Call for Papers | 2026 Conference

Centre-periphery and nationalist models for art history have traditionally divided artists’ practices according to contained geographies. During a period of imperial expansion in the long 19th century, this has resulted in a division between artists based in European metropoles (whose craft was premised on proxies, specimens or written accounts) from colonial-based artists, whose distance from European centres of teaching and exhibition had them considered provincial and technically less refined. But shipping routes in this period were lively networks that connected, rather than distanced, artists and ideas, and colonial contexts were violent places which spurred innovation with materials and media.

This panel invites papers on, but not limited to, the following topics:

- The mobility of artists, especially those less well-represented in art histories such as First Nations artists who leveraged imperial networks and women ‘globe-trotteresses’.
- Methodological approaches that reconsider the usefulness of national art histories, through the lens of artists who trouble boundaries by moving between spaces and places.
- The movement of artworks and ideas through commercial and imperial networks, particularly through exhibitions, and institutional collecting.
- Contemporary artists’ engagements with the materiality of 19-century artworks, taonga and First Nations Cultural property and/or with the legacies of their movement in the 19th century.

Contact: Rebecca Rice, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Elisa deCourcy, National Gallery of Australia / Australia National University

Architectural Journeys Through Image, Memory, & Spatial Imagination: invites papers considering— journey—not simply as movement through geography, but as a metaphysical and metaphorical passage through architectural representation, media, memory, and spatial imagination. Architecture has always travelled. Drawings migrate into buildings; photographs outlive demolition; renders speculate upon futures not yet realised. Images circulate faster than structures themselves. Today, architectural space increasingly exists in mediated form: scanned, compressed, rendered, archived, glitched, and algorithmically reproduced. The architectural image no longer merely documents space — it produces new spatial conditions. This panel asks how architectural imagery operates as a vessel of temporal passage. How do representations carry traces of obsolete technologies, vanished interiors, atmospheric residues, or fragmented cultural memory? How might architectural practice itself be understood as a movement between analogue and post-photographic conditions? Possible lines of inquiry may engage with recent texts such as: Hito Steyerl (2025): Natasha Chuk (2025), or Christopher Bardt, (2024) alongside enduring theoretical frameworks such as The Poetics of Space, (1994) where Bachelard describes the house as a container: “a portal to metaphors of imagination.” Rather than treating architecture as fixed objecthood, this panel positions spatial practice as an unstable field of transmission—one shaped by memory chips, visual residues, and representational drift. The journey here may be archival, cinematic, phenomenological, digital, speculative, or mnemonic. In the spirit of Haereka, this panel asks not where architecture is, but how it travels.

Contact: Dominik Lengyel, Brandenberg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg and Lengyel Toulouse Architects and Annabel Pretty, Unitec

This panel examines the limits of “consultation” as a framework for research and exhibition-making in Aotearoa and Australia. Now routine within galleries and museums, consultation often stabilises rather than redistributes authority, leaving intact the structures through which exhibitions are authored, interpreted, and realised. The panel asks what practice, relation, and responsibility emerge when consultation is no longer sufficient.

Rather than framing collaboration as method or outcome, the discussion approaches exhibition-making as an ongoing negotiation across epistemic, institutional, linguistic, socio-economic, embodied, and cultural difference. It foregrounds unresolved processes, including the labour of mediation, translation, and realisation in gallery contexts with Indigenous, migrant, diasporic, working-class, queer, and neurodivergent practitioners.

Within this frame, He Waka Eke Noa (a shared journey and shared responsibility) articulates the relational conditions underpinning intersectional exhibition practice. Rather than a metaphor for harmony, it signals attentiveness to uneven responsibilities, dependencies, and obligations within collaborative institutional settings.

Engaging the conference theme Haereka, the panel considers exhibition-making as journeys through which authority, voice, and knowledge are continually reconfigured. It attends to unstable boundaries between institutional and intersectional practice, asking how exhibitions might be understood not as resolved objects, but as ongoing sites of relational practice across difference.

The panel includes a 5-minute introduction, three 20-minute papers, and a 25-minute facilitated roundtable/Q&A connecting the papers.

Contact: Izzy Hillman, Aigantighe Art Gallery

This panel welcomes a conversation around working with ephemeral art archives and histories. Thinking with the burgeoning of post-object, conceptual and performance practices in Australia during the 1970s; artworks that were counter-institutional in their time continue to confound the institutions that would collect, exhibit and teach with them.

