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Annual Conference

Disruption and Progress: Reflecting on Digital Art Practice

Artists are often seen at the forefront of innovation in using emerging technologies as they seek to reflect on society and disrupt established norms, from the early experiments of Nam June Paik’s video art in the 1960s to the contemporary... Read More...

Art Histories of Experience

These sessions explore the experience of spatial environments as an art historical question. Experience is multivalent, subjective, and above all ephemeral. Our experience of the built environment, designed landscapes and the world at large is highly mediated and contingent, connected... Read More...

Art and Rights

The incorporation of culture into the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (as ‘the right freely to participate in cultural life of the community’ and ‘the right to enjoy protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any […]... Read More...

Architecture’s Unsung Institutions

In September 2025, the University of York will open its new School of Architecture marking a revival of York’s legacy in architectural studies. This began with the (largely forgotten) Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies (IoAAS) in 1953, a postgraduate study... Read More...

Art Histories of the Urban

Cities offer paradigmatic spaces for artists to make and exhibit their works and to make and sustain their careers. From Europe to the Americas and Africa to Asia, artists represent, document, interpret, and intervene in the cities where they work... Read More...

Art, Esotericism and the Ecological Imagination

When the art, visual culture, and creative practices of the ecological imaginationare informed by esotericism, they reveal rejected knowledge and recover enchanted relationships. In recent years scholarship has expanded significantly in the fields of art and ecology, and art and... Read More...

Attention in Pre-Modern Art and Visual Culture

In today’s world of perpetual digital connectivity and ever-evolving algorithms, attention is a precious, fervently sought commodity, at once carefully guarded and divided with abandon. While both the amount of imagery that endeavours to claim our attention and the pace... Read More...

Being Present: Art, Work and Wellness

Before the global pandemic struck in 2020, a spate of exhibitions thematising mental and physical health placed renewed emphasis on personal and collective wellbeing. Key survey-exhibitions such as Group Therapy at Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2018-19) and Hyper Functional, Ultra... Read More...

Burning Matters: The Limits of the Image in a “World on Fire”

In the context of rising global temperatures, raging wildfires, blazing conflict in the Middle East, and ever more incendiary political speech in Western liberal democracies, the politics and aesthetics of fire have become an increasingly important area of study, crucial... Read More...

Contextual Temporalities: Time and space in museums, galleries and archives

This session focuses on the ways in which museums, galleries, and archives have constructed multiple temporalities through configuring relationships between objects and space in permanent and temporary displays. As tools of Enlightenment thinking, these institutions created and visualised taxonomies of... Read More...

Community and Activism in the Global South

Art functions as a locus for exchange and organisation, where a sense of community is formed. Here, community is often characterised by tensions and contradictions as individuals unite to achieve a common dream or an activist goal, driven by a... Read More...

Museum Exhibitions and the Political Economy of Exchange

Temporary exhibitions shared between museums are labour-, capital-, and time-intensive undertakings, and employ increasingly specialised actors, techniques, and infrastructures. They are used to strengthen international diplomacy and generate revenue for museums and their locales. Museum studies has long been concerned... Read More...

Resistance Through Absence: Strategies of deculturalization, separatism, refusal and withdrawal

This panel explores strategies of separatism and withdrawal as political and artistic practices employed by marginalized communities, artists, thinkers, and scholars. Throughout history, individuals and groups have chosen to disengage from dominant systems of power—cultural, political, or social—as a form... Read More...

The CAyC network revisited: Archives, methodologies, and critical perspectives on Argentina’s Centre for Art and Communication

­In 1968, the art critic and businessman Jorge Glusberg founded the Centre for Art and Communication (CAyC) in Buenos Aires. Over the following decades this interdisciplinary network of artists, thinkers and art professionals, rife with contradictions, shaped the production and... Read More...

The Politics of the Handmade: Textures, Feelings, and the Matter of Trans Art History

This session draws attention to haptic and material engagements in modern and contemporary art history by exploring the handmade as a trans-specific methodology. We ask: How is trans art history made materially through the hand and body? What does trans... Read More...

Expressing Divinity, Evoking Devotion: Interweaving Networks surrounding Chinese Buddhist Artifacts

Since the mid-1980s, Igor Kopytoff and several scholars have vigorously proposed that studying the social lives of objects can provide clues to their cultural redefinitions and utility. Arjun Appadurai have expounded how “things-in-motion,” like artefacts, “circulate in specific cultural and... Read More...

Mechanisms of Art History

The slide is the exemplary piece of art historical technology: an object which facilitated the examination of artworks and objects of all kinds in the classroom and the study for decades. With applications for both pedagogical instruction and the work... Read More...

Pedagogy and Practice: The Role and Influence of Immigrant Artist Teachers as Agents and Conduits of Cross-cultural Exchange: 1923-1973-2023

The rich and varied immigrant contribution to British visual culture is an ever- prescient focus of contemporaneous art historical discourse and exhibition culture, and the particular focus of exhibitions and research at the Ben Uri Research Unit (Buru.org.uk ), incorporating... Read More...

Writing Joyishly

Writing is “a means of producing, codifying, transmitting, evaluating, renovating, teaching, and learning knowledge and ideology in academic disciplines. Being able to write in an academic style is essential to disciplinary learning and critical for academic success” (Fang, 2021). In... Read More...

Day Jobs, Second Careers, and Side Hustles: Considering Black Artists’ Creative Self-Support

In a structurally exclusionary art world, Black artists have long had to be creative in funding their artistic practices. They have worked as teachers; porters; curators; public intellectuals; manufacturers; historians; waiters; and social workers; among countless other jobs and professions.... Read More...
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