Visual Conflicts: Art History and the Formation of Political Memory

Proposals are invited for a one-day conference to be held on 7 March 2009 at
University College London.

At a time when issues concerning memory formation and the visual mediation of
conflict are attracting a great deal of attention, we wish to explore ways in
which visual culture has engaged with armed conflict and
politically-motivated acts of violence of all types. The conference aims to
provide a platform for developing links between issues of memory formation,
the politics of violence and visual representation. Working with the
analytical framework of the discipline of art history, we nevertheless wish
to consider the entire field of visual representation, to include, for
instance, documentary film, reportage as well as images produced by
individual agents but that were made public in one way or another.

We wish to consider questions such as how pre-existing narratives of conflict
condition the way in which we derive meaning from representations of
politically motivated acts of violence and to explore the implications for
art historical inquiry posed by shifts in imaging technologies and of the
experience of war itself. While this call for papers is open to any
suggestions that engage with this topic, we are particularly interested in
receiving proposals that challenge received ways of thinking about the
relationship between visual culture and the construction of narratives of
conflict.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words, for 20 minutes presentations, from
academics and postgraduate students, should be submitted to both conference
organisers by 1 November 2008:
Paul Fox (paul.foxucl.ac.uk)
Gil Pasternak (g.pasternakucl.ac.uk)