Welcoming their unruly presence, this panel invites discussion on the potential of the disruptive role within the archive of ephemeral, performative and anti-institutional practices, asking:
• What are the possibilities of following the score, or rehearsal?
• What is gained when we come to know performance art histories through re-enactment with the body?
• Does documentation become art after the art is gone?
• How can we hold such works in lively relation to art practices now?

Much like LARP (Live Action Role Playing), which are communities creatively invested in performing history with their bodies, what would happen if the recent history of contemporary art was played through the body rather than through static black and white photographs?

This 90-minute panel welcomes submissions for either 20minute papers or 10minute creative presentations.

Contact: Bridget Currie, Adelaide Central School of Art and Sasha Grbich, Adelaide Central School of Art

As new technologies either hype their ability to transform, speed up our research in art history or threaten to disrupt our teaching and research and make us all obsolete, is it time to take a critical look at how we are doing art historical research in the contemporary moment? This panel invites papers that critically consider how our art history methodologies are changing and evolving. These might include (but are not limited to):

1. Art history research projects that foreground the use of digital tools and/or online platforms.
2. Creative and experimental methods for doing art history (3D modelling, automation, data visualisation, data scraping and hacking).
3. Critiques of digitisation and automation, threats, disruptions, and challenges posed by mass digitisation, data harvesting and the rise of synthetic text and images.
4. Interdisciplinary methods that seek to bring the study of visual and material culture into dialogue with other disciplines.
5. Research that considers the role of ‘critical looking’ as a method developed by art historians that can be applied beyond art history to the digital world.

The goal of this panel is to prompt us to think more deeply about how our research practices shape our research outputs, so we ask that, whatever the focus of the paper, presenters offer a thoughtful explanation and critique of how they carry out research. Including how those methods shape choices about the material they work with, the questions they ask, and the conclusions they present.

Contact:  Katrina Grant, Power Institute for Art & Visual Culture , University of Sydney and Mark Ledbury, Power Institute for Art & Visual Culture , University of Sydney

We live in an extractive zone. The colonial enterprise in Aotearoa, Australia and across the Pacific continues unabated with recent proposals for offshore drilling in Taranaki and open cast mining in Tarras. The list is exhausting: oil drilling, coal and mineral mining, forestry and logging, hydroelectric power dams, industrial scale fisheries, and monocrop farming. Phosphorus-rich sand from the Western Sahara is spread over the fields of Aotearoa. Resources continue to be removed from the earth. The extractive journey of critical minerals is just one of the mass movements that characterise the early Twenty-first century.

The 1975 Land march, led by Dame Whina Cooper and Te Rōpū o te Matakite, was a hīkoi against the ongoing loss of Māori land. Dame Whina Cooper’s rallying cry “Not one more acre” demanded the protection of the remaining acres of Māori land; what remained after millions of acres of land have been stolen and appropriated by the Crown in their endless demand for resources. The extractive flows that began with tall ships journeying across the Atlantic and Pacific, is once again made visible with fossil fuels at the centre of a violent transformation of life across the planet.

This panel is interested in short papers that consider:
Artists as critical ecologists
Remediation and landfills
Sediment, erosion and the movements of earth
Kaitiatitanga and resistance
Regenerative and reparative materials and practices
Alternative energy systems
Labor and the exploitation of bodies
The journeys of critical minerals

Presentations should be 10-15 minutes to facilitate a conversation between all participants. Speculative projects that imagine future ecologies are most welcome.

Contact: Susan Ballard, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington

What is described or experienced as difficult in the visual arts or visual culture 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. Time and the journey through time can shift meaning quickly and unpredictably. This session considers the theme of difficulty and difficult art, as well as the ways in which aesthetic reception changes over time. Papers might examine difficult topics such as feminist artists' investigations of abortion or rape, now regarded as triggering; the recent cancellation of art projects that hinge on ethnic identity in a period of recrudescent racism; confronting topics that some might regard as inappropriate to represent such as images of children or violence, suffering, genocide, and war; and the challenges of writing about writers or artists whose lives do not conform to current moral codes.

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

This panel expands on ideas explored in Artlink Australia’s special issue Discontent [working title], with a focus on contemporary art in Aotearoa / Māori / Moana Oceania communities, Guest Edited by Karl Chitham ONZM (Ngā Puhi, Te Uriroroi) Director of The Dowse Art Museum, and Ioana Gordon-Smith Sāmoan / Pākehā arts writer and curator Pātaka Art + Museum.

