Call for Papers | 2024 Conference

It is no small claim to describe Michael Carter, University of Sydney, as one of the world’s most important fashion intellectuals. His curious, expansive and enormously entertaining works around clothing, dress and fashion were ground-breaking at a time when fashion scholarship was struggling to find a place in academia. Carter uses a disarming clarity to ask fundamental questions about dress and the clothed body, and along the way he disbands the idea of a sartorial realism, where dress is merely an extension of the body. His work takes us into the realm of the imaginary, the utilitarian, the unconscious and on to the role that ornamentation and decoration plays in the way we transform ourselves through dress. This session will describe the way art history, anthropology, film, philosophy, and aesthetics have shaped Michael’s thinking and observations about dress. It will encourage other reflections on the flourishing of humanistic fashion research in Australasia since the 1990s. We welcome paper proposals that address any of these themes, as well as scholars who wish to reflect on Carter’s influence in cognate fields. Joint/shared papers are allowed: we particularly welcome contributions from Mick’s former students.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Michelle Guo PhD Candidate, University of Technology Sydney and Dr Peter McNeil Distinguished Professor, University of Technology Sydney

There is an ease with which artists talk about energies. However, critical discourse has not kept up. Analyses prefer singular, a priori concepts of energy whereas artists synthesise several. The nineteenth century scientific concept is a singular abstraction composed of the behaviours of different physical forms of energy. Plurality can extend to understanding the interplay of energies, whether Indigenous knowledges, physical and biological phenomena, corporeality, the senses, experience, cultural forces, spiritual dimensions, or the energy resources of fossil fuels and their alternatives. From language to embodied practice, processes, and materialities, different energies coexist and are complexly coordinated, especially in the arts, given the capaciousness of their engagements. With the intention of generating specificity where the nebulous thrives, we propose that analytical methods and understandings of energies benefit from examining artistic usages, concepts, and imaginations. We invite artists, historians, and theorists to consider a multivalence of energies at work.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Douglas Kahn Honorary Professor, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and Pia van Gelder, Lecturer, School of Art & Design, Australian National University

This session invites researchers to examine the current status of arts journalism and the evolving terrain of art criticism within popular media. It seeks to scrutinise the perceived decline of art criticism in traditional media outlets and the associated transformations. Exploring obsolescence and opportunities for art criticism in a fragmented media environment, this session delves into the impacts of economic pressures and evolving audience behaviours, particularly with the rise of social media platforms in shaping contemporary art discourses. Anticipated topics include historical and contemporary challenges encountered in arts journalism, such as economic restructuring, the influence wielded by major media entities, sensationalism, and shifts toward safer subjects that avoid political scrutiny. Moreover, while art criticism stimulates lively public discourse and productively contributes to a fourth pillar, advocates consistently struggle to secure the full inclusion of art and culture in mainstream media. Drawing upon influential voices, diverse perspectives, and pivotal events, this session endeavours to elucidate prevailing trends, offer actionable recommendations, and galvanise sustained advocacy efforts to ensure the continued relevance and adaptation of art criticism in an ever-evolving media landscape.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Dr Louise Rollman Fryer Library Fellow, University of Queensland

In Art History after Modernism (2003), Hans Belting writes that “the museum has become a railway station for the departing trains of the imagination instead of remaining the destination of a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of art”. Belting characterises the museum as temple, as school, as theatre, as screen, and as art fair, and highlights both the co-dependency and the incompatibility of the museum as the site for contemporary art. He argues that the museum’s special status is founded on now questionable universal narratives of western art history. The museum as a site for making art history manifest in turn provides a stage for contemporary art, which seeks to challenge the master narrative whilst paradoxically preserving the special category of art for itself.

This panel will present case studies, and points of view on the project of the new museum (realised or aspirational) and its interface with art history in local contexts. It has been sixty years since the 1960s when the “post-modern” and the “end of art history” began to be theorised, and contemporary and global art emerged as counterpoints to modernist art. We can now look historically at the way that these ideas, and the transformations that they initiated in creative practice, scholarship and criticism have played out in institutional collections and exhibitions since that time. Equally, we may also see how these collections and exhibitions have themselves played a role in shaping the contemporary practice of art and art history.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Duncan McKay Masters Student, University of Western Australia

One of the evolving futures of the discipline of art history is how collaborations with other disciplines are playing out in action in curatorial projects presented in the public domain. With diverse typologies of museums and historic properties and spaces, there is strong evidence of a growing practice of new curatorial narratives presented between artworks with objects and places - particularly drawing from the disciplines of the sciences, histories, anthropology and design.

We seek contributions that address the considerations in the placement of artworks with other typologies of object, especially outside the framework of a traditional art gallery. What have been the considerations involving the works and objects of First Nations peoples? For contemporary artists, what have been the curatorial processes involved in presenting their work in these contexts? What have been the impacts and/or audience response?

Virginia Rigney is Senior Curator Visual Arts at Canberra Museum and Gallery and will discuss to different types of recent projects that involved collaborations with other disciplines. Canberra Kamberri/Place and People, and eX de Medici Sidney Nolan Guns and Flowers, which included the presentation of a new work within Lanyon Historic Property. Dr Anthea Gunn Senior Curator of Art, Australian War Memorial and will discuss artist responses to the Memorial’s collections.

