Call for Papers | 2025 Conference

This double panel invites papers that consider absence and abundance in nineteenth-century art history. A period characterised by increased visual saturation, the nineteenth century indulged in the excesses of the encyclopaedic, saw the proliferation of new media, and witnessed the introduction of novel modes of display. Such visual abundance was often a result of concomitant blindness, or a wilful exclusion or erasure. This panel wishes to consider how these mutually informing qualities–absence and abundance–continue to both consciously and unconsciously direct our curatorial and art historical approaches to the nineteenth century. We invite contributions from scholars and curators who consider absences and/or abundances in the nineteenth century as indications of the unruly nature of the art historical archive. In this dynamic between absence and abundance, objects, or their exclusion, become unruly: uneasily accommodated by established art historical conventions. Conscious of our own location, we encourage papers that consider or complicate colonial archives and invite projects that employ interdisciplinary and collaborative methodologies.

Contact Emily Brink University of Western Australia  and Elisa deCourcy Australian National University

The panel calls for papers that critically examine instances of censorship in Australian and/or broader Australasian art contexts with the aim of investigating the interplay between art, politics, and the media. Contrary to assumptions about artistic freedom in liberal democracies, recent incidents of censorship within the Australian art world have demanded critical enquiry and the benefit of historical analysis. From the controversies surrounding works by Bill Henson (2008) and Abdul Abdullah (2017) to the recent withdrawal of Khaled Sabsabi by Creative Australia from Venice Biennale, Australian contemporary art is not without a history of censorship, shaped by political and social pressures. These events offer insight into how censorship operates within Australia’s cultural sphere.

By tracing historical and contemporary moments of censorship, this panel seeks to analyse not just what gets censored, but how censorship functions – structurally, rhetorically, and socially. What are the mechanisms within public discourse that render certain artists and their “unruly objects” “objectionable”? What rhetorical strategies are deployed to justify censorship? How do artists navigate, resist, or even embrace the censor’s gaze? How does the invocation of “freedom of speech” or “freedom of expression” shift across political lines, and to what effect? Of particular interest are papers that unpack case studies that interrogate the cultural mechanisms that deem certain artworks “unexhibitable,” and question how the limits of what is “acceptable” are determined.

 Contact Sam Beard, Dispatch Review

This session aims to examine the many and varied ways in which the relationship between art and life is figured. This relationship is key to accounts of both the historical avant-garde and the neo-avantgarde as well as earlier discussions of mimetic theories of art, and the analysis of the various realisms. Neo-avantgarde art tended to sever the life of the artist from the discussion of their art, often represented in shorthand by the adoption of the premise of Roland Barthes’ article, “The death of the author”. How do recent developments in contemporary art like auto-theory or identity politics challenge this severance of artist from art? How might life writing in literature studies effect art historical theorisations of this relationship? We welcome proposals on the art and life relationship from any time period or medium.

Contact Susan Best, Griffith University and Chari Larsson, Griffith University

This panel seeks proposals for conversations, discussions or reflective papers that engage the idea and experience of bodies in the gallery or museum as unruly objects. From our perspective, this includes curating performance, student learning and artists actively making new work, during gallery opening hours. How do bodies provoke, or require us to revisit, our assumptions and approaches to exhibition making, and what galleries are for? Working with living, thinking, breathing practitioners and audiences in the gallery context comes with a degree of unpredictability that brings its own challenges and rewards.

The panel convenors will explore this through the prism of a range of curated works and programs delivered during the run of the exhibition The Same Crowd Never Gathers Twice at Buxton Contemporary in 2024. including Angela Goh’s Body Loss, Riana Head-Toussaint’s Guided Wrestling, and Audience Surveillance by Dr Joseph Lallo and Melbourne Conservatorium students.

We welcome contributions that explore live art-making or outcomes in the gallery in the broadest sense, including First Nations approaches, collaborations, residencies, education and other unclassifiable and unruly undertakings.