Discontent is fundamentally a transformative tool — or it can be — because it emerges from the belief that things (socially and structurally) need to shift in both subtle and radical ways. With this in mind, we ask how artists, writers and curators from the Pacific region are unpacking and reacting to larger issues of cultural identity, intercultural exchange and the persistent residue of colonial experiences and histories. We invite papers that engage with such topics and speculate on what potential destinations look like, and how the notion of journey might be reclaimed and redirected in a contemporary context.

Artlink's Discontent (Warltati / Summer 2026) will be launched at the annual AAANZ conference in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Contact: Karl Chitham, The Dowse Art Museum and Tabatha Forbes, Artlink Australia

This panel recovers the lesser-known histories of artists whose journeys to and from Aotearoa or Australia shaped their practice in significant and often overlooked ways. Moving beyond familiar narratives of European influence in the Pacific, the panel centres the experiences of a diverse range of artists — Māori, Pākehā, Pasifika, Asian New Zealanders, Jewish refugees, women, and migrants of many origins — whose mobility, displacement, or exile brought them into contact with new artistic traditions, and whose stories have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve.

The panel encompasses movement in both directions. It examines artists from Aotearoa or Australia who travelled to Europe and elsewhere seeking professional recognition, exhibition opportunities, and engagement with the international art world, and what they encountered and returned with stylistically. It equally considers those who arrived in Aotearoa or Australia from overseas — whether drawn by opportunity, driven by necessity, or fleeing persecution — and the artistic languages they brought with them, and how the new environment transformed their practice in turn.

Central to the panel is the experience of return and reception. Many of these artists returned to an art world that was ill-equipped to receive them — their new ideas misunderstood, their evolved practices unwelcome, and their ambitions at odds with prevailing local taste.

Papers may address any period from the era of early European contact to the present and may draw on archival, object-based, biographical, or indigenous art historical approaches.

This panel comprises three 20-minute presentations, each followed by 10 minutes of questions.

Contact: Miriam Olds Spence, Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland

This session invites contributions that examine the movements, exchanges, and trajectories through which graphic design histories in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific have been produced, circulated, remembered, and contested.

These journeys may be geographical, cultural, institutional, or methodological: from print workshops to digital platforms; commercial studios to activist movements; local practices to international networks of influence and exchange. The session asks how graphic design histories travel across and between fields such as art history, visual culture, media studies, publishing history, and material culture, and whether graphic design demands distinct historical approaches and research methods.

We particularly welcome papers that reflect on the journeys of archives, objects, and practitioners themselves. What materials and voices have been preserved, overlooked, or excluded? How do historians work with ephemera, oral histories, vernacular design, community collections, or digital-born artefacts? How can/do indigenous research methodologies reshape how graphic design histories are produced and shared? What new stories emerge when graphic design is understood not as a peripheral (and often) commercial practice, but as a vital site of cultural production? Rather than proposing a singular narrative, this session aims to create an open and expansive space for tracing the many journeys of graphic design and its histories across Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific.

Contact: Barbara Garrie, University of Canterbury and Luke Wood, University of Canterbury

This panel foregrounds the shared yet uneven impacts of colonial and patriarchal infrastructures, with particular attention to how subjectivity is reconfigured through ritual, relationality, and embodied practice. We invite artistic researchers, artists, curators, film screenings, and or studio performances to discover how physical and metaphorical ‘journeys’ influence artistic process, be it through textual documentation, voice, film, dance, photography, poetry, or prose. Contributions may explore physical or symbolic journeys to specific sites as catalysts for personal and collective transformation, healing, and empowerment. Rather than understanding journeying as mere experience, this panel emphasises the importance of recognising the past as integral to how the present is interpreted and recontextualised. We welcome artistic responses that position performance journeys as vital modes for activating memory and as methodological tools for engaging lived experience.

Contact: Athene Currie, Griffith University and Sonia York-Pryce, Flinders University

In alignment with the 2026 AAANZ theme Haereka, this double session investigates the multifaceted "journeys" of Māori and Pacific taonga to challenge the colonial perception of the museum as a final destination. We invite papers that examine the tensions between an object’s physical displacement and its evolving journey, tracing the life of taonga from their ancestral origins through the complexities of institutional display toward potential journeys away, centered on community reconnection.