We invite presentations from art historians working in curatorial practice to share their experiences.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Virginia Rigney Senior Curator Visual Arts at Canberra Museum and Gallery and Dr Anthea Gunn Senior Curator of Art, Australian War Memorial

Convened by the Australasian Network for Asian Art (AN4AA), this panel invites submissions which attend to the 2024 AAANZ conference theme of "Past, present and possible futures", with particular attention to Asian art research. The panel aims to highlight different modalities of research currently being undertaken across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand related to Asia and its diasporas – through the fields of art history, curatorial and/or creative practices – and spanning different periods, cultures and geographies. We invite papers that provide opportunities to consider the histories of Asian art research in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, current developments in Asian art research, as well as speculations about its possible futures. The panel furthers the work of AN4AA, to support research on the art and visual culture of Asia and its diasporas in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (https://www.an4aa.org/ or Instagram: "an4aa_aus").

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Olivier Krischer Lecturer, University of New South Wales and Michelle Antoinette Associate Professor, Monash University

Appropriately for the 50th anniversary of the Australian and New Zealand Art Association, this panel looks at those art historians who have shaped the art history of the region in the twentieth century. From an Australian perspective, we might start with Edith Fry's two newspaper articles 'Australian Artists in Paris' (1914 and 1922), and from a New Zealand perspective at Raymond McIntyre's review of the exhibition of the group ‘Australian Artists in Europe’, founded by Fry; but there are any number of other art writers, curators and art historians who have tried to construct art histories of the two countries. We hope that papers take up such matters as Australia’s and New Zealand’s relationship to other cultures and countries, the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous art and culture in the two countries, feminist and LGBTQI+ art histories and the possible end of any identifiable Australian and New Zealand art and art history. Above all, we want the papers to address the work of particular art writers, curators and historians and their attempts to construct the respective and sometimes overlapping art histories of the two countries.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Rex Butler Monash University and ADS Donaldson National Art School

"Cultural mediation must help to weave a link between past, present and future, to introduce gaps where event, discovery and innovation can be inserted to set a direction that is never predetermined" Jean Caune (2015, p. 32).

Cultural mediation is a museum-based practice, inaugurated in the 1990s, forming relationships between publics, artworks, artists and institutions. Mutual exchange and diverse perspectives create relationships and spaces for action, often with unknowable results. Cultural mediation has supported museum education, engagement and access. More recently, cultural mediation has advocated recognition of non-institutional knowledges within the museum. Vernacular, affective and embodied knowledges drive collaborative engagement rather than consumption of displayed information.

Cultural mediation has been practiced extensively in European museums, supporting audience development, diversity of cultural voices and responses to social fragmentation. In the Australian context, there have been recent initiatives from peak bodies Museums & Galleries NSW and Creative Australia, and industry partners Artspace (Sydney), The Science Gallery (Melbourne) and University Queensland Art Museum (Brisbane). This panel seeks papers from academics, researchers, artists, curators, museum staff exploring publics as cultural actors and audiences as co-producing subjects. These practices may include:

• Collective, collaborative and community-oriented approaches to exhibition and collection display and interpretation;
• The introduction of non-institutional knowledges into museums;
• Participatory and collaborative approaches to the diversification of an institution’s publics;
• Challenge to institutional expertise, authority and monoculture;
• Histories of collaborative knowledge formation within the arts (community arts, regional galleries, festivals, events);
• Cultural mediation and critical perspectives on history, aesthetics and cultural capacity.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Dr Chris McAuliffe Emeritus Professor, School of Art & Design, Australian National University and Dr Raquel Ormella Senior Lecturer, School of Art & Design, Australian National University

Reference

Caune, J. (2015). La médiation culturelle: Une notion mana ou l’usure du sens. In C. Camart, F. Mairesse, C. Prévost-Thomas & P. Vessely (Eds.), Les mondes de la médiation culturelle, (pp. 29-34). L’Harmattan.

What if we advance into the future unbound by objectives and visions? Would that curtail or enhance our chances of good times ahead? What can Kantian “purposiveness without a purpose” offer a goal- and utility-oriented culture? How do we plan for serendipity?

If your practice explores spontaneity, chance, improvisation or other unscripted progressions, disinterestedly follows through “what ifs?” or otherwise does not let envisioned goals stand in the way of unexpected discoveries – join this session and share your strategies, insights and concerns arising from purposively aimless artmaking or research in contrast to the pursuit of preconceived targets.

