2023 Conference | Call for Papers

The call for papers is now closed

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 historians, 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 architecture, design and moving image historians, museum studies academics, and arts and design professionals.

Read more about the conference and its format here.

Questions about specific panels and submission of papers to panels should be directed to the conveners listed below.

Any general questions about the conference (registration, venues, etc) should be sent to conf@aaanz.info

How to apply

To apply to speak at the conference, submit a Paper Proposal Form directly to the Panel Convenor by 25 August 2023.

The Paper Proposal Form requires you to provide the following details:

  • Your name and institutional affiliation
  • Your email address and AAANZ membership status
  • The title of your paper
  • Proposed paper abstract (max. 200 words)
  • Professional biography (max. 100 words)
Download the Paper Proposal Form

Further guidelines

Panel formats:

  • Panels can be either single (1.5 hours) or double (3 hours)
  • Unless otherwise noted, panels will comprise 3 research papers of maximum 20 minutes each, and at least 30 minutes for questions
  • If you are unsure of the format of the panel you are applying to please contact the convener/s

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. Visit the Membership page to join or renew. If you have questions about your Membership status please contact: admin@aaanz.info

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. Please see information for Panel Conveners here

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

Key Deadlines

Call for Papers announced July

Call for Papers Closes 25th August

Notification of Successful Paper Applications 1st September

Full Panel Details due 15th September

Panels Open for Submissions

Browse by Title and Conveners

From Within Creative Practice

Amanda Watson (Research Associate, Wintec, Te Pūkenga; Associate Editor, Journal of Visual Art Practice) and Dr Elliot Glenn Punahau Collins (WITT, Te Pūkenga)

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This panel welcomes submissions about the critical explorations of visual art practice as a place where insight can flow from and grow. Creative expression impacts how the world is seen and understood, and the making of art itself is a powerful practice with many facets that feed into the unfolding of these insights. Environmental and relational conditions, aspects of dissemination, collaboration, material considerations and things prior to making can be examined for a broad understanding of creative practice and it’s far-reaching capacities. Ways of knowing are many and varied, and in relation to Country/place/land there are important sensitivities and dilemmas regarding honouring indigenous relationships and epistemologies within practice. Additionally, there are factors prior to practice that affect the social landscape of contemporary art in powerful ways, where aspects of language and political meanderings come into play in the artist’s work. Tensions between material and immaterial properties and the struggle between anthropocentric will and involuntary responses create direction in the production of and experience of art. How art activity can unfold during planning, making and reception is relevant in many aspects of art making including collaborations, performance, object-based, and material-focused work. As we look at this multi-faceted view of visual art, it’s practices and engagements, we hope that the discussion enlivens fresh modes of knowledge interactions, learning, and collaboration.

Art in the Era of Decolonisation

Raymond Spiteri (Art History Programme, Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington)

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The three decades that following the Second World War witnessed the rapid collapse of European colonial authority across the world as national independence movements struggled for independence or greater autonomy from colonial rule. How did the politics of decolonisation affect artistic practice and/or visual culture during this period? How does the process of decolonisation shape the histories of art and/or visual culture during this period? This panel welcomes papers that discuss the direct or indirect impact of decolonisation on the practice of artists or visual culture during this period.

Fashioning Women’s Empowerment: power dressing and gender

Una Pupola (Doctoral Student of the Visual Arts and Design Sub-programme of the Professional Doctoral Study Programme in Arts at the Art Academy of Latvia)

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In 2016 at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia Hillary Clinton wore a white Ralph Lauren suit to accept her party’s nomination for the U.S. president. In an intimate and yet explicit way Clinton fashioned her body to reference women’s suffragette movement and the fight for equality. White was one of the official colours of the National Women’s Party (USA) and Women’s Social and Political Union (UK). Prior to Clinton, white was worn for example in the 1978 march in Washington in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1984 the first female candidate for the U.S. vice president Geraldine Ferraro also wore white. The white pantsuit once again became a power uniform to project empowerment, authority and confidence. The visual politics of fashion articulates ways in which fashion communicates identity through visual cues. ‘Power dressing’ has been a recognised trend in women’s wardrobes. Joanne Entwistle, in ‘’Power Dressing’ And The Construction Of The Career Woman’ (2020) suggests it inspired a redefinition of femininity and generated an alternative ‘technology of the self’. This panel welcomes contributions exploring ways in which fashion re-negotiates societal norms, particularly concerned with gender and class. It invites critical perspectives interrogating factors behind women’s fashion choices in terms of limitations to their freedom of choice and inclusion; and resistance to convey individuality and authenticity. Specific case studies analysing and negotiating the intersections of fashion agency, societal expectations, vestments of power are of particular interest, with a focus on women’s empowerment and their social mobility.