By highlighting how Indigenous communities, artists and curators reactivate these trajectories, the session explores the transition of taonga from static artifacts back into living heritage. This exploration will culminate in a Talanoa, facilitating a collaborative discussion on new approaches that reflect possible journeys both within and beyond museum spaces.

Contact: Caroline Vercoe, University of Auckland, and the Pacific Arts Association, Pacific Branch and Chantal Knowles, Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum

This two-session panel examines art history in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand as a discipline formed through journeys: across oceans, institutions, intellectual traditions, communities, archives and contested histories. Taking the 80th anniversary of the appointment of Joseph Burke as the inaugural Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1946 as a point of departure, the panel asks how art history in the region has travelled, settled, been unsettled, and transformed over time.

The panel revisits the question of whether there is, or has ever been, an 'Australian/New Zealand school' of art history, while resisting any simple national or regional model. It invites papers that trace the discipline's shifting itineraries, including from European intellectual inheritances to settler-colonial institutions; from university departments to museums, galleries and professional organisations; from canonical art histories to Indigenous, feminist, decolonial, Asian, Pacific, environmental and transnational frameworks.

In direct relation to the AAANZ conference theme of Haereka, the panel considers art history itself as a journeying practice: one shaped by migration, distance, pedagogy, exchange, disciplinary rupture and renewal. Papers may address influential departments, educators, curators, exhibitions, publications, research networks, teaching models, under-recognised figures, or moments of methodological change. The panel will combine historical reflection with forward-looking analysis, asking not only where art history in the region has come from, but where it might be headed.

Contact: Anthony White, University of Melbourne and Victoria Perin, University of Melbourne

Half a century after the first institutional exhibitions dedicated to sound art, the sonic aspects of modern and contemporary art remain under-explored. Major contemporary art exhibitions increasingly feature prominent sound works, yet much of the history of the integration of sound into the expanded field of art practice remains to be written. This panel brings together researchers working on sonic practices of 20th and 21st century art, without limiting this to the field of ‘sound art’, instead inviting broader consideration of how 20th and 21st art histories might be reoriented from the perspective of sonic practices.

In mapping these origins and trajectories we broach three key areas of focus. First, that sound in modern and contemporary art has been inherently intermedial, integrated into varieties of visual, literary, and performative practice. Second, that one of the key concerns of the sonic arts has been with ‘translation’, the making-intelligible of information and energy through sonification. Third, the panel will consider the centrality of the body to sonic practices of all kinds, both as producer and hearer of sound.

We thus invite submissions that address the intermedial connections of sonic practices to other forms including poetry, dance, film, and theatre; that chart the processes of translation performed by the sonic arts; or that consider the body as a site from and through which sound travels.

Contact: Elyssia Bugg, University of Melbourne and Francis Plagne, University of Melbourne

Cross-cultural engagement is nothing extraordinary in the world of contemporary art or is it? Do differing cultural perspectives really find common ground or are pre-existing power dynamics and stereotypes simply reinforced or masked by new terminology and novel sentiments? In artistic and art historical journeying which sets out to look both ways, how do we avoid ending up cross-eyed? When does a new kind of looking, a new form of cultural interface begin? This panel invites papers which respond to ‘culture’ as a conceptual journey and which explore artistic and art historical endeavours across and between cultures. While it’s anticipated that papers will address cross-culturalism through postcolonial and neocolonial lenses, the panel also looks beyond such parameters and beyond cross-culturalism as a duality. The looking may be more than both/two ways. Papers which consider cross-cultural aesthetics in an intracultural light are also welcome, i.e., the traversing of distinct cultural or subcultural expressions within a broader cultural domain.

Contact: Maurice O'Riordan, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education and Wendy Garden, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

How do we trace the journeys of creativity through data? Can data capture the rich, layered stories of artists, collections, exhibitions, and cultural movements without losing the nuance that gives them meaning?

Across the visual arts and design sectors, data is becoming an increasingly important companion to creative practice. It shapes how we communicate value, measure impact, preserve histories, and imagine futures. However, arts data remains fragmented and fragile, often constrained by limited sustainability, inconsistent standards, and challenges of interoperability. These conditions shape the paths artists, organisations, researchers, and governments can take in understanding and evidencing cultural impact.

This panel invites papers that reflect on the journeys between creativity and data in visual arts and design. We are interested in stories of transition, translation, experimentation, and return: how creative practice becomes data; how data travels across systems, institutions, and communities; and how it can return to enrich cultural understanding.

