupart’s “Spell to bind all-male conference panels” (2017), or Jeremy Deller’s Father and Son (2021), a case of sympathetic magic in which large scale wax figures of the Murdoch Empire were publicly melted, to provoke the waning of their power.

Pignarre and Stengers ask would-be witches to “share recipes” on how to protect ourselves from common enemies in the poisoned milieu we all inhabit. Similarly, this panel welcomes papers from artists, writers and researchers whose practices are engaged in the reclamation of magic arts; reviving and protecting sleeping knowledges; and fabulating tactics for earthly flourishing. Preference will be given to papers that have a demonstrative, performative relationship to magic, but please, no Sith lords or megalomaniacs.

Neoliberalism and the Visual: Notes on a Politics of Refusal

Chari Larsson (Griffith University)

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In the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008, increasing scholarly attention is now being paid to neoliberalism’s social and ideological agendas. If neoliberalism is understood in its narrowest sense, as a set of economic policies, we risk neglecting the extent that it has fostered new forms of social relations and subjectivities. With its emphasis on productivity and enterprise, what are neoliberalism’s invisibilising tendencies? What other forms of subjectivities are ignored or forgotten because they are not valued or promoted?

In line with the conference’s theme of “DEMONSTRATIONS”, the aim of this panel is to investigate neoliberalism’s engagement with the visual, broadly imagined. What opportunities exist for visual arts practitioners for critique and disruption of neoliberalism’s normative frameworks?

Some potential paper topics may include:
• Neoliberalism and modes of resistance
• Precarious labour
• Work resistance
• Neoliberalism and theories of subjectivity
• Representation and the theorisation of class
• Intersections with the climate catastrophe
• Neoliberalism and the wellness industry
• The dissolution of the welfare state
• Othering and neoliberal precarity
• Environmental justice
• Competition and individualism

Collaboration and Art History

Susan Lowish (The University of Melbourne) & Ursula Frederick (University of Canberra)

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Much has been written about artistic collaboration, but what of collaboration and art history? This panel seeks presentations that focus on demonstrations of collaboration within the discipline of art history, or between art historians and artists and/or academics from other disciplines. Examples of collaboration that cross cultures and/or interdisciplinary collaborations that demonstrate innovation, that develop new methods and/or link differing knowledge and value systems are most welcome. This panel also invites presentations in the form of conversations between artists and historians, case studies of curatorial collectives, or even papers that outline circumstances of a breakdown in an existing collaboration or an absence of collaboration where there should have been one.

Aiming to highlight the range and diversity of collaborative endeavours in art history, alongside a focus on what makes collaboration successful, the presentations in this panel will have research outputs that benefit their source communities. The key questions are: what is ‘collaboration’? How do we/should we/can we ‘collaborate’? How do we [art historians] understand the nature of collaboration? How might we collaborate better in the future?

Referendum (Machinery Provisions) (Third Iteration)

Natalie Lynch (Australian National University)

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Section 3 of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984 (Cth) defines referendum as ‘the submission to the electors of a proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution.’ Relevant to the submission process are critical questions about how a proposed law comes to be written, how the law is communicated to the electors and by whom. This panel asks, how might art engage electors in questions about referendum and constitutional identity before a referendum takes place?

Participants are invited to collaboratively assemble the immersive voting compartment Referendum (Machinery Provisions) (Second Iteration), by Natalie Lynch — as a demonstration referendum model, to engage a dialogue about constitutional identity.
Expressions of interest to participate are welcomed by a statement that positions yourself in relation to the panel question.

Museums and Risk

Christopher R. Marshall (University of Melbourne) & Georgina S. Walker (University of Melbourne)

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In March 2022, the Director of the Kharkiv Art Museum in Northeast Ukraine informed the Art Newspaper that the Museum had been able to keep its collections safe: “however the very definition of ‘safety’ today is relative”. This session invites participants to consider the implications raised by the multiple risks facing museums and art galleries in an increasingly unstable world.
Museum risk assessment policies tend to focus on the immediately definable dangers that are posed to museums by such natural and socially determined threats as fires, floods, theft, vandalism, terrorist attacks, etc. Yet this session will also ask participants to consider the less tangible – yet no less pressing – risks facing museums today. How, for example, can museums best present challenging ideas in a safe environment? What are the risks – as well as the benefits – involved in the increasing emphasis on private branding and other forms of individual and corporate sponsorship in museums? And what risks should museums be prepared to take as they seek to redefine themselves in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the multiple sources of social, political, natural and economic uncertainty in the 2020s.

