29th January 2026
This session will consider the complex engagements between art, illness, and abstraction. Visual culture has been a catalytic force in the anxieties and obsessions elicited by novel illnesses, from the emergence of HIV to the rapid spread of COVID-19 and... Read More...29th January 2026
From early illuminated manuscripts to the tradition of editorial design, words and images have long found in the book a locus for creative encounters. In the 20th century, however, a different kind of phenomenon emerged: the global boom of the... Read More...29th January 2026
This session invites artists, curators, and researchers to reflect on the evolving role of art and activism across the contemporary post-Soviet space, including former Eastern Bloc countries framed by Soviet political, cultural, and ideological influence. Across much of this region,... Read More...29th January 2026
Water is a key enabler of movement, no more so than in the late early modern period. Water was a means to carry people and things across the world – accommodating intercultural exchange and hybridity, as well as facilitating colonial... Read More...29th January 2026
African artworks, makers, and narratives are increasingly – if belatedly – a focus of British, European and American art markets and exhibitions, with attendant increases in the number of books focused on African art, and aspirations to create more undergraduate... Read More...29th January 2026
Text has become a familiar presence in contemporary art, in various media and forms, yet its function often goes under-discussed. Historical frameworks, including modern and pre-modern art, offer important references and can help to understand the complexity of how language... Read More...29th January 2026
This session investigates how contemporary art engages with the visual regimes of medical imaging to question dominant narratives of bodily transparency, objectivity, and control. From X-rays and MRIs to 3D scans and AI-generated diagnostics, the medical image has come to... Read More...29th January 2026
2026 marks the seventieth anniversary of This is Tomorrow, the seminal exhibition held at the Whitechapel Gallery in August 1956, and widely cited by scholarship as a definitive moment in the development of Pop Art.The ‘Pop’ on show in This... Read More...29th January 2026
Spain’s modern painters are but mediocrities’ declared Richard Ford, the influential British Hispanist, in 1845. At the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris, critics proclaimed the death of Spanish art in similar terms: it lacked the ‘soul of Zurbarán and Velázquez’.... Read More...29th January 2026
The development of digital technologies —AI, biometrics, wearables, surveillance systems, and biotech — has reshaped the body, transcending a coherent biological whole into a dynamic site formed by data, networks, and algorithmic systems. This panel addresses the urgent need to... Read More...29th January 2026
From Tucumán Arde, in 1968 that sought to address the governmental hypocrisy and negligence that plagued the region of Tucumán, Argentina, to Group Material, a group of conceptual artists active between 1979 and 1996 in NYC who created nearly fifty... Read More...29th January 2026
This panel explores the materials, techniques, and embodied practices of printmaking with the goal of engendering a more capacious understanding of the medium and its ongoing potential as a field of art-historical inquiry. While Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed in Understanding... Read More...29th January 2026
Non-figurative art encompasses visual systems built on repetition, simplification and abstraction. From concentric circles to angular patterns and linear diagrams, these forms have been used across cultures to structure space, convey relationships and generate complex visual experiences. While differing in... Read More...29th January 2026
This panel will explore the complex interplay of colonial wealth and industrial development in British landscapes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Britain’s imperial reach expanded, wealth amassed through colonial exploitation fuelled drastic transformations of the British countryside, from... Read More...29th January 2026
IIslands have long inspired the artistic imagination—figured as sites of ethnographic encounter, spiritual retreat, or creative kinship. This half-day panel will consider the potential of island-based or island-informed artistic practices for critical reflection, cultural healing, and environmental justice. Oceanic islands... Read More...29th January 2026
This panel explores the shift from decolonisation to counter- and retrocolonisation, analysing how Indigenous and minoritarian art traditions, practices, symbols, and materials worldwide have responded to, influenced, appropriated, and subverted colonising cultures—both historically and in contemporary practice. What strategies are... Read More...29th January 2026
This panel invited contributions that sought to evaluate, critique and imagine feminist art history in the present moment, when noticeable gains in the representation of women artists – as well as other underrepresented constituencies – coincide with a growing tide... Read More...29th January 2026
Temporal dynamics of rise and decline are key drivers in the art world as a marketplace, and they often impact on art production, too. In his 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, Walter Benjamin agreed with Fuchs’ critique that... Read More...29th January 2026
Today, artistic identity is central to many of the most active avenues of inquiry. In many ways, signatures are the gateway to those inquiries. Some recently unearthed signatures have shifted attributions to women and under-studied minority artists. This has enabled... Read More...29th January 2026
How do creative practices represent and interrogate both immediate and protracted forms of violence in the context of war and ecocide in different time periods, and different regions affected by conflict and environmental changes? What role do artistic interventions play... Read More...Copyright 2026. All Rights Reserved