A two-day postgraduate conference at the University of Aberdeen sponsored by the Beyond Text Programme, AHRC
Call for Papers
The long contested issue of the relationship between art and politics has lately re-emerged in critical debate, in conjunction with an explosion of interest in political theory and the exhaustion of the postmodernist model. Recent technological developments have radically transformed modes of creation, circulation, assimilation and dispersion of images, reframing perception and making the investigation of the interdependency of visual arts and politics an urgent ethical necessity. Yet now that activism, militancy and engaged art are back on the agenda, it is essential to analyse contemporary artistic practices and thought in an attempt to discover not just what art can say about politics, but what art can and cannot do as politics. As many of the critical models developed in the last decades have been absorbed and assimilated by the structures they were trying to destabilize, as the avant-garde and radical art has become a commodity, as revolutionary projects and ideas neutralize themselves and lose their corrosive power, we ask: can art be an effective political gesture? And if so, how?
This conference invites a critical rethinking of the complementary concepts of complicity and resistance: asking complicit with what; resistant to what? It does so in the context of current critical debate in the field of contemporary visual arts, promoting a provocative and challenging exploration of the technical, thematic, and institutional possibilities/limitations/implications of artistic strategies aimed at intervening in the political.
Keynote Speaker: Zeigam Azizov
We welcome proposals from postgraduate students within and outside the UK. We have two bursaries available for travel and expenses; if you would like to be considered, please let us know when you submit your abstract.
Please send a 250 word abstract and a brief biographical statement to Rachele Ceccarelli (r03rc7@abdn.ac.uk) and Lorna Muir (lemuir@abdn.ac.uk) by September 11th.
Applicants will be informed about the outcome of their submission shortly after the deadline. Papers will be automatically considered for publication in the first issue of Interstices: Critical Interventions in Visual Culture, an online graduate journal being established at the University of Aberdeen, with the support of the AHRC’s Beyond Text Programme.
Conference website: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/visualculture/rcr/