The session welcomes papers that address these concerns across a broad range of contemporary and historical case studies and in relation to both art institutions as well as other museum settings in both the private as well as the public sectors.

Tasteful Exhibitionism – Early Modern Collecting, Commissioning, and Display

Matthew Martin (University of Melbourne)

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In response to the sustained scholarly focus on the material aspects of eighteenth-century culture, this panel seeks papers that address the idea of demonstrations of power, taste, sociability, luxury, or knowledge articulated through eighteenth-century material culture – or the instability of the material realm – in this era.

This panel welcomes papers that address – but are not limited to – collecting, commissioning and display practices in the long eighteenth century.  They may consider technical innovations in the production of luxury goods; collections and their display as tools for asserting or advancing political and social authority; the establishment of State manufactories for luxury goods and the changing labour market; cosmopolitanism and its impact on regional styles.  

Presentation Layer: NFT forms, platforms and transference

Raewyn Martyn (University of Canterbury) & Lydia Baxendale (University of Canterbury)

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This panel invites short paper presentations as the springboard for a roundtable-like discussion focused on the rise (and fall) of NFTs. The conversation will focus on how NFTs provoke changes in existing production, distribution, recognition and collection—and what this means for artists, curators, and for institutions with material collections. The panel topic responds to the exhibition Presentation Layer: NFT forms, platforms and transference, at the University of Canterbury Ilam Campus Gallery in May 2022, and the subsequent publication launched later in 2022. This show brings together works by three established artists working with NFT forms, platforms and modes of transference, and work by two current Ilam students who are new to the medium. The premise for the show developed from an earlier roundtable discussion in April 2022, which introduced multiple histories of the NFT—artistic, economic, technical—and asked how our understanding of these histories might shape future behaviours within art practices and markets. 

Queer Antidotes: Specificity in Theory and Practice

Hamish McIntosh (University of Melbourne) & Zoë Bastin (Deakin University)

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How dangerous is queer specificity? Much has been said recently of queerness’ popularity and seemingly endless application. With the increasing commercialisation and tacit visibility of LGBTQIA+ cultures in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, queerness is spreading. However, critiques from scholars and artists of colour have challenged the colonial logic of this ubiquity for decades. Reflecting on these critiques, we welcome papers for a panel on specificity: on queer antidotes to supposedly “queer” universality and inclusion. Although this panel is convened by dancers, we look forward to contributions from all artistic traditions. The word antidote derives from the Greek “antidotos,” meaning “given against.” We are seeking papers and presentations that address what specific issues are being addressed by queerness in art. What are we giving queer against, and how might this reflect the excluded lives, embodiments and practices that inspired theory? Acknowledging that Western Art Theory has invoked queerness in reaction to normativity and power, we are interested in the particular problems and possibilities that queer subjectivities invite, especially in terms of bodily absence and presence. Furthermore, how might demonstration act as a queer antidote through “showing up and showing how” to evoke the alternative politics of this queer specificity? 

Coaxing Chaos: Spontaneous Demonstrations in Contemporary Art

Gregory Minissale (University of Auckland) & Victoria Wynne-Jones (University of Auckland)

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This panel seeks to explore artistic practices that co-opt spontaneity in order to coax chaos and the unpredictable into being demonstrative.

How can we evaluate the successes of planned demonstrations compared to those not planned but which are nevertheless, in retrospect, transformative and meaningful? And what can we learn from deconstructing the premeditated and intentional? Which artistic practices in history, recently and in the making, are inspired by alternatives to the notion that an author and a plan are necessary for something to be demonstrative? How can various forms of art, performance, social practice, and art as activism become the butterfly’s wing, the agent for the swarming of historically necessary transformations that dislodge social inequities and the power structures that produce them? Is there an alliance or synthesis possible between premeditated aims and spontaneous ruptures that usher in change? Resisting the didactic impulse, this panel invites us to think, examine and create unpremeditated and unprethinkable revolutions in thought, action, and being.