Artists and researchers are welcome to submit formal papers (20 min.) or brief project presentations (10 min.). Relevant alternative contributions will also be considered if practicable. The format and nature of the accepted contributions will determine whether the session will be more like a conventional panel, a round table or a serendipitous encounter.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Justas Pipinis PhD Candidate (Art), RMIT University [Holds MFA from RMIT and MSc in Anthropology from Stockholm University]

What is experienced as difficult in the visual and performing arts changes dramatically over time and according to context. What was once considered acceptable might now be considered problematic and similarly what was once censored might now be normative. This session will consider the theme of difficulty. This could mean examining difficult art, difficult subject matter, or difficult viewing positions. Possible topics include: censorship, cancel culture, iconoclasm, public sculpture, voyeurism and scopophilia, compassion fatigue, over-identification, appropriation, traumatophilia and trauma. All periods and mediums are welcome.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Professor Susan Best Griffith University and Dr Chari Larsson Griffith University

To observe almost 80 years since the end of the Pacific War and atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this panel invites papers exploring the crucial role of 'soft diplomacy,' through visual art exhibitions, collections and creative exchanges across Japan and Australasia, in the major changes to international relations in the postwar period between 1945 to 2025.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Emily Wakeling Curator, Rockhampton Museum of Art

Exploring the Intersection of Building as Body and Body as Adornment—strand within the AAANZ 2024 conference examines the multifaceted connections between building as body and body as adornment across different temporal and cultural contexts. Adornment is not just a trend or statement but a method of communication, conveying various symbolic meanings reflective of both place and culture. We invite scholars, researchers, architects, artists, designers, and practitioners from diverse fields to submit abstracts for paper presentations that engage with the following themes:

Historical Perspectives: Examining historical evidence to uncover the ways in which previous cities, civilisations, or historical epochs conceived of architecture as a metaphorical extension of the human body and explore the cultural significance of bodily adornment throughout history. Vitruvian thought laid the groundwork for conceptual discourse on architecture, and one might also think of the writings of Semper and Banham in this regard.

Contemporary Practices: Investigate contemporary architectural and design practices that blur the boundaries between the built environment and the human body, including wearable architecture, biomimicry, and interactive installations that engage with bodily experiences. Throughout the process of making and creating, which involves thought, design, creation, and communication, ornamentation is evident in every realm of design and scale, from small-scale objects to architecture.

This panel will be convened online preconference.

Contact Gina Hochstein Lecturer, School of Architecture, Unitec Te Pūkenga, Aotearoa and Annabel Pretty Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Unitec Te Pūkenga, Aotearoa

Calling for papers that critically examine 'kith and kin' by Archie Moore and its implications. The exhibition was curated by Ellie Buttrose and commissioned by Creative Australia for the Australia Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2024. It was bestowed the Golden Lion for Best National Participation by the international jury, one of the few times that a project from outside Europe and North America has won the award. In the artist's words: "'kith and kin' is a holographic map of relations which connects life and death, people and places, circular and linear time, everywhere and everywhen to a site for quiet reflection and remembrance" (Creative Australia, 2024). This panel is seeking a range of responses — and encourages discordant views— on how the artwork addresses the themes of language, kin, justice, truth-telling, archives, memorials, and time. Contributions may reflect upon First Nations art histories, legacies of conceptual art, biennale frameworks, and could speculate upon ‘kith and kin’s longer-term impact.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Ellie Buttrose Curator, Contemporary Australian Art, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art

Reference

Creative Australia. (2024, February 8). Title and details revealed for Archie Moore’s presentation at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. https://creative.gov.au/news/media-releases/creative-australia-reveals-the-title-and-first-details-of-archie-moores-presentation-at-la-biennale-di-venezia/

Whakapapa, whenua and tikanga: these three core tenets of Maori art history have shaped the forthcoming publication 'Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art from Aotearoa New Zealand.' Written by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, one of the goals of the research is to showcase the ever-changing diverse art landscape with, by and for Indigenous peoples. This session offers an opportunity for Māori and other Indigenous peoples to present emerging research; papers are particularly sought in relation to the body, dress and adornment. We ask: what are your approaches? What have you found surprising? And how is the art of our tīpuna continuing to shape our thriving arts communities. Nau mai, haere mai - welcome all.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Ngarino Ellis Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Porou tribal affiliations. The University of Auckland

Contemporary drawing practices reflect the changing approaches that artists and designers make when generating ideas, problem solving, and sharing knowledge across disciplines, technologies, societies, communities, and cultures. As a continuously evolving practice, drawing activates the present and creates dialogues around imagined futures while connecting with and communicating past histories and narratives. Led by Dr Erica Seccombe, Australian National University, Dr Naomi Zouwer, Univeristy of Canberra and Dr Tony Curran,University of Tasmania, this panel welcomes submissions from researchers who are addressing aspects of drawing – through practice, art history, theory or curatorship – and who are interested in ideas of drawing as data, collective or collaborative engagement, cultural knowledge, tacit knowledge or interdisciplinary research. Looking at this multifaceted view of drawing practices, we hope that the discussion enlivens fresh modes of knowledge interactions, critical thinking, learning, and collaboration.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Dr Erica Seccombe Senior Lecturer, School of Art & Design Australian National University

This panel includes presentations on artists largely ignored or sidelined by mainstream history, establishing how recent scholarship on such figures can affect the ways art is acquired, interpreted, and archived by collecting institutions. We pose the role of the art historian as a scholarly agitator, tasked with responsibly breathing new life into works that have gone unnoticed, been categorically misread, or were not otherwise granted their dues during their creators’ lifetimes. Be it their transits through multiple countries or resistance to careerism, historically repressive readings, or formation of alternative canons: we know of these artists as artists less through quantifying historical texts, catalogue raisonnés, exhibition records or criticism, and more through cursory mentions in newspapers, archival documents, and other quotidian ephemera evidencing looser connections with an Australian artworld. What challenges and possibilities can the quietly resuscitative and often lone activity of scholarship entail for a discipline that broadly prefers 'rediscovery', redress, or reclamation of narrative/s?