Contact Kyla McFarlane, University of Melbourne and Erin Milne, University of Melbourne

In Art to Come Terry Smith suggests that contemporary art history might not be a history of contemporary art, but could instead ‘revise our understanding of . . . much previous art.’ This panel proposes contemporary art history as a description of the new methodologies that have arisen since the rise of contemporary art, methodologies that are rewriting the history of art that is not just contemporary. Contemporary art history has taken the place of the New Art History, with its focus upon the postcolonial, feminist, Marxist (and social), instead describing anachronistic, concentrationary, decolonising, digital, quantitative, Indigenous, intersectional, new materialist, post-national, world, settler-colonial and socially engaged art histories, as well as scholarship around the curatorial, including exhibition histories. Australia’s contributions to this multiplicity include the concepts of Aboriginal modernism (part of a global scholarship on multiple modernisms) and the UnAustralian, that have shifted the postcolonial and provincial models of Australian art into new, contemporary terrain. This panel invites papers on ideas, methodologies and syntheses about the discipline that have arisen since the turn of the century, or troubling the periodisation around which this model of contemporary art history is drawn. Criticality and multiplicity should inform papers addressing the theme, while older disciplinary practices may also be the subject of papers, insofar as they offer continuities with the intellectual and activist histories of feminism and Marxism, as well as with foundational scholars including Warburg and Riegl, whose approaches have proved unexpectedly relevant to atypical media, geographies and identities.

Contact Darren Jorgensen, University of Western Australia

This panel investigates objects made between c.1400-1800 that defy classification, resist control, or transgress normative boundaries. In an era marked by burgeoning empirical science, expanding colonial empires, and increasingly elaborate systems of order (from cabinets of curiosities to theological taxonomies), certain objects stood out not for their conformity but for their disruptive potential. Unruliness might manifest in an object’s material properties (melting wax, unruly hair, alchemical substances), its representational ambiguity (hybrid monsters, anamorphic images, or deceptive materialities), its behavioural agency (automata, relics), or unknowability (when artworks or archives are lost).

This session seeks to explore how makers and contemporary viewers collectors in engaged with objects that refused to stay in place—physically, conceptually, or symbolically – and how curators today can tell their stories.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Disobedient or animated objects in visual art and literature
• Grotesque, hybrid, or monstrous forms and their symbolic functions
• The role of unruly materials in artistic and artisanal processes
• Objects of magic, miracle, or the occult that defy natural explanation
• Colonial artifacts and the crisis of categorization
• Failed technologies or “haunted” machines
• Disruptive objects in early modern domestic, religious, or courtly spaces.

This panel welcomes interdisciplinary approaches that draw on art history, literary studies, history of science, philosophy, theology, gender studies, or critical theory to examine what unruliness meant in early modern contexts, and how it continues to challenge our historical narratives.

Panel members will present 20-minute papers, followed by a joint discussion.

Contact Susanne Meurer, University of Western Australia

A hyperobject is an object which we know to be real yet is spatiotemporally too vast and multifaceted for us to apprehend in its entirety. The ‘hyperobject’ concept was developed in Timothy Morton’s book of the same name to describe the enormity of global warming, observable only via its consequences such as extreme weather events, impending extinctions and permanently altered landscapes. In a resolutely globalised world, much of how we interact with one another also depends on our interfacing with a different set of hyperobjects: things including, but not limited to, wireless telecommunication infrastructure, the internet, flight routes, and capital itself. It is through these hyperobjects that we understand and witness how the political decisions in one part of the world can have direct consequences for people’s experiences in another. This panel seeks to consider hyperobjects as its point of departure, and especially seeks to separate the idea from its roots in object-oriented ontology and revisit it from a subjective and humanist perspective.

From this point of departure, this panel invites artists and theorists to ask: what might it mean for us to experience, engage with, or reckon with objects and systems that are too vast to apprehend? This proposition can be explored in a variety of ways—from artistic practices that contend with modes of circulation, to dialogues between the local and the global, or from the human experiences of climate change, to affective overstimulation online. Additionally, this panel welcomes contributors working with related ideas, such as distance, temporality, and scale, and welcomes contributors who might approach the same terrain from different theoretical contexts.

Contact Paul Sutherland, Curtin University

This panel examines the role of artist-led archives as a transformative tools for collective organising, self-narration, and cultural resistance, particularly for Filipino and BIPOC artists who have historically been marginalised within institutional contexts.

Convened by artists Catherine Ortega-Sandow and MJ Flamiano of Saluhan Collective, the session is informed by Fugitive Archives, a year-long curatorial project developed during their tenure as Curators-in-Residence at Monash University’s School of Art, Design and Architecture (MADA). The panel will include a walkthrough of objects featured in the Fugitive Archives exhibitions. Using sound, moving image, ephemera, and object-based storytelling, attendees will engage with materials, encouraging embodied dialogue between participants, curators, and the objects themselves.

We invite artists, community members, academics, and arts practitioners to submit proposals to join this panel. We also welcome alternative presentation formats, such as walkthroughs, object-based storytelling, or the use of ephemera.

