History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh is pleased to announce the call for proposals for its Graduate Student Symposium, "Exhibition Complex: Displaying People, Identity, and Culture." The symposium will be held October 18-20, 2012.

This year’s symposium sets out to analyze the many modes of display, types of artistic production, and built and existing structures that constitute ephemeral exhibition spaces. Organized in collaboration with the Carnegie Museum of Art, our topic is inspired by the museum’s fall 2012 exhibition, Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851–1939. We are interested in projects that explore temporary exhibitions displaying people, identity, and culture in any geographical location or time period, within and beyond the modern history of Western display. The keynote address will be delivered by Saloni Mathur, Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, author of the book India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (2007), and co-editor of the forthcoming No Touching, Spitting,
Praying: Modalities of the Museum in South Asia (2012).

We welcome scholarly topics on a variety of visual culture dealing with any geographical area or time period, as well as presentations of design and artistic projects. Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:

• early history of ephemeral display in Western and non-Western traditions in processions,pilgrimages, religious collections, and homotsu kaze-ire as well as fairground and festival
spectacles, marketplaces, gardens, parks, masquerades, and carnivals
• modes of national representation and self-display at international exhibitions
• carnival transportation and transient entertainers and design in performance history
• explorations of the exhibition of the self and the other, such as ethnographic documentation, film, and photography, cabinets of curiosity, and wunderkammer
• literary forms and structures in display and as display
• souvenirs, guidebooks, maps, handbills, and other ephemera aimed at documenting
participation in ephemeral events
• critical interventions in the national history of ephemeral display and exhibition
• artistic projects that engage with themes of display, nationality, people, and identity
• afterlives of ephemeral exhibitions: national collections, archives, digital media

We encourage paper submissions from graduate and MFA students at all stages of their studies. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Please email an abstract or description of artistic intervention no longer than 300 words, and a brief CV to symposium organizers at pittgradsymposiumgmail.com by April 27, 2012. Selected speakers will be notified by May 15, 2012.