The Museum, the Academy and the Studio
34th Association of Art Historians Annual Conference
Tate Britain, Tate Modern, and Chelsea College or Art & Design, London, UK 2 - 4 April 2008

Call for Papers

Session: Dis-Locations: Movements and Migrations

Convenors: Rosemary Betterton, Institute for Women’s Studies, Lancaster University, UK Dorothy Rowe, Department of History of Art, University of Bristol, UK

Contact Email for Proposals: r.betterton@lancaster.ac.uk or d.rowe@bristol.ac.uk

Dis-located and nomadic subjects have become privileged signifiers in recent feminist and post-colonial theory (Rosi Braidotti, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha), sometimes hailed as empowered inhabitants of in-between locations and interstitial spaces or as catalysts who question ‘our’ everyday existence. How do such figures, embodied or virtual, relate to art practice and theory? Do such concepts ‘travel’ across academic and aesthetic borders? What happens to such theories and practices in their new ‘locations’? This session invites papers that address these and related questions in the context of artistic, academic and curatorial practices in the art world and academy. Participants may explore these issues in relation to figures and movements in art history, visual studies, visual arts, museum and curatorial practices, as well as by exploring the problems and potentials of moving through time and space as living agents.

Debates about art and museum practices have been renegotiated over the last decade in exhibitions and institutions that address issues of intercultural and multicultural exchange across virtual and physical borders. The attention given to location and identity, culture and ethnicity by centres such as INIVA in London, BALTIC in Gateshead, KIASMA in Helsinki or Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin have become sites of cultural and artistic exchange, offering new possibilities for encounter between artists, curators and audiences. But hybridity and mobility have also become fashionable commodities on the international art circuit; they can become the signifiers of a post-modern aesthetic detached from location and of a curatorial practice that pays as little attention to specificities of gender and race as did its modernist precursors.

How do new curatorial practices migrate across locations and borders within a global art market? How do the dis-locations and movements of artists and art historians contribute to the migration of practices and theories? How do artists represent the specific locations and dis-locations of peoples and ideas? What happens when practices and theories move across disciplines and locations? To what extent does it matter if they are changed in the process? What makes them useful in another location or discipline? Are certain concepts more able to travel across national or disciplinary borders than others? And, how can engagements with different locations - and dis-locations - cut across a globalised, mass-mediated culture and enable us to address subjects of identity, gender and nation?

We welcome 250 word abstracts for 30 minute papers from artists and art historians who seek to address these and other related questions in their work. Please submit proposals by email to both convenors listed above by 16 November 2008. If you wish to submit a paper should do so using the submission form; this can be downloaded form the AAH website: http://aah.org.uk/conference/index.php.