Contact Catherine Ortega-Sandow, Monash University and MJ Flamiano, Monash University

This panel invites dialogue on art objects produced under, and in response to, institutional conditions, such as the hospital, prison or asylum. We’re interested in the ways in which these objects, both historic and contemporary, resist simple classification.

This session originates from an under-researched element of Melbourne’s art history, as told through the Art Access Studio (1989–1996), which operated on the grounds of the Larundel Psychiatric hospital (1953–1999). The studio was a space for those institutionalised at Larundel to produce art outside of a diagnostic framework, under the guidance of artists, not doctors. It pioneered and challenged how art could be used therapeutically by embracing artmaking as an opportunity for self-directed healing and creative expression. This history is explored in the forthcoming exhibition, Healing: Art and Institutional Care (20 Aug–9 Nov 2025) at La Trobe Art Institute.

Building on the ideas explored in this exhibition, the co-curators (Wallin and Leong) invite dialogue on the lingering, unruly objects produced under, and in response to, institutional conditions. These include works created within former sites of care and control, as well as those emerging from contemporary responses to archival and institutional memory. Such objects often complicate contemporary curatorial ethics and raise unresolved questions around authorship, consent, access and representation.

Rather than treating these objects as passive artefacts of past therapeutic or diagnostic practices, this session invites critical engagement with how they continue to act in the present—whether through their disruptive presence in collections, their influence on curatorial approaches, or their reanimation through contemporary artistic and scholarly responses. We particularly welcome contributions that explore how such objects leak, haunt, resist and reshape contemporary engagements with care, disability justice, neurodivergence and institutional critique.

Contact Jacina Leong, RMIT and Amelia Wallin, La Trobe Art Institute

This panel investigates domestic and personal objects in flight—those displaced through forced migration, exile or fugitive escape. Objects in flight are here defined as those physically and symbolically dislocated: left behind, carried in urgency, or moving across space and time through acts of memory and ritual. These objects resist containment, lose context, and accrue new - often monumental meanings as they move.

We are particularly interested in the entanglement of these objects with the loss of home, but also importantly with the concept of ‘home making’. These can be interpreted widely – considering how objects are carried across borders, held in exile, or invoked in rituals. The main idea is to think how objects in flight act as anchors to lost homes, while also generating improvised sites of survival and belonging.

Drawing on scenographic and spatial theory, material culture, and performativity of objects, this panel asks: how do such objects embody and perform grief, rupture, and loss, while also enabling repair, resilience and re-inhabitation?

The panel invites proposals that look at:
• Diasporic memory and the performance of loss and/or survival,
• Improvised domesticities in contexts of shelter or displacement,
• Objects as scenographic agents in ritual, installation, or archive,
• The absence or fugitivity of objects in institutional collections.

We welcome proposals from scholars, artists, curators, and practitioners exploring the ‘objects in flight’ through 10-15 min research presentations and round table discussions.

Contact Nevena Mrdjenovic, University of Technology, Sydney

According to Jorge Oteia, ‘the greater the noncommunication of a work of art, the greater its capacity to produce preeminent content in the viewer,’ but the ‘beholder’s share’ of occluded or ‘absconded’ objects cannot be divorced from the history of visuality in every place and period, especially the institutional conditions under which vision becomes possible in ruling and segregating viewers. Examples include the variable degrees of visibility in the Parthenon frieze, invisible from the ground; the concealment and displacement of sacred stories and ancestral subjectivity in the abstract designs of Aboriginal paintings; the pictorial heritage of Parrhasius’s curtain, promising what cannot be shown and revealing what is obscured; the carved undersides of Aztec sculptures, visible only to patrons, makers or the Gods; the invisible archetypes in images not made by human hands; the confinement of Reformation art to things of this world, the exposure of indicted ideologies by iconoclastic acts; modernist art as machines for the exposure and concealment of secrets, including concealment performed by proscribed gender identities. The theme includes the incompletely visible: principles of Japanese yugen and Indian Dhvani; importance conferred on ownership rather than the contents of secrets in African masks, low-powered paintings (Gwen John, Clarice Beckett), low-resolution photography, and the denial of viewers’ participation in the bland or insipid style of lofty, Chinese, reclusive artists. Methodologies could include Derrida on blindness, Lacan on scotomization, Goffman on front and back regions as barriers to perception (gallery versus storeroom, this world versus the next, real versus imaginary).