Women, War, and Work

Lara Nicholls (Curator of Art, Australian War Memorial; PhD candidate, Australian National University) and Alex Torrens (Senior Curator of Art, Australian War Memorial) 

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This panel seeks to contest and extend current thinking about the role of women in wartime through the lens of art history. We seek papers which are primarily concerned with how visual culture represents and re-presents the involvement of women in both unofficial and official capacities during the First and Second World Wars and their aftermath. Through visual and theoretical analysis, we intend to explore the ways in which women worked at the frontline and on the home front, and consider the way national conflict shaped the status of female labour in the first half of the twentieth century. Of particular interest is the work of women artists of all nationalities. We welcome papers which look at the output of both female Official War Artists and those women artists who were not directly commissioned to record subjects about combat or the war effort, but who through the coincidence of location recorded their experience of war as it appeared on their doorstep. We especially welcome papers which delve into questions about the depiction of women by all artists and the gendering of activities during wartime and their implications for what Judith Butler termed ‘foundationalist fictions [which assume] that the term “women” denotes a common identity’. This panel invites exploration into how gender identity was reinforced by the proscribed roles of war time and how this is expressed in art and all forms of visual culture.

Questions of Diaspora: Architecture and European Émigrés in Australasia

Isabel Rousset (University of Technology Sydney) and Philip Goad (University of Melbourne)

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From the 1930s onwards, Australia and New Zealand experienced an influx of migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, many of whom sought to escape Nazi rule or flee the Eastern Bloc in the aftermath of World War Two. Émigrés who held professional degrees in architecture faced considerable challenges in their new country, including difficulty in getting their degrees recognized, overcoming cultural barriers, and experiencing xenophobia. Despite these challenges, many émigré architects ran successful firms, gained prestigious university appointments, or became influential public critics. Some émigrés, including Harry Seidler and Ernst Plischke, loom large in architectural history. Yet, there remain countless others whose contributions have been largely forgotten. This panel seeks papers that reflect on the diverse experiences and breadth of impact of individuals who received architectural training in Central and Eastern Europe and who, by force or by choice, left Europe to settle in Australasia. We are especially interested in those architects who advanced modern ideas but whose education and practice fell outside of the Bauhaus paradigm that typically frames histories of the region’s modernism. We encourage papers that offer expanded perspectives: which could include discussions of architects’ collaborations with designers and craftspeople; a focus on interiors and furniture design; architects located within government agencies; architects whose community of practice or shift in disciplinary direction might lead to a reconsideration of the conventional timeframe of modernism; architects whose work engages geographies outside of the region’s major cities; or architects who through choice, force of circumstance or age were rendered invisible.

Challenging Optical Totalitarianism: Multi-sensory Anarchism in Art

Professor Gregory Minissale (University of Auckland) and Dr Victoria Wynne-Jones (University of Auckland)

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In Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005), Caroline Jones argues that Clement Greenberg’s criticism in the 1950s aimed for the separation and hierarchy of the senses. It is well known that Greenberg placed ‘pure’ opticality over the other senses, thereby aligning himself to a Kantian form of detachment. This rational positivism insisted on the pre-eminence of the optical while denigrating emotional, multisensory, or affective entanglements with art. Has such a retinal regime been consigned to the past? Or could it be argued that online content, social media, and entertainment have in fact extended the instrumentalisation of the optical as a channel of capitalist consumerism, populism, and patriarchal fundamentalism? In such circumstances, how can artworks that stimulate multisensory experience—that which makes touch, taste, smell, and sound interact and overlap with the optical—challenge the continuing society of the spectacle? In art history, we have had Surrealism, and the ‘art of disturbation,’ as Arthur Danto termed it, which we see with post-war movements such as Vienna Actionism or Fluxus, and kinds of performance art, and contemporary multimedia artworks where matter, the abject and the body are intertwined. These restore the anarchic and transformational roots of the Greek term theatre to reach, as the poet Arthur Rimbaud reminds us, “the unknown by the derangement of all the senses.” This panel invites papers that explore how art can produce affective, chaotic, and disorienting multisensory events. Which artistic practices sustain multisensory experiences that reset perceptions and interrogate cognitive capitalism and optical totalitarianism?

Protest Art: Then and Now

Emerita Professor Catherine Speck and artist Jude Adams

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Protest Art makes ‘apparent the deep inequities, injustices and truths of our time and appears when the social contract has been violated’ (A. Emelite, A Brief History of Protest Art, 13). The 1970s was a period of political unrest. In the art world this was expressed by a shift away from the orthodoxies of the time to a practice that was experimental, ephemeral, anti-commodification and fostered artist groups and collectives. Two such groups that emerged during the 70s were the Earthworks Poster Collective and the Progressive Art Movement (PAM). Both Earthworks and PAM rejected elitest art, instead embracing the democratic medium of silk-screen printing which was cheap, fast and graphically vital. Unlike gallery art, posters addressing socio-political issues were made to be pasted on walls and held aloft at protests and demonstrations. Since then Protest Art has expanded beyond posters to multiple media forms. Protest Art today includes environmental activism targeting high profile masterpieces as a form of protest in major museums across the globe. Such gallery-based protests, however, are not new; PAM had engaged in a similar form of activism when critiquing US imperialism. From political posters to art activism, the scope of Protest Art is wide open. This panel is calling for papers focusing on any aspect of Protest Art from the 1970s to the present. The aim of the session is to take the pulse of Protest Art in Australia and New Zealand over the last 5 decades. 

