SESSION: Local Studies (FULL-DAY PART 1)
In recent decades, scholars have increasingly challenged the dominance of canonical centres in art historical narratives. Yet the frameworks of centre and periphery continue to shape how local art histories are researched, written and valued. Too often, studies of regional or site-specific practices must justify themselves by claiming international significance or by aligning with dominant paradigms and places. What becomes visible when we take locality seriously—not as a stepping stone to global relevance, but as a meaningful endpoint in itself? How might alternative methods of engaging with the regional, including community collaboration, archival re-readings and situated critique, help construct new art historical narratives?
In focusing on the local, this session aims to expand the possibilities of art history—not only upward or outward, but laterally and intimately. We explore the richness of local art histories without recourse to external validation, and resist and subvert that impulse.
This session reflects on the ecological, economic and ethical dimensions of working locally. In an era of climate crisis, rising costs and increasing awareness of extractive research practices, locally-grounded studies may offer more sustainable models for scholarship—less dependent on long-haul travel, global art fairs and elite networks, and more embedded in relationships of care, accountability and reciprocity.
Session Convenors:
Fiona Anderson, Newcastle University
James Boaden, University of York
RJ Wade, University of Leeds
Part 1 Session Speakers:
Olga Sureda Guasch, Universitat de Barcelona
Rural as Translocal: Negotiating the Local in Global Rural Collectives
This paper examines how rural art collectives in the Global North and South articulate the local as a site of negotiation within global networks. Responding to recent calls for locally grounded art histories that do not rely on external validation, it explores how locality operates not as isolation but as a relational field—a space where artistic, ecological, and social practices intersect.
Drawing on Michael Woods’ concept of the “reconstitution of the rural place” under globalisation (2007), the paper analyses how both initiatives remake rural localities through transnational exchange while remaining deeply rooted in situated contexts. Myvillages, founded in 2003 by Kathrin Böhm, Antje Schiffers and Wapke Feenstra, connects dispersed rural and urban communities through shared acts of making, storytelling, and collective knowledge. Similarly, Sakiya, founded in 2012 by Nida Sinnokrot and Sahar Qawasmi near Ramallah, integrates art, science, and agriculture to reactivate community spaces and ancestral practices such as Mujawara and Masha.
By comparing these projects, the paper reflects on the politics of “micro-globalisation” — the everyday entanglements of global and local forces — and questions how rural art practices can subvert centre—periphery hierarchies. In doing so, it proposes the “translocal rural” as a productive framework for rethinking the ecological, ethical, and epistemic potential of working from and with the local, and for shifting art-historical attention toward local contexts rather than canonical centres.
Flora Dunster, Central Saint Martins
Vancouver Photography (or, Against Schools and Conceptualism)
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) is also known as “Canada’s poorest postal code”. Located in the city’s historic centre, since the 1980s, the DTES has been synonymous with homelessness, drug use, and prostitution. Though this is widely acknowledged as being a product of systemic racism, neglect and unrestricted gentrification, the area’s residents remain underserved by municipal and provincial governments and segregated from the wider city.
The DTES is also the backdrop for many of Jeff Wall’s most well-known photographs, including The Storyteller, Mimic, and A Man with a Rifle. This paper bypasses their staged nature and the art historical allusions that have afforded them an international platform and instead takes a distinctly local approach. It asks: what could happen if we read images of Vancouver as images of Vancouver, rather than a set of references, or through the framework of centre and periphery?
I suggest that these photographs are documents of something, forming a loose archive which—through their very staging—reflects the city back to itself. Thinking with other photographers of Vancouver’s downtown, including Greg Girard and Fred Herzog, and artists like Rebecca Belmore, I consider how this work prioritises a different narrative to that which has otherwise been sanctioned. Here, Vancouver is not “Hollywood North” or the “City of Glass”, but a space where engineered inequalities are raw and overt. By taking this surface seriously, we might view Vancouver as itself, and re-orient the city’s contemporary art history as being in service to the breadth of its population.
Shao-Chien Tseng, National Central University
Care and Animism: Reinventing Discarded Objects and Vernacular Heritage in Taiwan
Studies of junk appropriation have primarily focused on Western avant-garde art movements. In recent decades, research on the repurposing of refuse in African and Asian contexts has yielded critical insights into cultural resistance and the revitalization of heritage through junk art. These discussions resonate with the postcolonial condition of Taiwan, characterized by ambivalence and hybridity in art and identity. This paper examines how care and animism can revitalize obsolete objects and fading heritage through the work of two Taiwanese artists: Ni Xiang (b. 1982) and Zhang Xu Zhan (b. 1988). Their deeply personal and local practices draw on the island’s geopolitical history and folk traditions. Ni Xiang’s ludic installations and absurdist videos explore his experiences of elderly care and his father’s hoarding disorder, rooted in forced migration from China after the 1949 civil war. Zhang Xu Zhan’s uncanny papier-mâché stop-motion animations inherit the artistry of his family’s declining traditional papercraft shop, which has produced paper figurines and houses as ritual offerings for funerals and religious ceremonies for over a century. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and Chang Chia-Ju’s concept of “environing at the margins,” this study demonstrates how these local practices reanimate the entropic remnants of material culture and vernacular heritage through care ethics and an animist worldview.
Martha Cattell, York St John University / National Trust
Jonathan Wallis, York St John University / National Trust
PhotoScarborough: Researching local photographic history to inform contemporary practice
Nestled on the North Yorkshire Coast, Scarborough can trace its history of visiting and holidaymaking back 400 years with the discovery of a mineral water spring. The seaside Spa, established in 1626, welcomed visitors to take the waters and later to bathe in seawater to benefit their health. By the mid-19th century, the town was increasing its range of entertainments to include camera obscura and photographic studios. In 1857, Oliver Sarony’s newly built studio was reported to be the largest photographic institution in Europe. Having ‘your likeness taken’ by a photographer had become part of the experience of visiting the seaside. During the 20th century, the changing technologies from walkie-talkies, Polaroids, to our phones, meant it was a town, almost constantly captured.
The photographs speak of a changing town, and PhotoScarborough was set up in a Scarborough pub by two friends in 2023 to track the photo studios, entertainment, holiday snaps, and kitsch postcards. It aimed to explore how to define the town’s local and shifting visual culture, highlighting how this might be used to inspire local engagement and create a photographic community. This paper will explore the value of highlighting a town’s photographic history, the methods of research and engagement we have undertaken, and the need for more DIY and collaborative approaches to research to enact creative histories and activities.