Contact Richard Read, University of Western Australian

Populism is often invoked to signal reactionary, authoritarian politics – those that reject pluralism, scapegoat marginalised communities, and deploy nostalgic nationalism. Yet this framing flattens populism’s contradictory nature. As political theorists like Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have argued, populism can also name emancipatory political energies: horizontal forms of organising that demand equality, autonomy, and popular sovereignty. In cultural contexts, this ambivalence is palpable: populism can both erode and enliven democratic engagement.

This panel considers the role of populism in the politics of exhibition-making and artistic address, exploring how institutions and artists respond to, resist, or embrace populist strategies.

Questions that the panel will consider include:

• What defines populist aesthetics in artistic and exhibition practice today?
• Can spectacular, widely attended exhibitions be understood as forms of cultural populism? Do they dilute criticality, or create broader inclusion?
• If populism operates less as a fixed ideology than a contested tactic, who are “the people” imagined by institutions and how is inclusion staged or withheld?
• How have artists used populist aesthetics – ranging from mass-media appropriation to community-based practice – to both radical and regressive ends?

Topics may include:

• Populist aesthetics in major exhibitions, national pavilions, or museum programming
• Artists’ use of populist forms, icons, or platforms
• The critique of ‘democratised’ art spaces

The panel will follow a 20-minute paper format with question time for discussion.

Contact Chelsea Hopper, Monash University

Old puppets are unruly objects. Silent and motionless, we can only infer how they once danced and spoke. Is it wise to reanimate them?

This panel invites current researchers who have encountered puppets as objects of art history, performance, or as challenges to a status quo. Whose voices are amplified when a puppet is the intermediary? What happens if we study the work of puppeteers through material culture or historical texts alone? What can we learn from fragmentary puppets, or the disjecta membra of preserved stories that might once have belonged to puppeteers?

These questions originate in the study of khayal al-zill as Arabic medieval shadow puppetry, notably in Egypt, Syria and Palestine. We are interested in speculative histories and the roles of translation in creative practice and performance-centred research. We invite others to cast a light on global and regional practices in shadow theatre, within and beyond karagöz and wayang kulit, or consider the unruliness of other forms of puppetry in contemporary and historical settings, including museum theatre. This is a panel for researchers who are willing to pull loose strings and see where they lead.

Contact Sam Bowker, Charles Sturt University

The emergence of the Blue Humanities and powerful vectors of hydrofeminism, hydrocenes, eco-criticism, and the politics of the post-Anthropocene all collide, comingle, and power bodies of watery thinking. Following the currents of Astrida Neimanis and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, and the waves of Stefan Helmreich and Claire Colebrook, this panel invites performance, discourse, histories, and more-than-human relations to unruly water and their many bodies.

The panel welcomes responses that occupies and emerges from watery thinking that might defy categories of (un)natural bodies – of the human, the more-than-human, posthuman, and inhuman kind. We welcome political vectors too, in the form of activist and eco-aesthetic histories of water infrastructure: making visible and deterritorialising energy landscapes, ports, hydros, and global oceans and more.

We encourage too sonic interactions and inventions, bioacoustics and atomic entanglements in pursuit of knowing and thinking the unruly waters we surround ourselves in. We draw from Jane Bennett, Karen Barad and Brandon LaBelle in mobilising currents of affection through vibrant and resonant methodologies of immersion, attention, listening and voicing.

We invite fluid and shifting forms of delivery and participation. We envision a panel that enacts its thinking through performances, (re)presentations, and dynamic exchanges in a polyphonic space that might invoke presence and absence. As the surging of unruly water suggests, hydrological intensities are already saturating us.

Contact Karen Hall, University of Tasmania and Toby Juliff, University of Tasmania         

Space as an object is not understood as a fixed entity. Rather, it is seen as fluid, porous, and dynamic in nature. Doreen Massey (2005, 9) suggested that space is "the product of interrelations” where distinct trajectories coexist and interact; space is always in flux, “under-construction”, informed by material practices that resist fixed boundaries. Challenging the static view of materiality, Tim Ingold (2007) acknowledged the ongoing transformations of materials within environmental and social contexts where people's multisensory engagements formulate their perception and understanding of tangible spaces. In both views the experience of space is relational, shaped by movement and interaction, and co-created through entanglement of materiality and interactivity. Today, this entanglement is further complicated by technological advances that have enabled the combining and colliding of virtual and real-world realities, which has simultaneously confounded and expanded our understanding of space. Marie-Laure Ryan (2001, 21) proposed that “the synthesis of immersion and interactivity is… nothing less than the participation of the whole of the individual in the artistic experience”. Bringing together Massey’s definition of space and Ingold's perspective on materiality with Ryan’s work on immersion and interactivity, this panel interrogates the notion of space as an object by exploring how we can shape the experience of space and transform its meaning through purposeful design, art, and architectural interventions. Furthermore, it challenges us to reimagine how the engagement between humans, materials and materiality can transform our perception and understanding of space–as object, world, and experience.

