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Annual Conference

Anthropocene Mobilities

This panel addresses travel, migration and the mobility of human and non-human populations, including animals, fungi and plants, in the light of the current environmental crisis. It takes its point of reference from the sociologist Andrew Baldwin, who coined the... Read More...

Art in the Street: Public Performances across Time and Place

In most standard art-historical narratives, public performance art set in the streets is profoundly associated with contemporary art. If it is given a history, this dates back to the 1970s or, at best, to Futurist and Dada interventions in the... Read More...

Beyond the AAH: Groups, Organisations, and Collectives since the 1970s

This conference celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the AAH, an organisation which since 1974 has sought to bring the discipline, as variously practiced in the UK, together. This panel explores less well-known groups, organisations, and collectives that... Read More...

Curating ‘Women Artists’

How are women artists written about in museums and galleries? In what ways do curatorial approaches engage with feminist methodologies? Can complex theories be reflected within short wall labels, or do they inevitably become inaccessible? Should the work of women... Read More...

Exploring Gender-based Violence in Feminist Art

The 1970s were marked by the work of feminist activists who were actively exploring the issue of gender-based violence in their artistic practices. Gender-based violence is a phenomenon deeply rooted in society’s gender stereotypes and has recently been descripted as... Read More...

New Ways of Knowing in Feminist Art Histories

This session examines feminist ways of knowing, such as anecdotes (Gallop), autotheory (Fournier), creative writing (Grant and Rubin), omitted footnotes (Dimitrakaki), gossip (Butt, Chave, Rogoff), imagination (Latimer), intuition (de Mille) and queer formalism (Simmons) as answers to incomplete or inexistent... Read More...

Poised in Performance: the Visual Culture of Dance through Time and its connection with Early Dance Practice

Dance is a significant form of cultural expression in all human societies using movement as a nonverbal communication tool to convey emotions and tell stories. Just as in contemporary dance, ancient dance forms were products of unique social and cultural... Read More...

‘Queer Photography’ Now

‘Queer’ and ‘photography’ are slippery terms, each imbued with a resistance to meaning and definition. But when brought together they appear to promise a stable and consistent history, obscuring the ways in which ‘queer’ and ‘photography’ have changed over time,... Read More...

Reproduction! Networks of Distribution in Archives and Collections of Publishing

This panel proposes to explore various intersections and materialities of publishing – via magazines, small press, artist produced and other affiliated poetry and experimental publications. Frequently described as marginal practices in relation to major artforms in institutional collections; these ephemeral... Read More...

Shifting Grounds: Landscape and Cultural Practice in Latin America

The concept of landscape is linked to the emotional attachment that individuals form with a particular place. This shared experience is a unifying bond among people or social groups within a region that contributes to our sense of place and... Read More...

Subjective Approaches to Sense-Making in Art and Visual Culture

Over recent decades, writing about art and visual culture has typically adopted a ‘critically detached’ stance in which the writer remains more or less invisible in what they write. This approach is increasingly being questioned and extended, however, by scholars... Read More...

The Past, Present and Future of Medieval Art in the British Isles

Where are we with writing the history of British medieval art? The arts of medieval Britain once had a peripheral place in broader histories of medieval art where they were frequently understood as passive receptors of Continental influence. Much scholarship... Read More...

‘A Day With(out) Art History’: AIDS and Art History

In 1981, the Center for Disease Control reported five cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) among young, previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles — the first official reporting of what would become known as AIDS. AIDS term AIDS is... Read More...

An Era of Walls: Art at the Boundaries of the New Enclosures

After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, pundits enthusiastically proclaimed the advent of a new borderless future.  Since then, six times more border walls covering the Earth’s surface have now been erected. They... Read More...

Art History and Contemporary Technical and Medical Images

Art history needs to be better at engaging with the wealth of non-art images produced by a diverse range of image-making practices, or risks obsolescence as a discipline. This session builds on the work of scholars such as James Elkins,... Read More...

Art, History, Exhibitions: Re-thinking Relationships

In 1981, American artist and writer Mary Kelly defiantly underlined how exhibitions have become primary tools for dissemination of art. Since the 1990s, following the establishment of curatorial studies, the proliferation of global biennials and the growing status of the... Read More...

Beyond Hilma af Klint: Rediscovering Swedish Women Modernists

Over the past decade, the discipline has ‘rediscovered’ Hilma af Klint’s contributions to the genesis of abstract painting, which has shed new light on our understanding of the origins of European modernism. Focusing on an artist that worked on the... Read More...

Contemporary Art and Rural Places

‘The rural is not new. The rural is not static. The rural is not disappearing…The rural is a multitude and it is dynamic,’ declare the artist collective Myvillages in the introduction to their edited Documents of Contemporary Art collection: The... Read More...

Healing and the Museum

Since the 1960s, the prevailing biomedical definition of health—an understanding of wellness and illness framed in terms of physical disease and its presence/absence—has been called into question. A broader definition acknowledges the entanglements of body, psyche and society, emphasizing social... Read More...

Keeping up with Fast-Changing Times: Creative Approaches to the Art History Classroom

How is Art History being taught today, and what does that tell us about the future of the discipline? How do online learning and artificial intelligence reshape the ways in which we teach and assess? What roles can teaching for... Read More...
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