Summer Symposium Conference: Art & Activism

The Association for Art History’s Summer Symposium is a two-day annual conference that highlights current doctoral and early career research from around the world. It is an opportunity for PhD students and ECRs who are engaged with art, art history, or visual culture to present their research and meet other students and academics with similar research interests. Inspired by discourse highlighted at the 2021 Summer Symposium, Global Britain: Decolonising Art’s histories, this year the symposium theme is Art and Activism.

Organized by the Association for Art History’s Doctoral and Early Career Research Network.

Day 1 - Thursday 21st July

Opening remarks: 9.45-10.00

Panel 1 | Exhibition and Institutional Critique | 10.00 - 12.00

Chair: Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews)

10.00 – 10.20

Renée Steffen

Vulnerable Trends. Queer Self-Representation and Video at the Whitney 1993

10.20 – 10.40

Sonny Ruggiero

Bolstering Activism: The Feminist Art Movement and Spare Rib Magazine

10.40 – 11.00

Jianan (Katherine) Qi

Avant-garde Art in China: Experimental Practices Against the Official Art System in the 1980s

11.00 – 11.20

Francesca Morgan

Subversion and Shared Laughter in Contemporary Feminist Visual Culture

11.20 – 12.00

Chair-led Panel Discussion + Q&A

Break | 12.00-12.30

Panel 2 | The Environmental: Art, Ecology, and Urban Spaces | 12.30-14.30

Chair: Andrew Patrizio (University of Edinburgh)

12.30-12.50

Emily Collins

Living Artwork as Critical Counter Practice: Tracing Layers of Activism in Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Gardens

12.50-13.10

Xinrui Zhang

Documenting Air Pollution: Activist Art and Environmental Governance in China

13.10 -13.30

Sophie Schultze-Allen

Crafting Gardens of Reciprocity

13.30-13.50

Patrick Düblin, Architects Turned Artists Turned Activists: The Stalker Collective and the Value of Transgressive Action

13.50-14.30

Chair-led Panel Discussion + Q&A

Day 2 - Friday 22 July

Opening remarks: 9.45-10.00

Panel 3 | Making to Unmake: Protest and Method| 10.00-12.00

Chair: Paula Serafini (Queen Mary University of London)

10.00 – 10.20

Brenda Reid

Quilt Architecture: Making Political Space

10.20 – 10.40

Victoria Burgher

Shattering Whiteness: Using Porcelain as a Tool to Promote Racial Justice

10.40 – 11.00

Nora Laraki

Performance as Protest - an Investigative Practice as Research Project by Queering Space Art Collective

11.00 – 11.20

Hannah Katalin Grimmer

‘What do you Understand by Democracy?’: Artistic practices on the Walls of Santiago de Chile for the 18-O

11.20 – 12.00

Chair-led Panel Discussion + Q&A

Break | 12.00-12.30

Panel 4 | Community and Collective Action | 12.30-14.30

Chair: Pablo Helguera (The New School)

12.30-12.50

Wei Hao Goh

Performances of Ku’er: Reimagining Queerness in Post-Mao China

12.50-13.10

Carmen Hesketh

The past, present and future of the AIDS Memorial Quilting Tradition in Britain

13.10-13.30

Fabiola Fiocco

A Feminist Account of Socially Engaged Art: Consciousness-Raising as Research Practice

13.30-13.50

Sarah Haylett

Archiving Socially Engaged and Activist Art

13.50-14.30

Chair-led Panel Discussion and Q+A

Closing Remarks | 14.30-45

Image credit: AIDS quilt, Washington DC. Photographs in the Carol M.Highsmith Archive, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.