The Fragment — Form, Method, and Meaning

• Region: London
• Type: Symposium
• Cost: Free

AAH Summer Symposium, Thursday 13 August 2026.

Free, in-person event at: The Gallery, 70 Cowcross Street, London, ECIM 6EJ.

Arrivals 9.30am for 10am-6.30pm.

To book: https://members.forarthistory.org.uk/events/6a314313bffe7e0008145ff9 

A Doctoral and Early Career Research Committee (DECR) event.

This annual one-day event showcases innovative research by doctoral researchers and early career scholars, providing a platform for discussion across art history, visual studies, practice-based research, and curatorial studies.

Exploring the fragment as a critical and creative paradigm across art history, artistic practice, and visual culture, the symposium considers how fragmentation, as a material condition, aesthetic strategy, and interpretive problem, shapes the ways objects, images, texts, and bodies are produced, encountered, and understood. From archival lacunae and dispersed histories to digital cultures and contemporary artistic practice, the fragment occupies a generative tension between loss and possibility, and between the partial and the whole.

Across five panels, speakers examine themes including gender and embodiment, photographic archives, war and political memory, museum collections, and digital culture. Papers explore topics ranging from feminist artistic practice, Black feminist archives, surrealist objects, and artificial wombs to Arctic expedition photography, Korean performance histories, wartime printmaking, memoricide, Aztec material culture, and the visual and computational fragments produced through digital technologies and blockchain aesthetics.

Together, these presentations demonstrate how the fragment functions not merely as a remnant but as a site of meaning-making, resistance, and reinvention, challenging assumptions about wholeness, origin, authenticity, and historical coherence across diverse cultural and historical contexts.

Join us to meet peers, share ideas, build new connections, and engage with some of the most exciting emerging research in the field today.

Organised by Ed Kettleborough, Man Li and Isaac Nugent of the DECR committee

DECR Committee

The DECR Committee is a volunteer board that drives the Association for Art History’s doctoral and early career research events and initiatives. Find out more here https://forarthistory.org.uk/about/who-we-are/committees/doctoral-and-early-career-research-decr-committee/

Programme

10:00 – Welcome

10:15 – Panel I: Fragments of the Feminine

• Fragmentation as Refusal: Rereading Thérèse Lessore, Emma Jane Davis, University of Sussex

• Erotic tumours: The Maternal and the Malignant in Joyce Mansour’s Objets méchants, Christiane Gontarek, University of Cambridge

• Stabilising Meaning: Fragments, Exposure, and the Construction of Self in British Film Culture, 1969-1972, Michaela Clarence, Royal College of Art

• Fragmenting Desire: Mickalene Thomas’s Jet Series and the Reconstruction of Black Feminist Archives, Cynthia Hodge-Thorne, The Ohio State University

• Reincorporating the Fragment: Artificial Wombs Between Medical Discourse and Artistic Speculation, Denisa Michalinová – Academy of Fine Arts, Prague

11:45 – Break

12:00 – Panel 2: The Photographic Fragment

• Unfathomable Photographs from the Archive of an Arctic Expedition, Nora Aaslaug Høegh, Nordic Institute of Art

• Exhibiting a Fragmented History in siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project, Jaemin Cha, Korean Cultural Centre UK

• Sina Niemeyer and the photographic representation of victimisation/survival: the visual fragments of child sexual abuse, Camila Cavalcante, University of St Andrews

13:00 – Lunch

14:00 – Panel 3: The Fragmentation of War

• The Haptic Politics of French Wartime Printmaking (c. 1915–1916), Katia Zinurova, University of Warwick and Imperial War Museums

• Fragments, Phasing, and Fear of the Bomb: The Nuclear Texts of Saroyan, Reich, and Johns James Rodker, University of Birmingham

• Cancelled Fragments: Virginia Errázuriz’s Cancelados, María Alvarado, University of Leeds

• The Writing on the Wall: Fragment, Memory, and Memoricide in Emily Jacir’s Ex Libris, Sophie Joseph-Murray, SOAS

15:30 – Break

15:45 – Panel 4: Museal Fragments

• Lifting the Lid: Mending Aztec Words, Art and Ecology to Revivify the ‘Fragment of a Stone Box’ at the British Museum, Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald, University of Edinburgh

• Fragments from the Museum: Finding New Stories in Lost Histories, Catherine Hirst, University of Sussex

• Identities and Inclusion in Museums and Galleries, Senah Tuma, The Open University

• Fragmented Perspectives: Journalling Fellowship at the British Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, Camille Serisier, University for the Creative Arts

17:00 – Break

17:15 – Panel 5: Digital Traces

• Warhol’s Figments: Digital Fragmentation and the Visual Politics of AIDS, Nat Sorscher, Birmingham Museum of Art

• Automated fragments: software sovereignty in the computational aesthetics of blockchain protocols, Timothy Gawaya, University of Warwick

17:45  Drinks

18:30  Close

Image credit: Bodhisattva with attendants, wall painting fragment from Mogao Cave 321, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, First Fogg Expedition to China (1923–1924).