AAH Summer Symposium 2016
Gender in art: production, collection, display

The development of critical feminist discourses since the 1960s has elucidated ways in which social, political and economic structures have impacted on the production and display of artwork. Gradually, the construction of gender in collecting, curating, exhibiting and producing art began to be understood as a reflection of wider social and cultural narratives, extending beyond gendered identities of individual artists or curators. In collaboration with Loughborough University, this year’s annual two-day AAH Student Summer Symposium will investigate current critical and art-historical approaches that develop theories, methodologies and debates to analyse the making, display and collection of art in light of concepts of gender.

As categorical differentiations between ‘sex’, as a biological distinction, and ‘gender’, as a culturally constructed version of masculinity and femininity, prove difficult, any critical debate about them inevitably requires careful engagement with the power relations that attempt to shape it. The same applies for the discourses around the power distribution at work in the making, collecting and exhibiting of art. Whether in the studio, in museums, private collections or domestic spaces, works of art and their curatorial framing remain important sites for the construction of meaning concerning the interactions of the sexes. On the other hand, can such heteronormative ascriptions be understood as leftovers of binary thought patterns unable to account for fluid contemporary understandings of gender? In an attempt to understand and explain gendered identities in art, issues of equality, the domestic life, the ‘body’, the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ may be explored as complex intersections of social, cultural and political landscapes.

Registration for two-day symposium includes: Two keynote addresses, fourteen papers showcasing new research, refreshments.
Tickets: £20; AAH Members £10
Bookings at http://www.aah.org.uk/events/summer-symposium or call +44 (0)20 7490 3211


Programme

Wednesday, 8 June

10.00-10.30 Registration/Refreshments

10.30-10.45 Welcome

10.45-12.15 Session 1: Private and Public

Elizabeth Kajs (University of Bristol): Woman as ‘split’: investigations of the public and private in Käthe Kollwitz’s early self-portraiture

Molly Eckel (Courtauld Institute of Art): ‘A little world within a world’: the Wardian fern-case in the Victorian home

Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (University of Leeds): Gendered collections: from the home to the museum—the case of Lady Dorothy Nevill

12.15-13.15 Keynote 1: Prof Katy Deepwell

13.15-2.15 Lunch

2.15-3.45 Session 2: Curating and Display

Madeleine Pelling (University of York): ‘That noble possessor’: the pursuit of virtuous knowledge and its materials in the collection of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715-1785)

Elina Suoyrjö (Middlesex University): On affects, emotions and feminist curating

Wendy Wiertz (KU Leuven, Belgium): ‘Honneur aux dames!’: displaying 19th-century Belgian amateur women artists

3.45-4.15 Refreshments

4.15-5.15 Session 3: Feminist Practices

Rose-Anne Gush (University of Leeds): Image-body space in VALIE EXPORT

Thursday, 9 June

10.00-11.30 Session 4: Labour and Practice

Helen Osborn (Birmingham City University): Blue period: exploring themes of fertility and motherhood through media experimentation

Sarah Charalambides (Goldsmiths, University of London): Situating precarity in feminist art practice

Anastasia Philimonos (Collective, Edinburgh) Franki Raffles’s ‘Lot’s Wife’: documenting the domestic in the early 1990s

11.30-12.00 Refreshments

12.00-13.00 Keynote 2: Prof Marsha Meskimmon

13.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.00 Degree show tour

3.15-4.45 Session 5: Representing and Contesting Gender

Qiuzi Guo (Heidelberg University, Germany): The gaze of voyeur: female representation from porcelain to photography

Sabine Hirzer (Graz University, Austria): Women at arms: visualisations of gender in art

Minna Hamrin (Åbo Akademi University, Finland; Università di Bologna, Italy): Saint Francis of Assisi’s exemplary chastity: picturing hegemonic masculinity in post-tridentine Italian art

5.00 end

The Summer Symposium is generously supported by the School of the Arts, English and Drama at Loughborough University. Enquiries to the convenors: Emma Bourne, Sara Tarter, Sofia Mali and Tilo Reifenstein at AAHGenderInArtgmail.com