Presenters: Amelia Birch, PhD candidate UWA (Hist. of Art) on Agnes Goodsir (b.1864 Portland, d.1939 Paris) and Aimee Dodds, BA Hons UWA (Hist. of Art & English), AGWA staff on Tim Burns (b.1947, Cunderdin WA) and Mina Loy (b.1882 London, d.1966 Aspen).

Accepting applications for the third presenter.

Critic, Dispatch Review co-founder & AAANZ Treasurer Sam Beard will introduce presenters and facilitate question time. Beard will tease out the limits and functions of scholarship of ‘reclaimed artists’ such as that of Dodds and Birch, and consider how art criticism versus art history can deflate or structure an artistic career.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Aimee Dodds Writer, The Art Gallery of Western Australia

In a video work from 2004 by Prem Sahib, a fox helps itself to a nocturnal feast of assorted meats from a makeshift table in a suburban backyard. As demonstrated by Sahib, who uses the future-oriented structure of an invitation or offering, more-than-human temporalities can be enacted in instances of contemporary art. Artists may choose to engage in counter-colonial, Indigenous conceptions of time; take queer approaches to past-present-future, and/or encompass machine-like, cyborgian temporalities.

More-than human temporalities encompass life and non-life, objects as well as the un-dead; spiritual temporalities, temporalities from other planes, planets and dimensions. According to Spinozist ideas of speeds and slownesses, all of life is a matter of different vibrational qualities. Vibrations play a key role in activations of time-space, expressed across the spectrum of colour, sound, radio-waves, ultra-violet, micro-waves ... Different frequencies require different modes of attunement, ways of being and seeing available to more-than human, prosthetic or machinic vision.

At a time referred to as the Sixth Mass Extinction event, there is also the temporality of what Deborah Bird Rose refers to as “extinction cascades” (Rose, 2017, p. 51). Whereas in the past brightly-coloured tree snails or kāhuli were once endemic to O’ahu and were known to glow and even sing, they are now at the brink of extinction after two-centuries of “land-shell collecting fever” (Van Dooren, 2022, p. 98). Slowing to a snail’s pace, or listening to mollusc songs, might prove powerful antidotes to ecocide.

This panel welcomes contributions from artists, art historians, curators and museum professionals. We invite papers that explore creative practice as well as reflections on prior, present or future instances of exhibition-making.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Victoria Wynne-Jones Honorary Research Fellow Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland and Tessa Laird Senior Lecturer, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne

References

Rose, D.B. (2017). Shimmer: When all you love is being trashed. In A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan & N. Bubandt (Eds.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, (pp. 51-63). University of Minnesota Press.

This panel explores the importance of a reflexive approach to contemporary arts practice undertaken within a cross-cultural context. Specifically, a co-exploration between two emerging practice-led researchers as they reflect on (and contrast) the challenges and opportunities of their respective approaches: Dr Harrison W. See, a Western-Australian painter of European heritage exploring collaborative painting with artists of predominantly South-East Asian heritage as a means of multi-modal dialogue and shared storytelling; and PhD candidate (final year) Patricia Amorim, a Brazilian Feminist artist using digital photography to explore, and challenge, traditional portrayals of gendered bodies between Brazilian and Australian cultural contexts.

The researchers’ pursuit of rigorous, authentic, and ethical cultural exchange through art practice is informed by somewhat intersecting theoretical lenses in relation to power dynamics, agency, materiality, and co-creation; however, where these lenses differ, Amorim and See discuss their unique negotiations with the historical and cultural traditions from which they draw, and as such, their differing views on future possibilities of art practice as a form of cross-cultural exchange in the contexts of the Global South and the Asia-pacific region respectively. The proposed format of the panel is for See and Amorim to contextualise their positionalities, practices, and motivations concerning cross-cultural exchange via creative research. They will then alternate presenting a selection of relevant examples as they contrast and compare the opportunities and challenges at each juncture, before taking questions; examples will feature creative processes and artefacts via images and/or video.

This panel will be convened online preconference.

Contact Dr Harrison W. See Practice-led & qualitative researcher at Edith Cowan University and Patricia Amorim PhD Candidate at Edith Cowan University

This panel aims to expand current thinking about generational, place-based and disciplinary representation in recent art from Indonesia. Although the events of 1998 and Reformasi continue to frame discussions of Indonesian art history 26 years later, this panel is concerned with exploring new shifts and anchor-points for art and history occurring in the post-Reformasi period. What distinguishes these new waves, ideas and ripple-effects from earlier precursors? And how can we theorise, represent, and practice art or its history in ways that account for new narratives, and new generational insights?

This is an interdisciplinary panel comprised of artists and art historians. We seek papers that are concerned with the process and practice of reframing and re-presenting recent contemporary Indonesian art and its history. Particular themes of interest include relationships with history, storytelling, and the surrounding (social, artistic, international) environment; and perspectives that cross intra-national and international contexts. Drawing from the multiple archipelagic influences that shape Indonesia, this panel invites exploration of decentralised thinking – and ‘making’ – of history, and considerations of how this is embodied in recent art.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Caitlin Hughes PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne and Patriot Mukmin PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne

This panel will explore the complex and multifaceted concept of monumentality within a decolonial artistic framework. In recent years, our perception of monumental art has changed. Statues of colonial figures such as Captain Cook and John Batman have been vandalized rather than venerated, reflecting a growing recognition of how monuments and monumental art reflect and reinforce colonial narratives and power structures.