We welcome contributions that explore questions such as:
What journeys does arts data take, and who guides or shapes those pathways?
How are artists, organisations, and researchers navigating the shift toward data-driven cultures?
In what ways can data reveal, preserve, or transform cultural histories and legacies?
How can we build more sustainable, connected, and meaningful data ecosystems for the arts?

We are particularly interested in reflections on your own data journeys and the ways you are using data to tell stories, demonstrate impact, build connections, and imagine new futures for the arts.

Contact: Scott East, University of New South Wales

What journeys do objects make — and what is lost or transformed when they are forced to travel? This panel traces the movement of objects, images, and material culture through colonial displacement and into the uncertain terrain of restitution, repair, and decolonial return.

Taking as its starting point the entangled histories of extraction that dispersed Indigenous material culture into Western museum collections, the panel draws on Ariella Azoulay’s Potential History and her call to unmake the disassociation between people and colonial objects — reframing them instead as living companions or missing people. Papers will ask: what does it mean to return to the moment objects went missing, in order to reconstitute a common world? What historiographies and forms of reparation can practice-led research engender, including through photogrammetry, collaborative casting, community archival research, and participatory critical fabulation?

While anchored in a case study connecting Central African and Scandinavian colonial histories, the panel welcomes contributions from across geographies — particularly Pacific, Indigenous Australian, and Aotearoa New Zealand scholarship, where questions of repatriation and living heritage are equally urgent. The site of the conference, Te Waipounamu, offers a resonant context: the ancestral journeys of Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, and Ngāi Tahu peoples remind us that traversal carries spiritual and relational weight, and that tracing colonial routes in reverse is both scholarly and ethical work.

The panel invites papers from practice-led researchers, artists, and scholars whose work engages directly with communities, collections, and colonial archives.

Contact: Cecilia Järdemar, Australian National University

This panel invites an exploration of how art, grounded in sensory experiences and multisensory approaches, opens up alternative pathways to navigate place, culture, crisis and perception. This expanded understanding of the senses emphasises the crucial role of the body and sensory engagement in aesthetic experience and meaning-making within the arts. This panel aims to reconsider and challenge Western ocularcentrism, the traditional separation of the senses, and the reductive sensory formalism characteristic of Modernism and Occidental aesthetic theories.

We encourage proposals that consider the cultural, environmental, and relational entanglement of the senses, embracing diverse sensory models and art's potential to decolonise entrenched sensory frameworks. When perception is understood as unfolding through multiple modalities, artworks can no longer be viewed as objects relating to a single sense. This repositions art as a product of situated encounters, and forces a reappraisal of categories within art itself. Multisensory approaches could reveal tacit forms of knowledge and understandings distinct from those offered by purely visual or single-sense focused methods. When discourse fails, sensory methods might be used to evoke empathy and explore current existential threats at a bodily level. We particularly welcome proposals that engage with multisensory and sense-focused art through practice-led research, as well as contemporary theories that emphasise embodiment and relationality, including phenomenological, posthumanist and crossmodal approaches, embodied cognition, new materialism and affect theory. Presentations might demonstrate sensory works.

Contact: Jo Burzynska and Catherine Sarah Young, University of New South Wales

In Ruth Watson’s 2017 installation Geophagy, a video embedded in a precarious tower of discarded synthetic clothing shows a white hand squeezing a globe-shaped stress ball. This metaphor for extractive capitalism exerting pressure on the planet’s biosphere connects themes of corporate office culture, anxiety, and consumptive anthropocentric megalomania, yet the inviting tactility and illusory comfort of the squashy sphere and mounded textiles offer further hermeneutical possibilities. This panel seeks to foreground the meanings of soft materiality, contending that squashy and fluffy objects, and their attendant epistemologies, have been neglected in art histories and canon-shaping museological practices.

Indeed, ‘fluff’ is often used as a term to describe the irrelevant and trivial, and where art histories have engaged with notions of the soft, the word is typically used metaphorically – perhaps associated with emotions and introspection, or to describe the role of art in diplomacy. However, the physical softness of material culture is under-theorised, and when attention is paid to soft objects, it is usually despite their yielding textures rather than expressly concerned with these. This session therefore seeks papers (addressing any time period or place) that explore how soft materials themselves are agentic and subversive, and how meandering fibres and their origins – be these animal, vegetable, or mineral – are enmeshed in objects, shaping their social and museological lives. In their amorphous capacity to tangle, shrink, and shed, soft and fluffy items materially signify journeys through space and time, and underpin histories of art, craft, and visual cultures in Aotearoa, Australia, and further afield.