Contact Monika Lukowska-Appel, Curtin University and Jo Li Tay, Curtin University

National and state cultural institutions (including galleries, museums, libraries and archives) are responsible for acquiring, preserving and interpreting objects of national significance, and making them accessible to the Australian public. How do these institutions acquire, accession, care for and interpret objects that question, criticise or intervene in government policies, decisions, histories? Are there examples of state-owned objects that disrupt past or present government actions, ideals and power structures through their materiality, content or the way they have been interpreted? What knowledge, change, poetics or other outcomes have resulted from these objects?

How do curators bear both the burden and responsibility to care for objects that relate to trauma caused by government failures, destructive policies or harmful state actions? How do curators who are also public servants navigate relationships with artists and communities while respecting that our actions and employment are governed by a democratic framework based on the concept of service to the Australian public? How do artists, curators and institutions navigate bureaucracy together?

Papers by artists, curators or community representatives working in or with national or state cultural institutions are sought for this panel.

Contact Elise Routledge, Australian War Memorial

Continuing in the modernist tradition, contemporary surrealist art often combines everyday objects – mannequins, dolls, fabrics, found objects, photographic cutouts, and fragmented depictions of body parts – to stage new configurations that blur the line between imagination and reality. Such objects defy conventional meaning through their recontextualising and placement to suggest more compelling alternate messaging. Rather than existing as passive artifacts, they convey disruptive insights that can affect viewers, ranging from humour, seduction, disorientation, to uncanny and eerie sensations. These experiential encounters suggest the affective charge of these objects, from precipitating powerful unconscious associations to cultivating political resonance and offering talismanic significance. Surrealist scholar and curator Patricia Allmer, for instance, has recently examined how “objects of the traumatic surreal” in the art of Germanophone post-war Surrealist women artists respond to the traumatic events of World War Two. Curator María Elena Ortiz has worked with African Diasporic artists to show how Surrealist tenets are applied in combining everyday items to create fantastical objects, offering alternative world views to bring audiences into decolonising narratives.

This panel investigates how contemporary artists working within a surrealist framework re-purpose objects to give them disruptive potential. What roles do these objects play? How might their uses and associated rituals take on alternate significance as potent symbols of anxieties, desire and selfhood, for instance? How does this impress upon the viewer in new and transformative ways? This panel welcomes consideration across all artistic mediums of the role of the surreal object and the audience encounter, including its potential to affect audiences psychologically and emotionally.

Contact Mimi Kelly, University of Melbourne and Victoria Souliman University of Sydney

The climate crisis manifests in ways that are truly unruly; unthinkable, disruptive and impossible to contain. Australia alone has witnessed catastrophic flooding, unprecedented droughts, and devastating bushfire events that challenge us to consider how we respond, physically and emotionally.

For cultural institutions, climate change represents a topic that bleeds across established boundaries. No longer confined to natural history museums, it increasingly appears in art, science, and social history museums. Yet its enormity, impact and the means of combatting its effects remain largely unimaginable for audiences and it is therefore challenging to exhibit within conventional display frameworks.

This panel explores multimodal engagement strategies that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. We seek papers examining how innovative approaches foster sustained institutional responses – beyond collection care and carbon management – to address climate change's disruptive qualities at both global and local scales.

We invite examinations of how exhibitions, artistic commissions, and community-engaged programs create spaces of dialogue where diverse knowledge systems — Indigenous, scientific, agricultural, artistic — converge in productive conversation. Of particular interest are case studies demonstrating how institutions function as "pathways" helping communities process, understand, and respond to environmental transformations in ways that build resilience and foster action.

How might cultural institutions better translate climate complexities into meaningful frameworks that are relevant to diverse audiences? What role should they play as active voices for nature in a post-human conception of climate change? What innovative models are emerging that reimagine institutional practice in response to climate change's unruliness?