How might artistic practice challenge the indexicality of demonstration, particularly the pre-conceived taxonomies of museum studies and histories of art? Can artworks and/or exhibition-making manifest troubling ontologies that challenge individuation, making manifest an interplay of affect, rhythm, chaos and entropy?

This panel invites papers that discuss (i) spontaneous demonstrations as content or method in artistic practice, taking into account audience reception (ii) how artists work with spontaneous demonstrations, alone or with others, and also with non-human actors and materialities beyond the anthropocentrism of intentional projects.

Keywords: spontaneity, complexity, unplanned, transformation, activism

The Unwritten Histories of Iconoclasm in Australia: Actors, Methods and Theory

Nikolas Orr (University of Newcastle) & José Antonio González Zarandona (Independent)

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The term iconoclasm has evolved to include all kinds of images and practices. Yet, through this expansion, theories of iconoclasm remain rooted in European histories of Byzantium, the Protestant Reformation, French Revolution or the fall of the USSR. In contrast, histories of iconoclasm in (and from) European settler colonies are largely unwritten. This situation has led experts, such as David Freedberg, to try to explain recent anti-racist and anti-colonial destruction through their work on entirely different historical periods. How useful, though, are existing theories of iconoclasm for understanding the destruction and defacement of cultural heritage and monuments in Australia? How do these theories stand up against real cases of contemporary iconoclastic challenges to colonialism as practised by First Nations artists?

In answering these questions, as theorists of iconoclasm we must face the limits of our own knowledge; we must re-test our hypotheses and study cases on their own terms. We, therefore, invite some of the most active iconoclasts in Australia – First Nations contemporary artists – to reflect on the motives, targets and treatments that animate their work. Our aim is to open up the field to scrutiny in order that iconoclast and scholar of iconoclasm might reshape theory together.

This call is open to First Nations art historians, artists, filmmakers, designers, etc. whose work has challenged colonial monuments. Participants will give a 15-minute visual presentation and join with each other and the convenors in a roundtable discussion.

Feminist Creative Practice Research: Methods, Motives and Meaning

Courtney Pedersen (Queensland University of Technology) & Rachael Haynes (Queensland University of Technology)

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Creative practice-led and feminist research methods demonstrate many shared ethical and practical goals, including developing unique or distinctive outcomes, the pursuit of affective truth, and valuing diverse perspectives in research. Feminist research asks crucial questions about what constitutes knowledge, how it is obtained, and for what purposes. There are evident synergies between this feminist questioning and the goal of creative practice research to prompt, reveal and communicate new ways of knowing that cannot be adequately discovered or demonstrated via traditional academic methods. This may explain why these two approaches have been increasingly melded over the past twenty years. The history of creative research is also a history of women’s and/or feminist contributions to methodological debates.

This panel provides an opportunity to assess the mutual impact of these methods and we invite papers and provocations from feminist and/or creative practice-led researchers with an interest in the following sorts of questions:
• What is a feminist/creative research problem and when does it appear?
• What does data collection look like in the feminist studio?
• What is the role of collaboration, both with other researchers and communities, in feminist/creative research?
• How do we draw reliable conclusions from feminist/creative research outcomes?
• How do we manage the experimentation and uncertainty integral aspects of feminist/creative research?
• What environmental and cultural factors impact our understanding of feminist/creative research?
• Who are the ‘end-users’ of feminist/creative research and how should we measure its impact?

Particular and General in the Writing of Art History

Francis Plagne (University of Melbourne) & Anthony White (University of Melbourne)

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The relationship between particular and general is a central problem of art history. As Baxandall and others have argued, even the apparently simple act of describing a single work is complicated by the inherently generalising nature of the language used and its indirect relationship to the object. These complications multiply when individual artworks are analysed within broad historical or theoretical frameworks, leading often to accusations that they are taken out of context, over-simplified, reduced to little more than props, and so on. In response, many writers on art have turned to intensive focus on individual works, at times stressing the experiential dimension of their own encounters with them as the site of an inexhaustible surplus of visual over verbal.