Contact: Rosie Ibbotson, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury and Katie Powell Wright, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury

Journey was fundamental to Surrealism in multiple, interconnected ways. At its core, modern Surrealism sought to move beyond rational reality: journeying into the Freudian unconscious, dreams, and altered psychic states. Yet Surrealists also imagined political and social transformation, proposing alternative futures and modes of being that challenged normative gender, sexuality and identity. The movement itself was profoundly shaped by movement across borders through travel, exile, migration and transnational artistic exchange. Its visual language emerged not only from Europe but also through complex encounters with cultures and artistic traditions across the Pacific, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia, for instance, contributing to Surrealism’s global circulation and continual reinvention.

Today, Surrealism continues as a travelling, transnational visual language, historically mobile and continually activated. This panel examines Surrealism as an enduring artistic impetus that has evolved over time and across places as a powerful form of visual, social, and psychic disruption and incursion. The panel examines both examples of 21st-century artists who mobilise surrealism to negotiate political, colonial, ecological, or diasporic histories, and the ways modern surrealist artists’ practices speak to contemporary issues, resonating through new interpretive frameworks. Papers may interrogate the circulation and transformation of surrealist motifs across generations and geographies; feminist and queer reappropriation of surrealist aesthetics; uncanny embodiments informed by science and technology; fragmented or displaced subjectivities; memory, dream imagery and Indigenous mythologies.

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

Aesthetic experience is increasingly understood as a form of learning in which art is used as a catalyst for engagement, reflection, and transformation, rather than as an object of contemplation. Within this perspective, and rooted in Mezirow’s well-established Transformative Learning Theory in adult education, learning is understood as a process that offers a rich landscape for examining how learners rethink assumptions through disruption and the reorganisation of meaning.

This panel focuses specifically on designing a transformative learning experience that teaches the process of creativity through aesthetic engagement. We begin by mapping key methodologies in transformative learning through aesthetic experience, highlighting how they create conditions for learners to engage imaginatively, emotionally, and reflectively. This is followed by a practice-based workshop that invites participants to experience creativity as it unfolds through a structured yet emergent process.

The workshop draws on Alexis Kokkos’ framework of transformative learning through aesthetic experience, guiding participants to articulate their existing ways of seeing and interpreting the creative process. They then engage closely with carefully selected artworks, chosen not to represent meaning directly but to provoke emotional and imaginative responses. Through sustained reflection and dialogue, participants are encouraged to generate new associations, interpretations, and ways of understanding, ultimately experiencing how aesthetic experience can be intentionally designed as a pedagogy for teaching creativity.

Contact: Nadereh Ghelich Khani, Australian National University

In the 21st century the study of sculpture continues its secondary position in art historical research. However, numbers of the most productive artists to arrive on Australasian shores during and beyond World War II were trained in, or came to practice sculpture. The list includes Margel Hinder (USA), Danila Vassilieff (Russian Empire), Lenton Parr and Donald Brook (UK), Inge King (Germany), Vincas Jomantas (Lithuania), and Rosalie Gascoigne (NZ).

The current thematics of transculturalism and decolonial studies make for useful interpretative frameworks. Leonard Bell's book "Strangers arrive: Émigrés and the Arts in New Zealand 1930-80" (2017) poses apposite questions: “How did displacement and settlement in New Zealand transform their work? How did the arrival of European modernists intersect with the burgeoning nationalist movement?” Butler and Donaldson’s "UnAustralian Art" (2022) further questions the discourse of national identities for artists who experienced what Papastergiadis calls the “turbulence of migration”. Reception studies are a key interest: were émigrés the subject of cultural admiration, or prejudice and suspicion?

Within such interpretive frameworks, we welcome new work recovering postwar émigré sculpture: its modes and theories ('truth to materials'), its materials and techniques (found objects; aluminium) its ‘period styles’ up to the burgeoning of installation art from 1970. In a 1969 survey Noel Hutchison provided a nomenclature – ‘postwar humanism’; ‘residual organicism’; ‘symbol and machine’ – pertinent on either side of the Ditch. The NGA Canberra’s new hang 'Migration and Modernism' on immigrant postwar proves the currency of these concerns, and the need for fresh in-depth research.

Contact: Roger Benjamin, University of Sydney

This panel will explore how contemporary artists from Aotearoa, Australia and the wider Pacific critically engage with three enduring visual and conceptual tropes associated with early European maritime journeys; the ship, the shore, and the encounter. These motifs remain central to how histories of journeying, contact, displacement and settlement are imagined and represented in Oceania.

