Call For Panels – AAANZ Conference 2018 – due 12 June 2018

A Message from Marnie Badham, co-convenor of the AAANZ conference for 2018:

On behalf of the 2018 AAANZ conference committee, my co-convenor Professor Daniel Palmer and myself, I would like to invite you to submit a panel proposal for our upcoming conference Aesthetics, Politics and Histories: The Social Context of Art, December 5-8, at the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. The conference will open critical dialogue on the histories of art by examining the social contexts of aesthetics and politics. Bringing together art historians, theorists, curators, critics, and artists from across the region, we will offer a four-day program of panels and papers, publication prizes, masterclasses and a parallel artistic program to be announced soon!

The conference features distinguished keynote speakers who will present expanded and alternative frameworks for understanding the diverse contexts and histories of art. Gabi Ngcobo (South Africa), curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale; Genevieve Grieves (AUS), Head of the First Peoples Department at Museums Victoria; and Ema Tavola (Fiji), independent curator are each engaged in critical curatorial practices aimed at democratising and decolonising art institutions and opening up art collections to alternative perspectives and narratives traditionally overlooked by museums and galleries. Art historian Professor Griselda Pollock (UK) from Leeds University is renowned for her postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory and research of trauma and the aesthetic in contemporary art.

The intersection of art and society is where differing worldviews and opposing epistemologies can meet and clash. Art offers a site for modelling political alternatives, questioning dominant discourses, and producing new historical narratives. Responding to the political, economic and environmental tensions of the present moment, the conference explores the relationship of the arts to social life throughout history. Located in a region marked by multiple and overlapping colonial and postcolonial histories and contemporary processes of globalisation, the conference aims to initiate critical dialogues that foreground the complex contexts, diverse practices, multiple histories, and contested trajectories of art.

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Genevieve Grieves is Worimi – traditionally from mid north coast New South Wales – and has lived on Kulin country in Melbourne for many years. 

She is an educator, curator, filmmaker, artist and oral historian who has accumulated nearly twenty years’ experience in the arts and culture industries. Some of her projects include the documentary, Lani’s Story; the video installation, Picturing the Old People; and, she was the Lead Curator of the internationally award-winning First Peoples exhibition at the Melbourne Museum. 

Genevieve has a role as a public intellectual and speaker and is undertaking her PhD in arts, memorialisation and frontier violence. She is Head of the First Peoples Department at Museums Victoria.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CENTRECATH) at the University of Leeds. 

Committed to creating and extending an international, postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, she is researches issues of trauma and the aesthetic in contemporary art expanding her concept of the virtual feminist museum (After-affects I After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Museum, Manchester, 2013; Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration (Freud Museum & Wild Pansy Press, 2013); both offer a feminist rereading of Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formulaat the intersection with psychoanalytical aesthetics. 

Since 2007, she has elaborated the concept of concentrationary memory in relation to the Arendtian critique of totalitarianism, in four publications with Max Silverman, Concentrationary Cinema (Berghahn, 2011) Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (I B Tauris, 2013) and Concentrationary Imaginaries:Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (, I B Tauris, 2015), and Concentrationary Art (2018). 

Just published is her monograph: Charlotte Salomon: The Nameless in the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2018) and forthcoming are Is Feminism a Bad Memory? (Verso, 2019), The Case against “Van Gogh”: Memory, Place and Modernist Disillusionment (Thames & Hudson, 2019) and Monroe’s Mov(i)es: Class, Gender and Nation in the work, image-making and agency of Marilyn Monroe (2020).

 

Gabi Ngcobo is the curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale. 

Since the early 2000s Ngcobo has been engaged in collaborative artistic, curatorial, and educational projects in South Africa and on an international scope. She is a founding member of the Johannesburg based collaborative platforms NGO – Nothing Gets Organised and Center for Historical Reenactments (CHR, 2010–14). NGO focusses on processes of self-organization that take place outside of predetermined structures, definitions, contexts, or forms. CHR responded to the demands of the moment through an exploration of how historical legacies impact and resonate within contemporary art.