I Want a Past that Lives Up to my Future: Queer History in the Making

Dr Amelia Barikin (UQ) and Callum McGrath (Monash)

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Although the work of LGBTQ+ artists is gaining visibility in contemporary Australian arts institutions, knowledge on the development of queer Australian art history is still a work in progress, particularly when it comes to pre-1970’s practice. The aim of this panel is to provide a platform for research into historical aspects of LGBTQ+ Australian art. We welcome papers on individual artists, collectives, curators, activists, communities, spaces, or networks involved in the development of LGBTQ+ arts practice in Australia, or who have contributed to the archival record of queer activity in ways that may still be underacknowledged. As Jack Halberstam has noted, an “archive is not simply a repository; it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity. In order for the archive to function it requires users, interpreters, and cultural historians to wade through the material and piece together the jigsaw puzzle of queer history in the making.” This panel is chaired by KINK, a queer Australian research collective who are currently developing an online database at queeraustralianart.com

The Intrinsic Values of Art Today

Dr Kate Warren (Australian National University) and Professor Julian Meyrick (Griffith University)

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How do we meaningfully discuss and advocate for the social role of art today? In opposition to the increasingly metricised methods of assessing the worth of art and culture, this panel aims to explore the signal importance of communicating the intrinsic or “substantive” (Max Weber’s term) value of the arts. After decades marked by the dominance of quantitative evaluation methods, and narratives about applied benefits and ‘national interest’, are we at a point where art’s value and values can be repositioned within Australian public and policy debates? As historians, creators and mediators of culture, how can our work and research contribute to constructing new narratives around how the arts are valued and perceived, both inside and outside the academy? This panel seeks to feature current research critically engaged with issues of how the arts are valued, evaluated, advocated for, and perceived. We encourage contributions from across art forms, as well as research at all stages of development. We welcome presenters whose research is conducted within or outside of universities. Topics might include, but are not limited to: • Historical and theoretical approaches to concepts of value • Reconsidering narratives of culture’s value (e.g. philistinism, cultural cringe, provincialism) • Research into audience perception and engagement • Histories of Australian cultural policies and institutions • Art and the media • The role of advocacy in historical and creative research This panel accepts proposals of research papers up to 20 minutes in length. If you would like to propose a different format, please contact the conveners to discuss options.

Avant-Garde Perspectives and AI Futures: Between Utopia and Apocalypse

Dr Christian Rizzalli (University of Queensland) and Associate Professor Anthony White (University of Melbourne)

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In 1923, Ruggero Vasari wrote a play, The Anguish of the Machines, set in a dystopian society ruled by a powerful “machine-brain.” The play traces an apocalyptic deterioration, as the machine-brain takes over and turns on its creators, leading eventually to massacre, chaos and the annihilation of the human spirit. In The Anguish of the Machines, Vasari intervened in the radical avant-garde debates surrounding new technology, offering a remarkable rebuttal to Marinetti’s unbridled machine fetishism. His position, however, was just one amongst many, as different cohorts of the avant-garde expressed their views, ranging from wanton utopianism through to immense anxiety. Fast-forward to 2023, and with the rapid development of new AI technology we are once again faced with a range of perspectives: there is anxiety and uncertainty, and yet there is also hope for emancipation from menial labour. What seems to be missing from contemporary discourse, however, is an acknowledgement that these same questions have been asked before. This panel asks whether looking to the entangled technology politics of the avant-garde may help us better understand the problems of today. Can the works and writings of the avant-garde offer perspectives that are missing from today’s discourse? This panel welcomes papers that consider the various contours of technological utopianism and anxiety that were articulated by the historical avant-garde. Panellists may discuss particular artists or movements, or may place historical examples in direct dialogue with the questions we face today. Panellists may also consider contemporary works that respond to the ideas and experiments of the historical avant-garde.

Migration, Resilience, Joy: Spatial practices, Objects and Rituals

Dr Evelyn Kwok (Research Assistant Professor, Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University) and Justyna Kabała (Senior Lecturer, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London)

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The modern age is defined by the movement of people. All around the world, people overcome geographic, spatial and cultural barriers to seek comfort zones where they can have stability – economically, socially, politically or religiously. Migrants inscribe traces, invisible or tangible, on the places they inhabit, generating cultural, social and spatial contaminations, consequently creating new histories and spatialities. These inscriptions may be created with art, stories, language, food, rituals, objects and more. Migration – temporary or permanent – creates a network of paths and spaces followed and inhabited by others, and their rituals learnt, embodied, and recreated. The idea of home and belonging are often of focus when it comes to conversations about moving from one place to another, yet the processes of migration are often represented by stories of hardship, dispossession and dislocation. This panel seeks to discuss, celebrate and expand upon creative and artistic practices of joy and resilience within the process of migration. We aim to engage artists, researchers and designers whose practices or research traverse through the social, political and cultural – spaces in-between and across disciplines – to contemplate the value of generating resilience and joy in situations and locations that are precarious or temporary. We welcome contributions that engage with concepts of belonging, marginalization, transnationalism and presentations can be open-ended, immersive and performative.