In alignment with the conference theme of “Past, present, possible futures”, this panel asks - what is monumentality and how has our understanding of the monumental changed over time? More specifically, how is monumentality defined within a decolonial context? How does a decolonial artistic framework transform traditional concepts of monumental art to foster a more inclusive understanding of history? How are the historical narratives perpetuated by traditional monuments recontextualised or reimagined through decolonial artistic responses? What processes and methodologies do artists employ to create decolonial monuments? And what does a successful example of a decolonial monument look like?

We welcome papers that critically examine and/or reimagine monumentality in contemporary artistic responses, both locally and globally. Themes may include, but are not limited to, the reassessment of historical monuments, foregrounding marginalized voices and inclusive histories, the role of monuments in the formation of identity and nation-building, public memory and the contested nature of monuments, the effectiveness (or not) of the ‘retain and explain’ approach to public statuary, reconsiderations of space and materiality, monumental interventions including targeted desecration of monuments as an art practice in and of itself, and/or other case studies showcasing innovative artistic practices that reflect a decolonial approach to monumentality.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Karen Blennerhassett PhD Candidate, University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau

An Oceanic cultural praxis holistically encompasses the multitudes of Indigenous knowledge systems, embodied through Indigenous methodologies, grounded in Indigenous ontologies, and is nurtured by Indigenous epistemologies. This panel seeks conversations between Oceanic sisters and their cultural praxis as an exploration of ancestral pathways to understand our present and navigate our futures. We capitulate the colonial ideologies of our art and seek to understand the ways of curating indigenous art forms through women’s collective memory, dreamscape and cultural archives to instigate an indigenous future. We suggest within our bodily memories, oral literacies, and indigenous practices that the legacies of colonial violence are remedied. This panel seeks to activate conversations through ceremonial dances, prayers and chants, story weaving through visual art forms, poetry and creative prose, and wayfinding Oceanic ancestral knowledge through various Oceanic philosophies like vā. Through a talanoa, this panel endeavours to centre Oceanic women’s practices highlighting their cultures and their sovereignties. A talanoa ensures the voices of women are heard, and their experiences of their pasts are shared from their perspectives as a pathway to their healing futures. Through this Oceanic-centric methodology of talanoa, the sisterly spaces in which women position themselves fosters an emancipation from a colonial cage. This panel aspires to weave our sovereignties through conversation, fostering healing and promoting a liberating future that embraces the diverse visions of a matrilineal Oceania.

This panel will be convened online preconference.

Contact Dorell Ben HDR Candidate & Artist, Griffith University

"The academy and radical practices" examines the shifting faultlines in terms of how public space has been shaped and defined in the contemporary university. Seeking to marry notions of academic freedom with precepts of brand management and technocratic control, the contemporary university walks the faintest of lines between its imperative to nurture an ethos of critic and conscience, and its responsibilities as a corporate citizen with complex governance structures and stakeholders. With the continued growth of public art and socially mediated practices in university art schools both locally and internationally, this panel will investigate how students are responding to the academy’s increasingly complex framing of what can be said and done on campuses? Specifically, it will examine how creative arts pedagogy can best prepare students to navigate this fraught and contested set of spaces together with which are the most viable theoretical frames to successfully negotiate this tightrope.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact David Cross Professor of Visual Arts, Deakin University and Cameron Bishop Associate Professor of Visual Arts, Deakin University

Art historian Bernard Smith contends that a past of unwritten yesterdays does not become history until a historian attempts to write what happened in it. Yet, to find oneself in "apocalyptic jitters" at the thought of writing contemporary art history is to misidentify the need, first, for dusk to fall before the owl of Minerva can spread its wings (Smith, 2007, p. 123). For Smith, in mind of G. W. F Hegel’s philosophy, not until an art-epoch ends does its tenets form a whole worthy of a historian’s attention. At odds, however, with this notion of our contemporary suspension of the present, is its simultaneous saturation with the philosophy of Giles Deleuze. Here the present, instead, eludes existence (e.g. see The Logic of Sense). The present, divided between the past and future to infinity, is at work this way in Smith’s reference to Claude Monet’s Haystack series of 1890-91. The painter’s brushstrokes race against the changing light to become "not so much a record of time present as a personal experience of time past" (Smith, 2007, p. 69). If, however, against this, one still holds for contemporary art’s dusk before its history can begin, then there is E. H. Gombrich to contend with. In 1977, Gombrich dubbed Hegel the father of art history. Then, advocated we free art history of Hegel.

The panel will comprise three 20 minute papers on these matters or the question: Is art history ending because we cannot make historical sense of contemporary art?

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Dr Gail Hastings

Reference

Māori arts practices of weaving, cloak making and haka are celebrated internationally as unique expressions of Māori culture, embedded with Māori language and imbued with cultural knowledge. At different times the knowledge and practice of these arts have been endangered by colonial assimilation agenda that sought to suppress Māori artistic practice which fed directly in to wide ranging impacts on Māori wellbeing. The resurgence of Māori arts practice over the last 50 years offers a key opportunity for practicing Māori arts scholars to extend our creative practice in to a theorisation of its pedagogy, entwining theory with practice to reinstate Māori arts practice as a modality for holistic and cultural wellness.

