Session at Art Association of Australia and New Zealand
Panel title: Making an Impression in the Contact Zone
Panel convenor: Dr Alex Burchmore, University of Sydney (alexander.burchmoresydney.edu.au)

This session will consider the collisions of the personal and material that occur when a sense of self arises between or across cultural or ontological categories, tracing the embodied formation of racial and sexual identities through artistic practice from the antique to contemporary. Anne Anlin Cheng (2019) has provided a potent theoretical touchstone for the study of such collisions with her concept of ‘ornamental personhood’ as ‘an alternative track within the making of modern [identity] that is not traceable to the ideal of a biological, organised, and masculine body [but is] peculiarly synthetic, aggregated, feminine, and non-European.’ She locates this primarily within the realm of the material and processes of accumulation, classification, and combination through which subjects and objects are brought together.

Building on Cheng’s ideas, the session will invite proposals that focus on expressions of personhood through the impressing, stamping, striking, or otherwise impactful manipulation of materials. This could include ceramics; stone, wood, and other sculptural media; and printmaking. Speakers will be invited to consider the role of such practices as registers of contact or intrusion across various boundaries (cultural, interpersonal, physical, material), including (but not limited to): the psychological and social separation of self and other; the tangible division of void and mass; the ‘contact zones’ of colonies, diasporas, and migrant communities; the politics of autoethnographic impression and imitation; and the frictions generated by the intersection of cultural curiosity and mercantile opportunism in the production and consumption of export art.

About the conference:
The AAANZ Conference is held every year (although not in 2020), and is the region’s major conference for art workers and researchers. You should apply to present at the conference if you are an art historian, artist or a curator. Outside these core areas, we also welcome design and moving image historians, museum studies academics, and arts and design professionals. We welcome speakers from across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Region, and we especially welcome proposals from Indigenous delegates.

How to apply:
To apply to speak at the conference, you must submit a Paper Proposal Form to the Panel Convenor of the panel on which you wish to speak.

All Paper Proposal Forms must be submitted by 30 July 2021.

The Paper Proposal Form requires you to provide the following details:
Your name and institutional affiliation.
Your email address and phone number
The title of your paper
Proposed paper abstract (max. 200 words)
Professional biography (max. 100 words)

All panels will be allocated 90 minutes. Unless otherwise noted, panels will comprise 3 research papers of maximum 20 minutes each, and at least 30 minutes for questions. Unless otherwise noted, all panels will be taking place in person at the University of Sydney. Online panels will take place via Zoom (or equivalent).

Speakers may present only one paper at the conference. All speakers and convenors must be current AAANZ members to be included in the Conference Program (in August 2021).