The Power of Portraiture in the Islamic World

Peyvand Firouzeh (University of Sydney)

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Portraiture is one of the most common, and yet most contested modes of representation in visual cultures of the Islamic world. Representations of humans have played a crucial role in the shaping of the arts of the Islamic world in both religious and non-religious contexts. Ranging from embedded portraits in narrative imagery, to paintings of known elite individuals and religious figures, portraiture occupies an important place in material culture in a variety of media – from illustrated manuscripts to single-page paintings, large-scale painted architectural surfaces, photographs, and small-scale figures that are found in abundance on ceramics or metalworks. Despite the importance of figural images in cultural production and devotional practices, portraits remain one of the most misunderstood aspects of art-making in the Islamic world both in terms of their public perception and reception among non-specialists. The making and breaking of figural images are both a testament to their perceived power. Recent episodes of violence and controversy around the images of the Prophet Muhammad are symptomatic of the need for more in-depth nuanced conversations that deal with the heterogeneous practices around image-making in diverse Muslim communities, and the ethical issues around viewing, displaying, and discussing them in public. This panel invites art historians, curators, and artists who consider the issues outlined above, while engaging with questions concerning the power of figural images in the arts of the Islamic world. Contributions on any media, time period, and geographical region are welcome.

Echo and Diffraction: The Speculative trace in reprographic processes

Dr Carolyn Mckenzie-Craig (National Art School, Sydney, Head of Printmaking)

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Reprographic culture is heavily implicated in the aesthetic constructions of the Real, in particular in
relation to the cultural construction of self/place. This panel will discuss how to interrogate (or invert) this legacy in both past, present and future tenses using strategies of ‘hauntology’ and the spectre. Perspectives will consider history as a site of complicit erasure and resurrection, where place is perceived as a complex habitation of ghosted pasts and presents as well as methodologies of new materialism and diffraction (Barad). Speakers are invited to reflect on the following research triggers within the framework of: Technologies of repetition; Technical blindness; The photographic lens obscuring /erasing; Performative materialism and the trace; Repetition and the counter archive; Projection and Affect: the spectral potential of the reproductive/reprographic gaze; Counter visual Practices; Images as contagion; The Hyper-mediated image and its counterpoint/s; Diffraction as Methodology (Barad); Non-representational practices; Interference and diffraction chemical potentials; Demarcations in digital and analogue rhetoric; Interspecies relations in image-making.

Narrating the Gaps: Re-presenting marginalised communities

Dr Drew Pettifer (RMIT University)

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Re-presenting marginalised communities The experiences of marginalised communities within dominant historical accounts have traditionally been omitted, concealed, or even erased. This has necessitated radical forms of recovery to fill in the gaps, breaks, and fissures that have opened in archival records. Under-represented First Nations people, cultural communities, genders, sexualities, and other marginalised groups have used various narrative techniques to tell their own stories. Creative practice is uniquely located to make visible these hidden histories through embodied encounters with creative works. The multi-sensorial exchange that occurs between audience and artwork can offer an alternative means of knowing and representing the world. This panel invites papers from curators, artists, art historians and others exploring creative practice as a vehicle for representation and social inclusion. In what ways might re-presenting hidden marginalised histories and identities challenge processes of omission, concealment, and erasure? What creative methodologies might be effective in shifting understandings of representation?

Artist & Animal

Jen Valender (Victorian College of the Arts ,University of Melbourne Alumna)

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The use of animals within contemporary art can be politically and morally divisive. This panel seeks to investigate the ethical quagmire of human-animal relationships through contemporary art practices. It invites papers and pecha kuchas that survey artists and artworks that explore the relational paradoxes and complexities of working with animals. Topics may include the use of taxidermy, animal symbolism, religious associations, by-products, materiality, new technologies, biopolitics, animal cognition, performance, Anthrozoology, ethical choices / obligations / inconsistencies, animal-human phenomenology, the disturbed vs the delicious, animal-human intersections, Speciesism, reconciliation within a climate of mass extinction, and so on. Fundamentally, the panel will consider the ways in which contemporary art may be used as a navigational tool to explore the harmony and discord between animal-human relationships. Panellists will identify visual art as an aesthetic language that has the powerful ability to complicate and contain multiple epistemologies simultaneously. The contradictory space that art may hold will be used to arrive at a multimodal framework that fleshes out knowledge in the field of animality within contemporary art.

Image Activism

Dr Nevena Mrdjenovic (UTS)

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This panel aims to explore an emerging phenomenon of ‘image activism’. We recognise that images dominate our contemporary experience, and offer Susan Sontag’s claim that ‘today everything exists to end in a photograph’ – as a critical provocation.  

