Global New Voices
- Region: Online
- Type: Conference
- Cost: Free
Global New Voices is the Association for Art History’s annual one-day conference for new postgraduate research about art, art history and visual culture, organised by our Doctoral and Early Career Research Committee.
Focusing on the theme of Art history and the Contemporary, our 2026 event brings together emerging researchers whose work explores how historical and contemporary perspectives intersect across artistic practice, curatorial work, and art-historical scholarship. Through a series of online presentations and discussions, the symposium will offer fresh perspectives on the ways artists, curators, and researchers engage with the past in the present, highlighting the breadth and vitality of current postgraduate research from across the discipline.
Our contemporary moment is marked by a set of very present urgencies, from geopolitics and the climate crisis to emerging technologies. However, curators and art historians increasingly consider the relationship between the contemporary and the past, seeking resonances that transcend the discipline’s conventions of periodicity. Recent exhibitions of Medardo Rosso in Zurich and Basel (2025), Frida Kahlo in London (2026) and Cézanne in Paris (2026) have explored the relevance of art-historical icons to contemporary creative practices. Artists such as Beatriz González, Shahzia Sikander, and Yinka Shonibare actively rework art history’s global canon. Such interests are not unique to our twenty-first-century moment: in sixteenth-century Italy, Giorgio Vasari blurred the lines between artist and art historian, while in the early twentieth century, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Herbert Read looked to the past for examples of the ‘significant form’ they advocated in contemporary art. More recently, queer and feminist art histories have been reframing how the contemporary relates to the historical, considering the possibilities of alternative temporalities that trouble linear and teleological accounts. Join our free online symposia interrogating the intersection of art history and the contemporary.
Wednesday 9 December 2026.
10:00am-5:00pm GMT
Free online symposium