Call for Papers: Working Worlds

Working Worlds explores the world-making capacities of the work of art. The conference seeks to reimagine the artwork as a space of compossibility in which multiple worlds, both real and potential, past and future, coexist. The present conference invites papers to intermix different scales of worlds, from the world in miniature to a world in collapse. Recent debates in art history have emphasised the artwork’s potential to represent global phenomena: conflict, ecological catastrophe and the flows of capital. Lost in these discussions is the fact that the artwork may also be understood as a world in and of itself. The artwork is of this world, but it is not reducible to it. From the sculptural practice of Camille Henrot to the performances of Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, attention paid to the particularity of the artwork reveals its potential to actualize speculative fictions in which worlds are formed and collapsed. Though the period addressed by the conference finds its beginnings with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an event that for many heralds the era of globalisation, Working Worlds also invites papers that draw lines of continuity between the modern and the post-modern, and thereby seek to challenge existing narratives that draw too firm a line between these historical periods.

Working Worlds proposes three panels with topics not exclusively related to:

1. The work of the artwork / worldmaking / the artwork as theory

2. Artistic labour / digital labor / artwork as situation / artwork as event / cognitive mapping

3. Institution / artworld / capitalism as global process

Speakers should be prepared to present papers for 25 min followed by a discussion. Please send 300 word abstracts by February 26th to: Andrew Witt and Rye Holmboe, workingworlds2015gmail.com The conference will be held on the 16th of May, 2015.