74. Prophetic Temporalities: Visualising Futures in Southeast Asia

How have images, objects, and social practices enabled people to anticipate uncertain futures? Building on the works of Ashley Thompson, Pamela Corey, and others in the field of Southeast Asian art history that challenge linear and secular models of historical chronology and on the 2025 Annual Conference’s “Regionalist and Other Decolonising Perspectives” panel on cultivating alternative approaches from the region, this session proposes prophecy as a productive lens for rethinking questions of temporality, memory, and historical imagination in art history. Rather than treating prophecy solely as a theological category, the session approaches it as a broader mode of anticipation through which communities have imagined, negotiated, and inhabited uncertain worlds shaped by violence, displacement, ecological extraction, and discrimination. From images, objects, architectures, performances, media practices to collective actions and networks of human and more-than-human relations, these manifestations not only represented but also participated in coping with change, crisis, hope, and possibility. By foregrounding anticipation and uncertainty as analytical categories, this session contributes to current debates in global art history concerning temporality, affect, and the production of futures. It proposes Southeast Asia as a critical site for understanding how visual and material culture participate in the negotiation of uncertain presents, sustain fragile forms of coexistence, and imagine possibilities for living otherwise. We welcome contributions addressing a wide range of periods, media, and methodological approaches.

Papers might examine the visualisation of future worlds, the materialisation of collective hopes and fears, the aesthetics of waiting and expectation, or the role of art in mediating moments of political, ecological, or spiritual uncertainty, all of which complicate dominant narratives of modernity, progress, and historical development.

Themes: uncertainty, collective hope, visual and material cultures

Additional format comment: Maximum 5 papers and a respondent.

Lead Convenor: Panggah Ardiyansyah, SOAS University of London, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Kiki Rizky Soetisna Putri, Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.