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Annual Conference

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...

Para-zomias: Prefigurative Urban Transformations in Asia

The word “zomia,” common across language groups in areas of Myanmar, Bangladesh, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, means “remote peoples” or “hill people.” The political and social dimensions of zomia were explored by anthropologist James C. Scott who describes the... Read More...

Nature and Gender in Pre-Modern Art

This session aims to explore and reassess the multifaceted connections between the natural world and perceptions of gender during the pre-modern period and their implications for the understanding of art. During the European Renaissance, gender played a crucial role in... Read More...

Radical Imprints: Visual Tactics of Anti-colonial Struggle

For many groups engaged in the anti-colonial and anti-imperial campaigns of the twentieth century, printing was the medium of choice for visualising and enacting political struggles. Across the Global South, printing presses and workshops were often sites of grassroots activism,... Read More...

Uses and Misuses of Premodernity: the afterlives of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Art

Donna Haraway writes that “the open future rests on a new past.” This panel investigates which new pasts (very broadly defined as ancient up to the nineteenth century,) our future rests on and their implications. Far from being confined to... Read More...

What can feminism do for Digital Humanities, what can Digital Humanities do for feminism?

In recent years digital humanities has been transformed by technology capable of searching, recognising, reading and even creating images. This has prompted numerous questions about the possibilities of digital technology for engaging with art, and for telling art’s histories. But... Read More...

Women’s Work: Re-examining the Material Practice of European Women Sculptors before 1900

The growing effort to expand the representation of women artists in academic research and museum displays can be traced back to the development of feminist art history in the 1970s. While significant progress has been achieved in highlighting women painters,... Read More...

Ecologies of Visual Culture in the Global Middle Ages

The study of medieval art and visual culture has recently seen a flourishing of ecocritical and environmental approaches that invite us to explore new ways of thinking about objects, buildings and landscapes. Drawing on the material, spatial, and post-human turns... Read More...

Approaches to Public Art History in Museums and Academia

This session interrogates the contributions of art historians in museums and academia to the practice of public art history. This field is not formally defined, but is generally understood as art-historical content produced for general audiences and/or applied to real-world... Read More...

AI, Automation, and Abstraction

In November 2022, the installation Unsupervised by the artist Refik Anadol was exhibited in the lobby of MoMA, New York. Aesthetically, it conveyed a dynamic display of abstract forms interpreting, via machine learning, MoMA’s archive of modern art. Conceptually, however,... Read More...

Architecture Theory and History in Contemporary Art

In postwar and contemporary art, artists’ engagements with architecture are often interpreted in terms of institutional critique or societal commitment. Artists comment on architecture’s imposition of power or on its biopolitics, or they gauge the capacity of architectural design to... Read More...

Carceral Causes: Representing Political Prisoners

An illicit photograph of IRA prisoners at Long Kesh in 1975 became a symbol of the Irish republican cause when a cropped version isolating hunger striker Bobby Sands’ face appeared frequently in media sources and inspired protest materials and honorific... Read More...

Embodied Experience in the Early Modern World

From the clothes people wore, to the objects they touched, heard, saw and smelled, material culture’s relationship to the body shaped lived experience of the Early Modern world. This synergy between body and its material landscape was consciously employed in... Read More...

Interpretations of Longinian Ideas in the Visual Imagery from the Early Modern Period to the Present

How does one deal with the reception of a - primarily - philosophical notion in the visual arts? The question of the reception of the Longinian sublime has already been addressed in recent years by such scholars as Caroline van... Read More...

Others Within and Without: Art, India, and Britain’s ‘Internal Colonies’

Britain’s Celtic ‘Others’ have often sought to compare their status to that of its chief Imperial possession: India. In The Country and the City (1973), cultural critic Raymond Williams argued that India’s colonial literature shared equivalences within the “home islands”:... Read More...

Selling Out?: The Neoliberalism of the Art World and Academia

This panel addresses the structural racism, classism, and sexism of the art complex and the university, which are premiere sites for the development of neoliberalism but also, arguably, primary structures allowing for obscuring its mechanisms through cultural forms. Generally speaking professors and... Read More...

Tempos of Making in the Pre-Modern World, 1200-1800

A line drawn quickly does not usually look the same as a line drawn slowly. It can take five minutes to cut one centimetre of contour in semi-precious hardstones for an inlay decoration. Cycles of hot to cold, moist to... Read More...
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