 We are specifically interested in images of destruction, but also those that capture elements of traumatic experiences of different kinds. While human interest in such images is not a new phenomenon, we take a sound increase in the plurality and acceleration in individual’s ability to access and utilise such material as a critical point of interest. Sharing, reproduction and manipulation of different kinds of images of ongoing conflicts, natural disasters, climate emergencies, and other more intimate traumatic histories have become an informally accepted method of protest and a new form of (primarily virtual) activism.  

 Our idea emerges from scenographic and design frameworks, and is primarily interested in images that capture the destruction of spaces. However, the panel is open to diverse viewpoints, as long as they embody elements of mise-en-scene, narrative, performativity, embodiment, spectatorship and/or engagement. Through the presentations of papers, projects, and discussions between presenters and audiences – we are interested in unpacking questions around ethical and human considerations, issues of the plurality of images and risks of presenting one’s raw traumatic narrative as a trivial daily scroll, issues of numbing our emotional receptors through such oversupply of images, as we begin to perceive these sights as our ‘new normal’… We invite research papers, provocations, and presentations of creative projects.  

Dr Rachael Haynes (QUT) and Dr Courtney Pedersen (QUT)

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Grappling with the implications of intersectionality and transversality, and a growing diversity of accepted feminist methodological approaches (such as mixed methods, critical autoethnography etc.), how do we recognise, define, and apply feminist methods in arts-based research today? A survey of recent feminist research reveals that hot topics such as post-constructionism, collaborative inquiry, or friendship-as-method point to a moment of deep introspection and self-interrogation as researchers look for ways to make their work as useful and representative as possible. This panel invites paper proposals that build on these existing conversations about the complexities of feminist research and invites feminist-informed researchers from all arts-related fields to join a discussion about the shape of feminist methods and possible future developments.

Archives and Embodiment 

Frances Barrett (Monash University) and Diana Baker Smith (UNSW)

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This panel will draw focus on practice-led researchers working with archives and collections. Archives and collections are not static nor moribund entities. As Clarke, Jones, Kaye and Linsley discuss in their 2018 publication “Artists in the Archive”: ‘To archive is to give place, order and future to the remainder; to consider things, including documents, as reiterations to be acted upon; as potential evidence for histories yet to be completed.’ Together they argue that archives are ‘comprised in their continuing and future enactment and use; in layers of performance.’ Their research leads us to consider the nexus between archives and performance, between the body and historical materials. This panel pivots around queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of ‘erotohistoriography,’ which is a way of using the body as a ‘tool to effect, figure or perform’ the multiple temporal registers held in historical materials. Erotohistoriography positions ‘the body as a method, and historical consciousness as something intimately involved with corporeal sensation.’ These ‘bodily responses’ are a form of understanding. Key themes and topics this panel seeks to address are: the haptic, affect and feeling, collaboration, liveness, agency, and re-enactment. What ‘bodily responses’ open us to new feminist and queer methodologies of engaging with archives and collections? How does erotohistoriography and performance shift established institutional practices of collecting, display, preservation and archiving? How does the context of this locality – of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand – impact and shape the work that we do and the histories and futures that we perform?

Generative Uncertainties in Tertiary Art Teaching 

Ash Tower (Adelaide Central School of Art) and Sasha Grbich (Adelaide Central School of Art)

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This panel arises from experiences co-teaching an art theory course to advanced undergraduate art students, where the co-teaching model has allowed for a productive dissensus within the classroom, emboldening students in their own contributions to discussion. Within this experience we have identified ideas of generative discomfort and distributed hierarchies within the classroom contributing to conditions of possibility for the kind of intellectual emancipation described by Jacques Rancière in ‘The Ignorant Schoolmaster’ (1987). As the chorus of different voices in the classroom grows, we consider the relation of our findings to the ‘polyphonic university’ described by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in ‘Decolonising the University’ (2017). We are interested in the role of generative discomfort in admitting the limits of one’s own knowledge, and how this might reposition the student’s role in the class to that of a willing participant in uncertainty. We seek papers from art educators looking to engage in a conversation around intellectual equality within the art school, particularly those whose research might expand or critique the role of teaching within an art school.  

Truth-telling, anti-colonial art activism and solidarity: the possibilities and challenges that arise when non-Indigenous alliescreatively contest colonialism

Amy Spiers (RMIT School of Art)

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In March 2023, queer performance and research collective, The Department of Homo Affairs, intended to stage an event to “mess with a colonial icon” at the James Cook statue in Hyde Park, Sydney following the Mardi Gras Parade. Cheekily called, The Comedown, the event—envisaged as an act of queer solidarity with First Peoples anti-colonial struggles—was called off, however, days before. In a statement about the cancellation the group explained: “we’ve realised that we haven’t organised with the right authority to be able to hold this event […] It’s complicated to make critical work as settlers on stolen land”.Australia’s official histories, public monuments and heritage interpretations have for too long been silent about colonial atrocities and ongoing injustices. Addressing this silence has been asserted by First Peoples communities as fundamental to healing from colonial trauma and a necessary step in any recognition or Treaty processes. Indigenous and decolonial scholars, meanwhile, have stressed that the burden of challenging and dismantling colonial domination should not remain exclusively the task of First Peoples. In response, non-Indigenous artists are critiquing colonialism and truth-telling about Australia’s past through creative practice. 