Contact Anna Lawrenson, University of Sydney and Chiara O'Reilly, University of Sydney

New technologies are unsettling the stability of our visual experience. They are introducing a fresh set of doubts about how we interpret the images and the objects that we see. At the same time we are frequently told - by popular media and critical writing - that we live in a world more saturated with imagery than in previous generations. How are we to grapple with these two phenomena? Are we experiencing a major historical break in how we think about images and objects, what they tell us and the role of seeing in society? A crisis of vision is not a new idea - it has been grappled with over many cultures and many centuries, yet each iteration is different, informed by changes in technology, scientific discoveries, socio-cultural shifts, politics, religion and so on. We are interested in taking a trans-historical view of the idea of the ends of vision and invite speakers to consider 'crises in seeing' as a means to explore the longer histories of vision – understood not as something universal, unchanging or natural, but rather as a crucial site of historical and political contestation. Papers are invited to address crises of vision as they relate to art, media, collections and broader visual culture. We welcome research on historical moments of crises, or on our contemporary moment. 'Crisis' could be interpreted as creating a destructive disruption or rupture in society, or as an opportunity to challenge existing hegemonies of vision. This panel is part of a multi-year initiative by the Power Institute to examine Visual Understanding, moving from research on the history and theory of art into examining the cultures of seeing in media, science and examining how technology mediates our gaze in the digital world.

Contact Katrina Grant, Power Institute Foundation for Visual Art and Culture and Nicholas Croggon, Power Institute Foundation for Visual Art and Culture

To borrow from Afterall exhibitions are “when art becomes public.” As the curator’s role has become increasingly central in contemporary art discourse, so too has the critical study of exhibition formats and their histories—often examined in tandem with the trajectories of individual artworks and artists. This panel considers the politics of exhibition histories and the artworks and objects they hold within.

We invite broad engagement with the topic. Proposals might consider the histories of specific exhibitions or biennales and their impact on particular works or artists; the exhibition history of an individual practitioner whether curator or artist; and polemical positions on the shifting relationship between art history and curatorial practice.

Contact Hilary Thurlow, Monash University and Amelia Brown, National Gallery of Australia

This panel considers how sculptural materials move from static matter to active collaborator in live, improvisational artworks. Through 15–20-minute presentations, artists will reveal methodologies that range from choreographed interventions – where bodies and fabricated forms perform in tandem – to spontaneous encounters that allow objects to surprise and disrupt creative process. Each talk may include film screenings, photographic documentation and live demonstration to trace sculptural objects’ latent agency, material excess and capacity for improvisation.

A 20-minute roundtable will follow, during which presenters and participants discuss the ethical dimensions of manipulating “things,” debate the porous boundaries between object, artwork and action, and chart a collaborative framework for material agency in contemporary practice. By treating sculptural form as co-author rather than passive backdrop, the panel will model a richly multimodal approach to performance-art-object encounters.

Prospective topics include:

• Object Agency & Material Vitality: how weight, texture and scale inform performative potential
• Improvisation & Choreography: strategies for co-creating sound and movement with rigid or malleable forms
• Mediation & Mode Shifting: the role of video, projection and sound in animating objects beyond the live event
• Audience Object Encounter: ethical and phenomenological questions arising when viewers become part of the performance
• Institutional Histories: reflections on fifty years of sculptural performance, from early happenings to today’s site responsive projects.

Jen Valender (convenor + presenter), PhD Candidate, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne

Dr Mark Shorter (presenter), Head of Sculpture, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne

This panel is open for submissions for 1-2 further speakers.

Contact Jen Valender, University of Melbourne

Artists have long employed masquerade to problematise artistic identity, constructing unruly masks and personas that disrupt notions of selfhood and authenticity. From Claude Cahun’s ambiguous masking and Marcel Duchamp's alter ego Rrose Sélavy, to Gillian Wearing's uncanny family disguises and Christian Thompson's explorations of race and sexuality, the performance of identity through masquerade prompts inquiry into the fluidity of artistic identity and the tension between authenticity and artifice.

This panel welcomes papers examining how artists use self-representation to destabilise our grasp on reality. The aim of the panel is to cover diverse historical periods and mediums, from Renaissance paintings to contemporary performance, to Generative AI images.

We seek contributions addressing artists who employ mask, masquerade and disguise as critical tools to deconstruct artistic identity and its historical, cultural, and material formations.

Key questions include:
• How do artists use masks and masquerades to question artistic identity?
• What strategies confound and destabilise ideas of the artistic self?
• How are self-portraiture conventions (mis)used to highlight the artifice of public persona?
• Can masquerade paradoxically reveal aspects of authentic selfhood?
• How do artists perform identities that undermine or reframe societal expectations?

By examining these unruly objects of artistic identity, this panel examines how masks and masquerade function as sites of resistance, enabling artists to craft alternate or indeterminate identities that defy categorisation and challenge normative discourses.

