The research group WONA Worlding Northern Art at UiT The Arctic University of Norway calls for papers for the conference "Photographic Practices as Care-Taking" that will take place at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, 24–25 November 2022 – in-person and online. The conference is organized in collaboration with Perspektivet Museum, Tromsø.

This conference aims to examine how photographs take part in complex networks of relations. While particularly analogue image making, curating and archiving suggest a yearning for something ostensibly more stable, more material and concrete than we experience on an everyday basis, other practices embrace today’s changing digital culture. Thus we would like to investigate which role photographs take in such a world of constant transformation, how they can “touch” and remain objects of affect when they are simultaneously part of rapidly changing circumstances and contexts. We ask: Can photographs be seen as “care-takers”, establishing empathic relationships between humans and between humans and more-than-humans? Can photographs create “other” worlds of being and caring? How can photographic images and their practitioners participate in transversal, post-disciplinary processes of recoding, rewriting and “alter-worlding” (Åsberg and Braidotti 2018)? We would like to address if and how a variety of photographic practices can be recognized as practices of care-taking, from artistic to curatorial, as well as archival and collective methods and (counter)strategies.

Historically, care is a concept of ambiguity, emerging in the tension between burden and love, anxiety and attention, ethics and politics. Here, however, care is to be understood in its simple everyday meaning: to feel concern, interest, or affection, to attach importance to something – and as what is necessary for the welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something. Further frameworks for understanding care can be found in feminist theories’ “ethics of care” (Gilligan 1982), Latour’s “matters of concern” (Latour, 2004), When Species Meet (Haraway 2008), Matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) and in relation to the recently experienced pandemic, which has laid bare a crisis of care in all aspects of society and our environments (Dowling, 2022).

The conference will have two keynotes by Dr. Jana Johanna Haeckel (art historian/curator/lecturer) and Katarina Pirak Sikku, (artist). There will be three sessions based on CFP. The sessions will be grouped into different aspects of care-taking and relate to WONA’s three research interests: art and identity; art and ecology; art and science (see https://uit.no/research/wona). Overlap between the three may occur, for example when research engages with both historical and digital photographic archives in which questions of race, sexuality and identity get scrutinized, whereby the role of science in ordering, categorizing and labelling is discussed; in photographic and curatorial practices that review the chemical aspects of photography, their ecological impact and possible (scientific) solutions; and in practices that use the photographic medium as an agent for environmental and political activism, creating intersectional solidarity and care amongst human and more-than-humans.

Proposals for individual papers should be 250 words abstracts and should also include a short vita of the presenter (max 100 words), and an e-mail address. Abstracts should be e-mailed to stephanie.von.spreteruit.no by 10 October 2022. We do not accept papers that have already been substantially published. Papers should be 20 minutes in length and generally include visuals. Topics should be relevant to contemporary discourses on photography. Each paper presentation will be followed by a Q&A led by the session’s moderator. Please provide information if you intend to participate in-person or online.