We welcome papers on these questions in relation to both historical traditions of writing about art and contemporary applications. What uses have individual examples been put to in past art history? Can anything be salvaged from the ambitious ‘grand narrative’ approaches to writing these histories, long fallen out of fashion? What challenges do individual objects pose to historical and theorical paradigms? Does the close analysis of individual works have a place within a discipline making room for emerging digital methods and ideas of ‘distant reading’?

Avant-Garde Demonstrations: Radical Exhibition Culture from Fringe Experimentation to State Propaganda

Christian Rizzalli (University of Queensland) & Anthony White (University of Melbourne)

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The first half of the 20th century saw radical transformations in exhibition culture. While Greenbergian theories of modernism propose that the period followed a steady march towards the White Cube, various groups — particularly amongst the European avant-garde — took an approach entirely at odds with this narrative. Futurists, Dadaists, Constructivists and Rationalists (to name a few) reimagined the exhibition space, treating it not as a space of contemplation for the display of precious art objects, but rather as a dynamic and vital space for the demonstration of new political and cultural possibilities. In practice, this extended from fringe experimentation (the anarchic First International Dada Fair of 1920) to fully-fledged state propaganda (El Lissitzky’s Soviet Pavilion at the Pressa exhibition of 1928). A far cry from the purity of the White Cube, the avant-garde exhibitions of this period were often chaotic and overfilled with material, and many aimed to viscerally impact their viewers in one way or another.

This panel welcomes papers that consider the various ambitions of this radical moment in the history of exhibitions. Panellists may discuss avant-garde exhibitions from the first half of the 20th century, or consider the influence of such projects upon postmodern and contemporary exhibition practices.

Excavating Women’s histories: nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries

Sarah Scott (Australian National University) & Christina Clarke (Australian National University)

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Women artists and designers remain relatively unknown when compared to their male counterparts even when they were well known within their lifetimes. This is despite the publication of numerous pioneering feminist art histories including those of Cheryl Southernan and Anne Kirker in New Zealand and Joan Kerr and Jeanette Hoorne in Australia. Recent exhibitions such as ‘Know My Name’ held at the National Gallery of Australia (2021-2022) and ‘We Do this’ held at the Christchurch art gallery (2018) have addressed this lack of knowledge to some extent. However, there is still an urgent need to recover and further research these lost women, their histories and their works. This series of panels invites contributors working on women artists and designers from Australia and New Zealand to submit papers that recover these lost histories, expand known histories, or reconsider ‘the canon’ in order to include women whose opportunities within the fields of arts and ‘crafts’ were limited when compared to their male counterparts.

Children’s Museum Education: Transformation and Innovation through Creative Practice and Collaboration

Chang(Carol) Xu (Massey University)

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Many scholars have challenged formulaic teaching procedures in museum education that impact students’ creative practices (Black, 2012; Castle, 2006; Griffin, 2007; Robins, 2016; Thomson, Hall, & Hamilton, 2019). And children are viewed as passive receivers of knowledge or “little learners” (Kirk & Buckingham, 2018) rather than co-creators and active participants or even contributors. With museums worldwide looking to engage students and expand their offerings, it is essential for museums and galleries to reflect their teaching practices and methods. This session examines the creation and development of new directions and possibilities to better understand children’s experiences in museums and galleries and the collaboration across different roles and disciplinaries outside the classroom to co-develop substantive and non-hierarchical museum practices. We welcome papers that address the following topics: new forms of children-centred praxis in museums; the possibilities and challenges of developing featured museum learning programmes and museum-based curricula; collaborative and interdisciplinary projects and approaches to children’s museum education; the role of the digital in developing collaboration across countries to co-design museum learning programmes and promote educational resource sharing; and the existing examples and future possibilities of engaging specially-abled children in museum learning activities.

Open Sessions

Suzie Fraser (University of Melbourne) & Anthony White (University of Melbourne)

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For the 2022 Conference the organisers will host a series of open sessions during the conference. If you wish to present a paper that responds to the conference theme DEMONSTRATIONS that does not relate to the panel abstracts above, please submit your paper for consideration to the Conference Committee for inclusion in an open session.