Format: Three 20-minute presentations followed by 10-minute discussion periods.

Contact Laini Burton, Queensland College of Art and Design and Elisabeth Findlay, Queensland College of Art and Design

Within the ARC Linkage project ‘Difficult Objects’, researchers from ANU, Federation University, Art Gallery of Ballarat and the Eureka Centre have explored community responses to the unruly. Ballarat encounters the unruly in multiple and complex ways: it has a history of colonisation, environmental disruption, goldfields insurgency, labour agitation, violence and trauma. The unruly is embedded in the cherished legacy of the Eureka uprising, the persistent scars of upside down country, the slow-healing wounds of institutional abuse, the trauma of violence against women, contemporary activism, and the unwelcome intrusion of extremist politics. Papers in this session will report on experiments with community-driven dialogue, knowledge formation and decision-making that use cultural mediation and deliberative democracy to model civic values and social cohesion within the unruly. The unruly is not approached as an affront to which the community reacts. Instead, we explore the ways in which the community engages with the unruly, considers its purpose and assesses its effects and their merits in relation to shared understandings of community history and identity. This session will combine research presentations with a round table discussion.

Contact Chris McAuliffe, Australian National University, Fred Cahir, Federation University and Amelia Wallin amelia.wallin@anu.edu.au

As the famous ad for eating lamb once said, “Guess we are all a bit UnAustralian, that’s what makes us Australian”. In these divided times, when artists can be sacked from the Venice Biennale and cancelled from university exhibitions because of who they are and what they are said to represent, can art and the history of art bring us together? This session encourages histories of Muslim artists in Australia and Australian artists in Muslim countries. It encourages histories of Jewish artists in Australia and Australian-Jewish artists overseas. It encourages histories of Australian Theosophist artists and architects, both building our capital city here and living and working overseas. It encourages histories of UnAustralian artists everywhere, both here and around the world. Histories of the reception of Indigenous art overseas are beginning to be written. This short history of UnAustralian Indigenous art can undoubtedly be seen as something of a victory after the failure of the Australian Voice.

Contact Rex Butler, Monash University and ADS Donaldson

This panel invites papers that explore the body as an unruly object—resisting aesthetic norms, institutional discipline, and cultural containment. In art history and contemporary practice, bodies often appear as excessive, fractured, politicised, or hybridised sites of meaning. Following Grosz’s (1994) notion of the body not as a static entity but as “a situation”, and Jones’ (1998) theorisation of embodied subjectivity in performance, we ask: how have artists mobilised unruly bodies to disrupt dominant narratives?

We welcome contributions that examine diverse representations— from the grotesque and metamorphic figures of Hieronymus Bosch’s 'Garden of Earthly Delights' (c. 1490–1510) and Picasso’s 'Les Demoiselles d’Avignon' to Hanna Cormick’s 'The Mermaid' (2020), where chronic illness and disability subvert ableist aesthetics. Dr Paola Balla (Wemba-Wemba/Gunditjmara and Italian) positions her body as a sovereign space of cultural memory and resistance, complicating settler and migrant narratives alike. Increasingly, artists are interrogating the body through emerging technologies: in 'Kagami' (2023), Ryuichi Sakamoto and Todd Eckert use AI and volumetric capture to reanimate the performing body after death, raising urgent questions around digital embodiment and the archive, intimacy, and presence.

We welcome research on queer, racialised, disabled, posthuman, and hybrid bodies in art, performance, and visual culture, as well as body-based protest and artistic methodologies that centre lived embodiment. Practice-led researchers are especially encouraged. This panel aims to spark dialogue on the body not just as a subject or image, but as an aesthetic strategy of rupture—an unruly object that exceeds, reframes, and reimagines what art can do.

Speakers must ensure appropriate consultation, consent, and attribution when using or referring to Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP), in line with protocols and custodial rights. Thank you.

Contact Angela Viora, Monash University

Concerns around the unruliness of discourse have grown under the auspices of post-truth and conspiracy theory. Just as artists and intellectuals  look for ways to escape the strictures and structures of discourse, the discursive seems to have become increasingly porous; with a variety of political and aesthetic vocabularies and projects flowing into one another in unpredictable and destabilising ways.

As such this panel calls for papers on the topic of contemporary art's relationship to materiality in light of growing anxieties around the breakdown of discursive efficacy, and, in particular, reassessments of the legacies of the new materialisms and the turn to the object in the context of an apparent breakdown of truth and trust in Western liberal democracies.