Toiora, Hauora – creating wellness through creative pedagogy - is a kaupapa Māori (Māori centric) arts-based collaboration between three Māori women who are practitioner -teacher -scholars in their respective artforms of haka, weaving and cloak making. We present our collaborative findings on Māori arts pedagogy and practice ‘as teacher’ to expand the under-researched field of Māori arts pedagogies, and to highlight the critical role of culturally regenerative arts pedagogy to grow well and flourishing Māori futures. Our aim is to move arts scholarship and practice beyond its form, function and product / performance to include arts pedagogy – how and why our practices are taught - in ways that contribute to whānau (family and community) wellbeing that are inextricably bound to our language, customs and knowledge.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Assoc. Prof Hinekura Smith University of Queensland Indigenous Futures Centre

In 1580, the French artist Bernard Palissy was trying to explain the impossibility of alchemy. To do so, he brought together ideas of artistic production, transmutation, divine power, and organic growth:

"All that Man is able to do with metals is to extract their excrements, to purify them, to examine them, and to form them into whatever types of vessels or coins he sees fit to make; and this is something similar to the harvesting and cultivation of seeds … Only God’s power can [make things] grow, flavour them, give them colour; I say that Man can do nothing in this, just as he can also do nothing with metals" (Palissy, 1580, p. 87).

The idea of transformation lay at the centre of premodern art-making, from the casting of metals or the generating of bodies from paints made of stones and earths to the iconographies of growth and change embodied in grotesques and gothic art. We invite proposals for papers that explore this visual links and conceptual frameworks in the creation of preindustrial art. Papers might address a particular medium or material, or engage with larger ideas about mutation and change within artistic process.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Professor Anne Dunlop Herald Chair of Fine Arts, The University of Melbourne and Dr Matthew Martin Senior Lecturer, Art History and Curatorship, The University of Melbourne

Reference

Palissy, B. (1580). Discours admirables, de la nature des eaux et fontaines, tant naturelles qu'artificielles, des metaux, des sels & salines, des pierres, des terres, du feu & des emaux. Trans. Anne Dunlop.

In 1851, John Ruskin published a defence of the much-maligned Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 'The Times.' While Charles Dickens famously criticised John Everett Millais’ 'Christ in the House of His Parents' (1851; Tate) for expressing the ‘great retrogressive principle,’ Ruskin defended the Pre-Raphaelites for their ‘fidelity to a certain order of truth.’ Since then, Pre-Raphaelite art has been understood as illustrative of the dictum ‘truth to nature.’ Scholars continue to grapple with the ways Pre-Raphaelite artists challenged previous forms of vision and visuality, revolutionised colour, and reinvented landscape art. Now—in the year 2024—in the context of a climate emergency, this panel offers an opportunity to reflect on art practices from 1851 onward that have sought to render with honesty, fidelity and truthfulness the natural world. It asks the following questions: what did ‘truth to nature’ mean during the nineteenth century? And what does it mean now? What new perspectives might our current situation offer on en plein air image making traditions? What are the environmental, philosophical and moral implications of the claim of ‘truth to nature’? Topics of inquiry include, but are not limited to: New Approaches to Naturalism; Botanical Illustration and the Truth Claims of Science; Nature in Realist Art; Art, Ecology and the Victorians / Art and Ecology After the Victorians; Visualising Truth in the Age of Climate Change; Nature and Natural Forms in Modern and Contemporary Art; Vision, Optics and Empiricism—past and present.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Keren Hammerschlag Senior Lecturer, Australian National University and Ariel Kline Visiting Lecturer, Sydney University and Australian National University

The tension between the real and the virtual is increasingly present in spatial representation and experience within contemporary shifting socio-political landscapes. From constructed environments, to the mediation of architectural experience through moving images, from algorithmic spaces and the interpretive frameworks of critical thinking and photographic interventions, the concept of unreliable spaces and uncanny connections permeates multiple disciplines and modes of expression. This conference track seeks to explore the ways in which virtual, metaphorical and allegorical spaces can be perceived as unreliable, contested, or uncanny and the connections that emerge within and between them. We invite submissions that critically engage with themes such as:

• The psychologies of space: How is the construction, representation, and experience of space mediated by the digital? How might these spaces offer sites of resistance, contestation, or subversion (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Steyerl, 2013)?
• Mediated realities: How do moving images and digital technologies influence our understanding of space and place? How do virtual and augmented realities challenge traditional notions of spatiality (Menkman, 2009;  Menkman, 2011; Vidler, 2008)?
• How can architects navigate the tension between utopian visions and lived realities?
• To what extent can we use the glitch, both the digital and the psychological, as a way of understanding the real and the virtual spaces we inhabit (Cixous, 2003; Cixous et al., 2006)?
• Aesthetic interventions: How do artists use images to explore the uncanny qualities of space? How do photographic, techniques and processes disrupt, or reinforce, conventional perceptions of space and time?

The panel welcomes proposals for individual papers and artistic presentations that address these themes from diverse disciplinary perspectives.