Submissions examining how the ship, shoreline, and scene of encounter are reconfigured in contemporary art are welcomed. How are these tropes visual frameworks through which histories are remembered, resisted or reimagined? In what ways are artists disrupting, reclaiming or reworking this iconography to create new ways of understanding Oceanic histories and their ongoing present-day entanglements? What does the ship, once emblematic of exploration and expansion, now signify? How is the contact zone of the shore represented, as Pacific historian/anthropologist Greg Dening described it, as “a theatrical site where history and culture are performed”? Which encounters are staged, remembered, refused or re-configured through these works?

Possible themes may include reworking of these tropes in relation to sovereignty, terra nullius and settler colonial narratives of arrival in Australia, challenges that decolonise Eurocentric maritime histories through recognition of Indigenous voyaging traditions in Aotearoa, artistic engagements grounded in Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s concept of Fourth Cinema centring Indigenous perspectives and epistemologies, and Pacific histories of missionary activity, slavery and labour migration.

Contact: Karen Blennerhassett, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland

This panel explores galleries as spaces of transition, navigation, and learning within contemporary art and educational contexts. Responding to the conference theme, the session considers how galleries support movement between student and professional identities, institution and community, artistic experimentation and public engagement.

Across Aotearoa and internationally, galleries in tertiary institutions occupy complex positions as sites of exhibition-making, pedagogy, research, and cultural exchange. They are spaces where artistic and professional journeys are shaped, negotiated, and made visible. At the same time, galleries themselves navigate changing institutional expectations, shifting cultural priorities, and questions of sustainability and value.

This session invites papers, practice-led presentations, and case studies that engage with galleries as educational, relational, and transitional spaces. Contributions may consider:

* galleries as sites of learning, pedagogy, or public education;
* student pathways into creative practice and the arts sector;
* curatorial practice within tertiary or community settings;
* galleries as spaces of connection between institutions and communities;
* artistic journeys, migration, and movement through gallery contexts;
* institutional navigation, precarity, and sustainability;
* galleries as spaces of belonging, experimentation, or cultural exchange;
* the role of exhibitions in shaping artistic and professional identities.

The panel welcomes contributions from researchers, curators, educators, artists, and practitioners working across gallery, museum, tertiary, and community contexts.

Contact: Wendy Richdale, Wintec

Far from being in limbo or ‘all at sea’, objects often asserted their agency on their journey(s) from place to place. Thinking primarily (but not exclusively) about the sea-based voyages that moved materials around the globe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this session invites papers that explore the material culture of journeying and the associated processes which both conceal and uncover ways of interpreting objects. Acts of packing, stacking, crating, listing, and describing, among others, often mark out items as being in transit. In doing so they shift how they are perceived and can even inform what happens to them at their journey’s end.

Contact: Bojana Rimbovska, University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha and Terri Elder, University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

In recent years, artists have taken what has been called a translocal approach to practice. In Anthony Gardner’s analysis, the translocal is exemplified by artworks that ‘draw different local histories, contexts, and aesthetic modalities together’. Such works are at once situated and mobile. They embody entanglements of roots and routes that stem from and pass through often dichotomised sites: entwining specific concerns, resources and technologies of urban and rural localities, public and private spheres, indigenous and settler spaces, and intimate and distant domains. The translocal travels below the national, bypasses the centre, disrupts centre/periphery models, reaches out to and grounds the global, and complicates the gendered and racialised local–global binary, whereby the local is (mis)taken as the passive recipient of the dynamic global.

But if, as Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson claim, ‘art is always translocal, metropolitan, caught up in a movement between places’, are translocal aesthetics specific to the global contemporary? If all art is, to an extent, ontologically peripatetic, how do we come to write translocal histories of art(isanal) practice more broadly, while attending to the transcultural? Translocal art histories may offer a corrective to the limitations of national and global art histories, but how can they avoid reproducing the hegemonies, power asymmetries and, in Tony Ballantyne’s words, ‘durable consequences’ of the (neo)imperial and (neo)colonial regimes in which they/we are entwined? Can the translocal be decolonial?

We invite 20-minute papers that explore the unexpected intersections of art(ists) and locales and the minor histories these unfold.