Contact Francis Russell

This panel invites papers on the conference theme of ‘unruly objects’, focusing on the representation of flowers native to Latin America and Australia in modern and contemporary art. This includes depictions by female artists inviting discussion on whether they depict not only flowers but rather facilitate the recreation of cultural interactions of ancestry. In doing so, this panel departs from the understanding that while artistic demands and intentions may have differed, a recurrent theme has been the representation of flowers as an artistic dialogue between nature and science. Participants are invited to consider, for instance: flowers regarded as a tangible expression of aesthetic beauty and delicacy; their unruly characteristics, unique to their native environments, as epitomising reflections of identity; and flowers as a material embodying views of gender and diversity. Flowers embody all of these inclinations and more, as their characteristics show an unruly nature encompassing beauty, diversity and their representation may include consideration of documenting illusory or realistic depictions

Contact Jenny Beatriz Quijano Martinez

Prompted by an artistic intervention at the WA Shipwrecks Museum (opening 28 November 2025), this panel invites critical reflections on curatorial and artistic strategies that seek to disrupt, reframe, decolonise, or indigenise collections. Taking place alongside the 2025 AAANZ conference in Perth, the exhibition interrogates the legacies of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) through shipwrecks and colonial maritime debris, with new site-specific commissions by local and international artists.

This panel considers such interventions as part of a broader turn toward activating ‘unruly’ objects—those that resist categorisation, unsettle dominant narratives, or carry unresolved colonial entanglements. While artistic interventions have become a common curatorial tool, they often risk remaining temporary or tokenistic, serving to gesture toward change without unsettling entrenched institutional logics.

We invite papers that examine interventions in art, natural history, or science collections and consider their capacity to meaningfully disrupt narratives of power, possession, and display. Contributors may draw on Maura Reilly’s typology of curatorial activism—revisionist, area studies, and relational approaches—to analyse the success, limitations, and ethical complexities of such strategies. Are these interventions capable of transforming institutional narratives, or do they remain safely at the margins of the museum? What unruly potentials do they unlock, and what remains contained?

We welcome contributions from scholars, artists, curators, and cultural practitioners working across diverse contexts, and encourage interdisciplinary and practice-led perspectives.

Contact Arvi Wattel, University of Western Australia

While institutions continue to transform beyond their object-centric functions into lively, civic-oriented spaces, their structures and internal processes are still largely underpinned by their founding logics. Risk, conservation, timelines, conflict of interest and care are developed around the artwork-object but take on radically different dimensions when it comes to relational and performance-based practices. Can institutional structures adapt to the needs of the unruly nature of live, community-rooted programming? How do power dynamics influence who has the ability to shape or alter these structures? This session explores the ‘unruly processes’ necessary in working with live programming, particularly in the context of queer and CaLD communities. It invites dialogue from those working at the intersection of institutions and these communities to reflect on how those productive overlaps can inform methodologies of collaboration, deviation, care, opacity and slowness. While these are sometimes referred to as paracuratorial tactics–processes that sit adjacent or on the edge of formalities–this session focuses on the possibilities that open up when they are centred within institutional practice.

Contact Samia Sayed, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Evgenia Anagnostopoulou, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Thinking beyond simply the agency of objects, we turn specifically to their disruptive and ungovernable aspects – whether they be leaking out of unwieldy collections, unexhibitable or unthinkable, fugitive or lost, or brimming with vitality, power, or ancestral subjectivity. We are interested in unruly objects not simply as passive bearers of meaning or extensions of artistic intent, but as active, resistant presences that defy containment and linear narratives. These are objects that trouble conventional museological, archival, and historiographic frameworks: objects that resist categorisation, refuse display, disrupt chronology, or carry haunted, contested, or politicised histories. Such unruliness may manifest materially – in decay, fragmentation, or tactility – or conceptually, as objects imbued with embodied memory, affective force, or situated knowledge.

In the context of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde women’s practices, unruly objects can be especially potent: they may stand in for occluded labour, suppressed genealogies, or speculative futures. They may be wielded as tools of resistance, carriers of feminist knowledge, or mediators of spatial and political disobedience. We are particularly interested in papers that question genealogies, propose alternative historiographies, or examine the socio-political and aesthetic strategies employed by women working within (or against) these movements.

We encourage submissions that challenge Euro-American-centric frameworks that consider the disruptive agency and unruliness of objects and materials within women’s practices.

Contact Annabel Pretty, Unitec School of Architecture and Joanne Drayton