This panel will be convened online preconference.

Contact David Cowlard Senior Lecturer, School of Fine Arts, Whitecliffe College, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand and Annabel Pretty Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Unitec Te Pūkenga, Aotearoa New Zealand

References

Cixous, H. (2003). Attacks on the Castle. In N. Leach (Ed.) Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, (pp. 228–233).

Cixous, H., Levy, A., & Rabaté,  J-M. (2006). Ex-cities: Contemporary artist series, no. 5. Slought Books with the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women and Gender.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus capitalism and schizophrenia [1980]. Trans. Brian Massumi. Athlone Press.

Steyerl, H. (2013). The wretched of the screen. E-Flux Journal. Sternberg Press.

Menkman, R. (2009). Glitch studies manifesto.

Menkman, R. (2011). The glitch moment (Um): Network notebook 4. Institute of Network Cultures.

The present moment is riddled with climate catastrophes, ever-widening economic inequalities, geopolitical tensions, and genocidal violence. These crises are not singular but interrelated — a polycrisis (though the word ‘crisis’ seems inadequate for capturing this particular confluence of destabilizing, existential forces). In such times, understandably, an increasing number of artists, scholars, and creative practitioners are experimenting with new and forgotten knowledges that have been ignored or excluded from academic scholarship.

Given the patriarchal and colonial biases baked into academic research cultures, there has been an avoidance of methods deemed messy, imprecise, or unscientific. For this panel, we are interested in the convergence of different methods of knowledge production in relation to recent digital technologies. We are concerned with the epistemological provocations of esoteric practices and critical examinations of simplistic framings of ‘old’ and ‘new’ knowledge systems.

Possible topics might include:

• Artists and designers who draw on occultist tools or practices, including but not restricted to: psychism, astrology, palmistry, Tarot and oracle cards, and witchcraft;
• Practices in the framework of Eugene Thacker’s Dark media (2013), referring to technologies that allow access to the otherwise inaccessible or unknown realms;
• Predictive claims of big data-driven machine learning practices together with the astrology and Tarot reading divinations;
• Integration of new technological interfaces for such practices, e.g. palmistry and astrology apps, in relation to data colonialism;
• Challenges to epistemological hierarchies and undoing binaries such as 'rational' and 'irrational' or 'old' and 'new';
• Alternative methods of 'making sense' and navigating political, environmental and other manifold crises via embodied, affective, sensorial, ritualistic, pedagogical, therapeutic, and/or socially engaged practices.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Charu Maithani University of New South Wales and Anastasia Murney University of New South Wales

Reference

Thacker, E. (2013). Dark media. In A. R. Galloway, E. Thacker and M. Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (pp. 77-149). University of Chicago Press.

Art history has traditionally been a discipline of the eye, developing through practices of connoisseurial authentication and iconographic analysis. Over the past few decades, the field has become increasingly aligned with ideas of ‘visual culture’ as departments faced with budgetary rationalisation have sought to claim new relevance in a world that seems more optical than ever. Art-historical research, meanwhile, has become dependent on the easy access to prominent collections that online databases provide, with scholars likely encountering most of their subjects in digital reproduction. As the impact of an excessive extraction of non-renewable natural resources and the ceaseless production of disposable commodities becomes ever more tangible, however, can (or should) art history remain a visual discipline in a resolutely material world? This panel will seek a range of responses to this question, both looking back to the origins of art history in the study of material objects as visual signs, and ahead to the place of these categories within the future of the field.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Alex Burchmore Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Studies, Centre for Art History and Art Theory, Australian National University

The study of art and its histories has always centred around a practice of critical looking. Now, digital tools for that study are constructing new modes of viewing. As visual analysis of the object is now joined by visualisation as a research methodology, researchers are considering not only the new ways of seeing prompted by their subjects, but also those generated throughout their research processes.

While the digital humanities first gained traction through textual analysis, digital research methods are increasingly visual: from the distanced data visualisations of network graphs and layered maps, to the microscopic close-ups and annotation of ultra-high-resolution images, to virtually reconstructed objects, exhibitions and architectural models. Although these alternately expanded or contracted views allow us to see materials, objects and histories beyond our biological limits, they also constitute selective views and contingent forms of looking.

As researchers who focus on making, studying and presenting art, our community is acutely aware that what we choose to visualise has an impact on the narrative of what we describe. And in an age of ever-expanding visual storytelling, with visual methods of research now becoming public-facing outputs through multimodal publishing platforms, it seems timely to reverse the critical gaze. We welcome papers looking at:

• visual methods: modelling; mapping; data visualisation;
• visual communication practices: multimodal publishing; digital artworks, exhibitions, and archives; visual storytelling; interface and infrastructure design.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Marni Williams ANU PhD Candidate in Art History and managing editor and co-lead Visual Understanding Initiative, Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture at University of Sydney and Dr Katrina Grant Research Fellow in Visual Understanding, Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney

To explore the past, present, and possible futures of art history, curating, and creative practice, this panel will consider how specific creative visual practices contribute to contemporary understandings of survivance and alternative ways of visualising human rights. Survivance is a concept coined by Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor, as a portmanteau combining survival and resistance. Survivance is distinct from survival in that it moves “beyond basic survival in the face of overwhelming cultural genocide to create spaces of synthesis and renewal” (Vizenor, 2008, p. 11). Survivance can be seen in those life-affirming acts that connect “the fallen ancestor, the current survivor, and the future descendant in a ceremony of mourning and a celebration of Indigenous endurance” (Carter, 2015, p. 419).