Recently Ngcobo co-curated the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, which took place in 2016 at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo, and A Labour of Love at Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main in 2015/16) and travelled to the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2017. She has been teaching at the Wits School of Arts, University of Witswatersrand, ZA, since 2011. Her writings have been published in various catalogues, books, and journals. She currently lives and works between Johannesburg and Berlin.

Call for Panel Sessions

The Conference Committee invites proposals for panel sessions that respond to the conference theme Aesthetics, Politics and Histories: The Social Context of Art with a deadline of Tuesday 12 June 2018.

Proposals may consider the following subjects:

• Social histories of art across time and in diverse local and regional contexts and in their intersection with questions of gender, sexuality and race;
• Transformations in art production from the early modern period to today which extend the social, experimental, interdisciplinary and conceptual natures of art;
• The public sphere as a contested and diminishing site of dissent, artistic intervention and social participation;
• New critical approaches to exploring art historical representations of community, country and heritage;
• Changing social economies and labour practices which have unsettled the art market historically and have changed the way artists work and live today;
• Individual artistic responses, creative resistance and collaborative contributions to political moments of local, regional and global political significance over the centuries and today;
• Theorisation of historical movements and contemporary forms of public, socially engaged and participatory art;
• Historical and contemporary examples of democracy and pluralism in cultural production;
• Decentred modes of authorship that shift the focus on the individual artist, curator and writer towards new collective and collaborative approaches.

Session Format

• 90 minute panel sessions can host three 20 minute papers with 10 minutes of discussion. This needs to include introductions and speaker transitions.
• Alternative formats may be proposed such as roundtables, workshops, performance lectures, or open discussions, if they can be organised within the timetable structure of 90 minute sessions.
• Panel convenors are responsible for the section of papers and are encouraged to include scholars and artist across all stages of career. Postgraduate students are also encouraged to propose sessions.

Submission Process

• Submit panel proposals via the google form here: https://goo.gl/forms/TijiQiVZY4M7u1fB3. Please include: name and email address of the session convenor(s); institutional affiliation; session title; a brief abstract (250 word limit) that describes the session and how it fits with the conference theme.
• The deadline for session proposals is COB Tuesday 12 June 2018.
• Session convenors are required to be active members of AAANZ at the time of the conference and will be asked to renew or register for membership upon acceptance of their panel proposal.
• Session convenors will be notified of the acceptance of their proposed session on or before Monday 16 July 2018.
• Call for papers for accepted panel sessions will open on Monday 23 July 2018.
• Session convenors are expected to administer all enquiries and correspondence relating to their session in consultation with the Conference Committee. Call for papers closes Friday 31 August.

Contact

Please address all correspondence to the conference producer, Amy Spiers, conf@aaanz.info.

Conference Committee

Dr Marnie Badham, Convenor, Vice Chancellor’s Post Doctoral Research Fellow, School of Art, RMIT University

Professor Daniel Palmer, (Co-convenor) Associate Dean Research and Innovation, School of Art, RMIT University

Dr Grace McQuilten, Lecturer, School of Art, CAST, Contemporary Art & Social Transformation, RMIT University

Dr Kristen Sharp, Coordinator Art: History + Theory + Cultures, School of Art, RMIT University

Dr Gretchen Coombs, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, School of Media and Communications, RMIT University

Mr Stephen Gilchrist, Associate Lecturer of Indigenous Art, University of Sydney

Dr Francis Maravillas, School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney

Dr Anthony White, AAANZ President, Senior Lecturer, Cultural and Communications, University of Melbourne

Dr Ngarino Ellis, Senior Lecturer, Art History, The University of Auckland

Dr Jacqueline Millner, Associate Professor Visual Arts, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University

Professor Barbara Bolt, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne

Professor David Cross, Visual Arts, Deakin University

Zoë Bastin and Clare McCraken, RMIT HDR Student Representatives

Amy Spiers, Conference Producer

Giles Fielke, AAANZ Business Manager

 

Funding support for the conference includes the Ian Potter Foundation and The International Visiting Scholar Fund through RMIT University as well as AAANZ, School of Art and the DCP ECP.