The Comedown’s cancellation goes to the heart of complex questions regarding in what contexts, and by what means, non-Indigenous allies can constructively engage in decolonial creative acts. We welcome papers that explore the productive forms that taking ownership and responsibility for past colonial injustices, and their effacement from public history, have taken in settler creative practice, while also considering the transgressions and impasses.

Objects in Motion: Intercultural Dialogue in Asia and Beyond Description

Ja Won Lee (Assistant Professor, California State University East Bay)

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This panel explores the importance of cross-cultural exchange in shaping cultural tastes and aesthetics in Asia and beyond. It particularly discusses the global circulation of art and objects across regions and cultures with focus on the complex dynamics of social, political, and cultural aspiration among artists and intellectuals. Questions to address include: How did artists integrate various aspects of objects from different cultures into in their works, including but not limited to paintings, embroideries, performances, installations, and photography? How did patrons shape the visual and material culture in response to the dramatic cultural and social changes of the time? How did intellectuals visualize their authority through their active participation in artistic projects with attention to the growth of the new networks? This session invites papers that discuss how the role of agency in shaping cultural trends in Asia and beyond through interdisciplinary and comparative approaches.

Other Modernisms in Australia and New Zealand

Linda Tyler (Art History, The University of Auckland)

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When Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, developed his famous diagram to explain the development of modernism for his 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, he was demonstrating his institution’s commitment to abstraction as the apogee of good art. As Glenn Lowry has explained, Barr’s diagram was not objective. Its goal was to borrow from models of scientific progression to show that abstraction was the inevitable culmination of earlier movements in art. The MoMA emphasis on abstraction as the defining characteristic of modern painting has been highly influential for the understanding of what is considered avant-garde in the history of art in the twentieth century globally. Notably, modernist painting in Australian and New Zealand art is often described as the result of antagonism as the artistic vanguard made themselves unpopular by crusading against prescribed art forms dominated by the British academic style. The leading artists are considered those who emphasised the gap between art and natural appearances, with those who maintained any representational interests seen as of lesser significance, detours away from the main highway to abstraction. Latterly, scholars have drawn attention to the nuances of modernism – particularly its complexities in negotiating tradition, gender, modernity, and national identity – and they have highlighted how it has functioned as a meta-narrative that provided an overarching conceptual framework for twentieth-century conceptions of progress and rationalism. In light of this, short presentations are invited for this panel which may undo this narrative by arguing for the importance of other regional modernisms, or point up the biases in the reception of the work of artists whose work currently lies outside the canon.

Oceanic avant-gardes

Andrew McNamara (Independent researcher) and Ann Stephen (University of Sydney)

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Given avant-garde studies has extended beyond a narrow Western European-North American lens to encompass discussion of a wider global context, this panel seeks contributions that examine the question of an Oceanic avant-garde. We seek papers that respond to this conjunction of the Oceanic and the avant-garde in order to develop new ways of narrating artistic and cultural encounters. In this case, it entails considering the limits of a Western art-historical, cultural, and aesthetic framework, but equally considering a history of encounters that occur episodically, not as continuous lineages of innovation and influence, but instead are more fragmentary.  Potential contributions may explore this topic from quite different trajectories: (i) a history of avant-garde projections about the oceanic and Australasian regions; (ii) examining avant-gardists and fellow travellers who visited the region; (iii) exploring how artists from these regions fared when visiting Europe or North America to engage with the avant-garde spirit; (iv) contemplating the intersections between the avant-garde and indigenous traditions. We welcome papers that creatively respond to a context that is far from uniform, a topic that is unusual within the framework of avant-garde studies as well as the standard consideration of cultural histories of this region, a place which is not a continent or a nation, but a zone, a set of peripheries without centre, framed by enormous coastlines.

 

Mnemonic sites: materiality, authorship and the memorial

Dr Charles Robb (Queensland University of Technology) 

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Despite its regressive associations, contemporary memorial art offers a unique site in which various modes of cultural practice, materiality and authorship coincide. On the one hand, memorials present an opportunity for powerful affectual encounters between their material features and that of the viewer’s body (Golańska, 2020). Memorial art also challenges conventional modes of authorship with the artist’s role subordinated to the institutional or civic ‘will’ that initiated the work. While many memorials seek to preserve an event or individual, as recent protest actions have demonstrated, the commemorative monument is in fact a vulnerable form, and can serve as a powerful emblem of the contestation of historical narratives and what is forgotten or overlooked by selective acts of memory. Similarly, while memorials may be a way of marking traumatic events, the act of materialising such events can instrumentalise this trauma, perhaps even redeeming it through the creative act (Young, 2016).