Contact: Millie Riddell, The Courtauld Institute and Leah Houghton 

Taking up Haereka as an invitation to journey, this panel turns to the visual itineraries of the long nineteenth century, when, long before the Anthropocene named our present crisis, images giving account of environmental change were already in motion. European-trained artists surveyed coastlines, catalogued minerals, and depicted sublime landscapes in works that normally circulated from the periphery to the metropole. Landscape painting and topographic illustration were themselves forms of journeying as artists travelled the colonial Pacific and the so-called Global South alongside surveyors, prospectors, and settler administrations, producing images that recorded and authorised the transformation of land, including its measurement, its mining, and its rebranding as colonial property.

This panel starts from the premise that climate change is not only a scientific crisis but a cultural condition anchored to the period after the Industrial Revolution and the eco-colonialism that followed. How did the landscapes explored, sketched, and painted between 1800 and 1899 produce a particular way of seeing the colonial earth? The question is urgent in colonial and postcolonial contexts, where representations of land, air, water, and life have served extractivist ideologies and continue to inform environmental discourse today. Papers span nineteenth-century landscape painting, topographic illustration, survey drawing, and related visual practices across the colonial Pacific, Australasia, and the wider Global South. We particularly welcome contributions from scholars, artists, and curators, as well as proposals that engage Indigenous knowledges of land, country, and environment.

Contact: Miguel Gaete, University of Melbourne

This session calls for papers that consider the currents, literal and metaphorical, moving through watery exchanges. Whether localised products of tidal rhythms or climate-shaping sweeps that cross the globe, the flow of nutrients, temperatures, beings, rubbish and remains shifted by currents are a constant reminder of interconnection, permeability and impermanence. Under/Currents invites speculation on visible and invisible forces, readings of the signals of stillness and turbulence, and questions of how hydrofeminisms and hydrocommons might speak to historical and contemporary artistic practices.

The session encourages submissions that explore alternative modes of presentation and performance that embrace embodiment, multi-sensory modalities, and responsiveness to place.

Contact: Karen Hall, University of Tasmania

Indigenous creative and cultural practices have always been deeply rooted in relational care for people and Country—knowledge exchange, collaboration, healing and strengthening relationships between human and more-than-human kin. These practices are intrinsic to keeping our people and Country healthy and our social, political, epistemological and spiritual systems regenerative and functioning. The recent inclusion of Indigenous creative practices within Western art histories and contexts has not been without complexity. This engagement has enabled pathways for our voices to be heard, cultural practices revitalised and sociopolitical realities collectively engaged with. Concurrently, the holding of our creative practices within institutions and discourses driven by non-Indigenous agendas, values and determinations prompts questions about maintaining our accountabilities to people and Country within frameworks and processes that can flatten, limit or reduce relational dimensions of practice—physically, aesthetically, conceptually or procedurally. At a time of escalating environmental and social harm, we recenter and critically engage with the purpose and possibilities of relational creative practice within and beyond the institution. To what extent can institutional settings hold relational practice, whether by failure or design? How do we expand conceptualisations of Indigenous art to enable the fullness of relational practice and its vitality within human and more-than-human systems? We invite Indigenous practitioners and researchers to sit with these questions and contribute their own—towards departure points or reorientation in our journeying with art institutions, guided by our responsibilities to people and Country.

Contact: Dominique Chen, University of Queensland and Freja Carmichael, University of Queensland

Addressing Indigenous connections and histories alongside the layered complexity of place for pākehā and tauiwi makers, this panel invites discussion of ephemeral practices and sculptural forms that derive from immersion in the environment. The session will include case studies of artists from Te Waipounamu, the South Island of Aotearoa, bringing focus to this region of extraordinary mountains, rivers, swamps and plains. The convenors also invite contributions on and by artists from elsewhere who make through moving lightly with the land, observing and relating; enacting a quiet politics through practice.

In the Earth Ethics compilation of texts, Australian editors Madeleine Collie, Megan Cope, Charlotte Day and Melissa Ratliff define a guiding principle for artists, institutions and cultural workers that is informed by First Nations philosophies and the reciprocal relationships we have with the ecological communities we are part of. Considering this framework and also the urgency of environmental concerns for the climate today, how can we rethink the relevancy of land art histories and the work of artists making projects within the landscape or using natural materials? In the words of Candice Hopkins, can we shift the conversation from sustainability to thinking about what sustains us? How do we give agency to the earth, water and air? What does it mean to make work with the land?

Contact: Melanie Oliver, University of New South Wales and Melissa Macleod