An international conference co-organised by the IHC and the Institute of Art History in a tribute to Foteini Vlachou‘s work. Open call until 28 October.

Art in the Periphery International Conference

Paying homage to the work of Foteini Vlachou (1975-2017), the Art History Institute and the Institute of Contemporary History of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa now launch the call for papers for the Art in the Periphery International Conference.

The conference aims to discuss the concept of periphery while focusing on the geographic and thematic areas that have been neglected by traditional and/or canonical art history. It seeks to push the discussion towards the understanding of the periphery as plural, historical and changeable, focusing on the non-linearity of cultural processes and historical time, and the non-universality of the artistic canons.

As Vlachou wrote in 2015: “No longer understood to mean ‘secondary, derivative, dependent, passive’, the ‘periphery’ will be understood as a structure with distinct characteristics and priorities that might in turn undermine values espoused in artistic centres, such as authorship and originality. More importantly, the periphery will not be framed in exclusively geographical terms (as a region distinct from the centre), but rather as situated at the margins of dominant art history. As such, it may refer to areas, periods or even materials that have been delegated a secondary position in the hierarchy of fine arts (the decorative arts can serve as a prime example of this process)”.

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Keynote speakers:

• Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel — maître de conferences in modern and contemporary art at the École normale supérieure in Paris (ENS, PSL) and possesses a Habilitation à diriger les recherches – a French equivalent of Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art History. She teaches and works on the global history of the avant-gardes from a transnational, digital and social perspective. She also works on the visual culture of petroleum, and on the digital turn in the humanities. In 2009, she founded Artl@s, an ongoing research project into the globalization of art and culture since the 19th century. Artl@s publishes digital sources for transnational art history and trains scholars in digital humanities to promote a better grasp global of phenomena circulation. In 2016, she founded Postdigital, a new research project on digital cultures and imaginaries.
• Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA — Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is Faculty at Large in the Curatorial Program of the School of Visual Arts, New York. From 2011 to 2014 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. He was the 2010 winner of the Franklin Jewett Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA), and in 2011 received the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate Award. In 2014 he was a Clark Fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2007-8 the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Research Centre, Raleigh-Durham, and in 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. From 1994 to 2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney. He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). During the 1970s he was art critic at these Australian newspapers: Weekend Australian, Nation Review, Times on Sunday; he continues to write for art journals and magazines throughout the world. A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and from 2004 to 2014 Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, he is currently a member of the Board of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Call for papers

We welcome contributions that explore either particular instances or longer-term historical developments in the visual arts, as well as contributions that conceptualize the centreperiphery debate in a broader scope, in relation to one or more of the following questions/topics:

• How selectively were the cultural models produced in the ‘centres’ adopted/adapted/transformed in the ‘peripheries’?
• What examples are there of specific instances and longer-term impacts on a ‘center’ of artists, images and artistic ideas originating in a ‘periphery’?
• What examples are there of transferences between peripheries and what kind of impact do they have?
• What is a ‘periphery’ within a ‘centre’? What is a ‘centre’ within a ‘periphery’?
• How do these relationships between centres and peripheries change over long historical periods, for example, across decades or even centuries?
• How do centre-periphery dynamics change after the formal end of colonization and the achievement of independence? How do they participate in processes of decolonization? Were the arts of any modern society ever fully free of the colonial experience, either as a centre or a periphery?
• How operative is the dichotomy centre/periphery in the construction of historiographical narratives?
• What alternative narratives can convey how art was/is produced, displayed and consumed in the peripheries?
• What should count as art outside the canon?
• Many contemporary artists live in exile from their home cultures yet maintain a strong relationship to them through diasporic exchanges. Are these relationships changing centre-periphery theorizations of artistic practice?

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations in English, which should include:

-Title of the proposal
-Applicant’s identification (name, institutional affiliation, country and email)
-Abstract (up to 300 words)
-Short curriculum vitae (up to 200 words)

Proposals must be sent in Word (.doc format) by email to artintheperipheryconference@gmail.com

Important dates:

Deadline for abstract submission – 28 October 2018
Notification of acceptance of abstract – 9 December 2018
Deadline for registration – 27 January 2019
Conference – 14-16 March 2019

Organisation:

Art History Institute, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Institute of Contemporary History, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

Scientific Committee:

Alexandra Curvelo (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, IHA)
Barbara Pezzini (Editor, Visual Resources: an International Journal on Images and their Uses)
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris)
Joana Cunha Leal (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, IHA)
Mariana Pinto dos Santos (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, IHA)
Raquel Henriques da Silva (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, IHA)
Terry Smith (University of Pittsburgh and the European Graduate School)
Luís Trindade (Birkbeck College and Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, IHC)