This panel welcomes papers from researchers and artists exploring issues that are relevant to the memorial and its many articulations, for example:
Counter memorials
Commemorative actions and rituals
Spontaneous memorials
Commemorations of individuals or groups
Commemorations of events
Public memory and archives
Online memorials

Reference
Golańska, D. (2020). Bodily collisions: Toward a new materialist account of memorial art. Memory Studies, 13(1), 74–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698017741928
Young, J. E. (2016). The stages of memory: Reflections on memorial art, loss, and the spaces between. University of Massachusetts Press.

 

The visualisation of uncertainty as a bridge between art and science

Prof. Dominik Lengyel, BTU University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg

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The visual communication of science in such a way that the subjective and emotional component of an appropriate design supports the communication process is a genuine artistic challenge. The result could then also become the content of art history, but for the time being it is a current creative activity on the part of architecture that translates spatial hypotheses from archaeology, historical building research and art history from text into image. The challenge lies in this translation of knowledge, which itself is usually uncertain due to the historical subject matter. For this knowledge cannot be reproduced by photorealistic images, if it has scientific pretensions. It requires a representation that is itself uncertain, that makes the ambiguity of the hypothesis comprehensible and readable as an image, just as language is perfectly capable of doing. At the same time, the inevitably abstract geometry is to be photographed virtually in such a way that a convincing spatial impression is created, designed architecture in other words. We welcome papers that address the this topic of artistic and art historical approaches to exploring scientific uncertainty for exchange and reflection, preferable but not exclusively with cultural and academic institutions. From the different focuses of African-Eurasian on the one hand and Australasian cultural tradition on the other, a particularly fruitful exchange with inspirations on both sides is to be expected.

Open Sessions

Professor Susan Best (Griffith University) and Dr Chari Larsson (Griffith University)

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The 2023 Conference the organisers will host a series of open sessions during the conference. If you wish to present a paper 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. 

The following panels are not open for papers.

Collaborative approaches to First Nations Artists and Researchers: a case study

Vanessa Van Ooyen (Director QUT Art Museum), Dr Fiona Foley (Associate Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland), Dr Louise Martin-Chew (freelance writer, Honorary Research Associate, The University of Queensland) and Dr Crisia Constantine (freelance cultural studies scholar, writer and curator, educator, art facilitator and practitioner)

This session is not open for papers

In this panel, we will discuss collaboration with First Nations artists and researchers using Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise, a survey covering 30 years of the practice of Badtjala artist Fiona Foley developed by QUT Art Museum. We will examine the approach to documenting Foley’s work (through an exhibition, exhibition catalogue and biography). These multiple approaches were developed with the support of QUT Art Museum’s leadership and attention to Indigenist Research methodologies (utilizing the appointment of a First Nations curator). Its delivery and tour to venues in Victoria and Queensland opened discussions with broader Australian audiences. Topics: Fiona Foley will talk about her approach to this exhibition and attention to opportunities for other Aboriginal artists and scholars. She will outline the Indigenous research methodologies applied and importance of this survey to her developing artistic and academic career. Louise Martin-Chew will discuss the innovative methodology (as a white woman) to writing the biography of an Aboriginal artist and friend, the ‘rules’ established and the negotiation of potentially difficult writing freedoms in light of a living biographical subject. She will also address the power of the exhibition in terms of promotion and sales. Vanessa Van Ooyen will discuss the power of exhibition making in enacting the University’s First Nations Strategy and the value of publishing to University Art Museums —its dual contribution to research and boarder public discourse. Dr Crisia Constantine will talk about reviewing the exhibition, her approach, and its value to her own developing profile. 

Kelly Gellatly (Australian Catholic University), Louise Tegart (Director, Art Gallery of Ballarat) and Julie McLaren (Curator, Art Gallery of Ballarat)

This session is not open for papers

Feminist historian Janine Burke asserts that a double gaze, looking backwards and looking forwards, is required to activate feminist art histories. In recent years, numerous exhibitions, books, campaigns, podcasts and projects have brought to light stories about forgotten women artists. Do these activities create meaningful and long-lasting change in institutional settings or are they simply a box-ticking exercise? Ballarat is a city rich with history and is home to the oldest and largest collection of Australian art outside of the state galleries. A high concentration of women artists who have made significant contributions to the history of Australian art have emerged from the Ballarat region, however this has not always been reflected in the collecting trends of the institution. The Art Gallery of Ballarat acts as a valuable case study for ways in which institutions can enact meaningful systemic change in the collection and interpretation of Australian art while avoiding tokenistic gestures of gender inclusivity. Panellists will explore how they are looking backwards in order to make meaningful change in gender representation moving forwards. They will discuss projects highlighting the work of individual artists and exhibitions which reinterpret historical material such as Ian Burn’s seminal essay ‘Beating about the bush’. These activities are being supported with academic research and policy development which will allow the Art Gallery of Ballarat to influence change in patterns of collecting, the presentation of permanent collection displays and exhibitions, through to public and educational programs.