Although visual narratives of suffering and trauma have proven to be powerful in making human rights issues visible, the long-term effects of this focus on victimhood for individuals and communities, suggest the need to move away from damage-centred research to examine the nexus of rights, responsibilities, relationality, and care.

The panel seeks to position creative works as examples of practical enactments of specific human rights. It will examine how creative works visualise the complexity of embodied lived experiences, survivance, Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Practices of survivance do not deny the cultural disruptions, erasures, and disconnections experienced as a result of settler colonialism and attempted cultural genocide, they make the realities of trauma part of their intergenerational stories of regeneration and reclamation. In turn, these practices not only work to decolonise and Indigenise historical colonial narratives and visual practices, they also offer pathways for future generations to connect with these relational stories and practices.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Dr Lola Alexander PhD – Monash University; University of New South Wales and Professor Jacqueline Millner La Trobe University

References

Carter,  J. (2015). Discarding sympathy, disrupting catharsis: The mortification of Indigenous flesh as survivance-intervention. Theatre Journal 67(1).

Vizenor, G. (2008). Aesthetics of survivance: Literary theory and practice. In G. Vizenor (ed.) Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. The University of Nebraska.

Much of the curatorial labour that takes place in collecting institutions goes into cataloguing objects and maintaining the collection database – an index that not only holds information, but also directs the kinds of questions that are asked when something is collected. In recent years, artists, art historians and other creative practitioners have begun to repurpose these databases for interventions into the very institutions that created them. This panel asks what museum collections and cataloguing practices reveal about Australia’s collective psyche, and how we might subvert or repurpose the them in order to challenge, undo or redress the museum’s intrinsic hierarchies, blind-spots and omissions.

Reflecting on poetic ways of intervening in collection databases, we invite research into that which is silenced and also that which is magnified in the process of collecting. We encourage submissions that push past the assumption that silences should always be filled. Rather, following Lisa Lowe’s lead in History Hesitant, we aim to ask deeper structural questions about how those silences might speak for themselves.

Encouraging careful analysis of the shifting ways in which we talk about collections and continue to grow them, we invite meditations on the possibilities and limitations of interventions that collate and trouble what collections already are. We welcome papers and creative projects that tackle language and representation, pattern recognition and interpretation. What possible futures can be reanimated in these pasts?

This panel will be convened online preconference.

Contact Macushla Robinson Assistant Professor in Residence and Director of the Contemporary Art Galleries, The University of Connecticut

Colonial-era art presents a range of challenges to contemporary researchers. It regularly crosses national borders (and thus entrenched art-historical narratives) as well as disciplinary boundaries (frequently veering into areas like botany and ethnography). Nineteenth century art often depicts or else indirectly speaks to histories of colonial violence, dispossession, and erasure. Much recovery work still needs to be undertaken to redress the absence of women practitioners in the art history of this period. Likewise, the question of how the invisible hand of the market has shaped the production and reception of colonial art in the nineteenth century requires much more attention than it has yet been awarded. This panel addresses the research and presentation of nineteenth-century art from the perspective of the present with a focus on new and best-practice methods across art history and curatorship. We are interested in receiving proposals on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• What existing art-historical methods – such as connoisseurship – have retained their currency? What new methods – including oral history, collaborative research, interdisciplinary practice and AI – are being developed to shift the discipline?
• What can a renewed focus on materiality bring to contemporary understandings of nineteenth-century media?
• What can research into cultural, political and aesthetic perspectives on gender, sexuality, race and the environment in colonial-era art offer the contemporary moment?

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Helen Hughes Monash University and Rebecca Rice Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

In May 2024 Creative Australia published the Visual Arts Publishing Review conducted by Rebecca Coates, intended to canvass the current crisis of Australian arts publishing. On the matter of First Nations, Coates remarked: “The focus on First Nations writers and voices in arts magazines and publications has been timely”, and that “appropriate cultural safety structures are also essential to attract and support Indigenous artists and writers”.

The findings acknowledged that Australia’s visual arts sector has long felt a decline in arts journalism but did little to address or suggest future directions regarding the death of visual and critical literacy among mainstream audiences of Indigenous art, a matter that Indigenous writers and critics have highlighted for over 10 years. This includes two notable polemics by Bundjalung/Kullilli writer and journalist Daniel Browning, 'The dearth of criticism' (2013) and 'Nothing if not uncritical: Revisiting re-visions and Indigenous art criticism' (2021), both published through Artlink Australia.

This panel explores the way in which arts publishers, across magazines, books, journals and periodicals, must and are negotiating a shift from non-Indigenous critical voices that rely on Western ways of knowing in their interrogation of Indigenous art, to one that is grounded in First Nations culture. This panel welcomes proposals for papers focusing on specific arts publishing case studies negotiating the intersections of criticality and Indigenous ways of knowing in Australia (or more broadly), from the 2010s to the present.

This panel will be convened in person.

Contact Erin Vink Chair, Art Monthly Australasia

References