The Blue Turn in Contemporary Art 

Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris (USyd & UNSW), Dr Izabela Pluta (UNSW) and Peta Rake (UQ Art Museum)

This panel is not open for papers

The captivating shift towards aquatic themes in contemporary art is driven by a proliferation of water-focused exhibitions. However, art critic Erik Morse has expressed concerns over this trend, referring to it as a fantasy that predicates a “drowning mindset.” But there is more to this “blue turn” than immersion and abstraction. Drawing on the inter-disciplinary field of the Blue Humanities and with an attentiveness to the situated cultural practices of our region, the three panellists will suggest counter-narratives of the turn into the ‘blue,’ critically engaging with the links and limits of the ‘blue’ in eco-aesthetics, art making and museum practices today. Dr. Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, an academic and curator, will present her theoretical work on the “Hydrocene,” which details the rise of water-focused thinking and making in art from her forthcoming book (Routledge, 2024). Peta Rake, Senior Curator and Acting Director, UQ Art Museum, will present on the multi-year programming and research arc Blue Assembly. And Dr Izabela Pluta, UNSW Art & Design, will discuss the culmination of a three-year research project that draws on oceanic field studies, studying fluctuating sea levels and oceanic mapping via an expanded photographic practice.

What is Military Art?: Visualising the Unseen and the Unsaid No

Prof Kit Messham-Muir, Ms Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, Colonel Richard Barrett

This panel is not open for papers

This panel brings together three scholars from Curtin University, Kit Messham-Muir, Professor in Art and Lead Chief Investigator of the Art of Peace ARC Linkage project with the Art Gallery of Western Australia; Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, final-year PhD student and visual artist; and Richard Barrett, PhD student, sculptor and Australian Army Colonel. The panel addresses the seemingly simple question, What is Military Art? Contemporary Military Art engages in a range of positionalities, themes and intentions, quite different from those familiar to the genre of ‘war art’. It embraces a broad community of artists – civilian artists engaging with military issues or the militarisation of society and technology; military practitioners using art to depict and describe their lived experience or making statements about important issues; or art as a mode of therapy for veterans. In a field dominated by war art, a more nuanced reconsideration of the notion of ‘military art’ may offer new ways of seeing what can often be obscured. This obscuration occurs through secrecy and censorship, or via the dominance of popular images and tropes about war, from Hollywood film to the privileged position of Official War Artists, which often shape public perceptions of Australian military commitments. For this panel, each of the three scholars will provide a brief presentation of ten minutes each, and then engage in a round table discussion, culminating in questions and wider discussion from the audience.

Slow Down Time

Mitch Goodwin (University of Melbourne)

This session is not open for papers

Slow Down Time is an international collaboration between writers, academics and artists and the generative text-to-image service Midjourney via a series of conceptual interactions that traverse geography, time and networked space through the exchange of text, image and data. Generative A.I. systems – like MidJourney and DALL.E – perform image requests in a matter of seconds, they represent a new machine operation of hyper-seduction. Slow Down Time is a response to the manufactured desire for instantaneity and gratification in modes of digital media production and consumption. Contemplation becomes a key feature of the design process, occurring at numerous stages of production: the crafting of the prompt by the authors, the gradual iteration of the images (over many hundreds of generations), the receivership of those images through the mail in printed form and the author’s responses to appraising those images as tactile media objects. Bringing together participants in this project the panel seeks to examine AI generated images as both stand alone works and products of large language models trained on network data. We will seek to discern the character and the intention of the algorithm when presented with texts that assume human levels of cognition and emotion.

Early Modern Art I – The Visual Politics of Empire

Dr Andrea Bubenik, University of Queensland

This panel is not open for papers

Early Modern Art I – The Visual Politics of Empire Chair: Dr. Andrea Bubenik Presenters: Dr. Amanda van der Drift (UQ), Alex Reed (UQ), Dr. Robert Brennan (UQ) This panel examines the relationship between art and imperialism in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. While Renaissance art has long been associated with the republican values of independent city-states like Florence and Venice, it was also intimately bound up with the politics of empire: this was, after all, a crucial period in the history of European colonialism, coinciding with Spanish and Portuguese incursions into Africa, the Americas, and Asia, as well as a critical moment of confrontation between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. What roles did artists play in crafting, negotiating, and confronting imperial imagery in this formative period? 

Early Modern Art II – The Art of Reception

Dr. Robert Brennan

This panel is not open for papers

Early Modern Art II – The Art of Reception Chair: Dr. Robert Brennan Presenters: Grace Jeremy (QAGOMA), Georgina Hooper (UQ), Dr. Andrea Bubenik (UQ) This panel will consider how early modern art continues to be a critical touchstone for contemporary artists. We are especially interested in how iconic works of art are alternately celebrated or thrust upon criticism via artistic appropriations, adaptations, translations, or transformations. The contemporary use and reuse of the art of the past highlights the challenges and ambiguities of temporal distance and cross-cultural understandings, with motivations ranging from subversion to homage. How and why do contemporary artists continue to engage with early modern art? These papers are case studies that engage with the multiple lives of early modern images, and work toward consider the dynamics of reception in contemporary art.