[1] Exhibition Design: Between Materiality and Spatial Dramaturgy
From: Pamela Bianchi
Date: June 13, 2023

This session focuses on the materiality of exhibition devices and their role in shaping knowledge. It is interested in examining the changing ontology of exhibition design, arising today from new curating approaches, such as hybrid installations, speculative narratives and aesthetic experience. Expanding existing scholarship and research on exhibition design studies, this session considers exhibition-making processes, materials and structures, and explores how the materiality of the exhibition (the curatorial and exhibition design practices) can spatialize aesthetic experience, foster spatial perception and, importantly, reposition the individual at the centre of newly-created social and spatial narratives.
Since the 1980s, the art world has moved away from an object-oriented culture to a systems-oriented one. This created a form of permeability that allowed for hybrid creative and exhibition formulas to appear: sort of meta-sculptures and meta-spaces capable of generating experience and knowledge. From the landmark exhibition Contemporanea (Villa Borghese, Rome, 1973) to Liam Gillick’s show Renovation Filter: Recent Past and Near Future (Arnolfini, Bristol, 1999); from the Boijmans Museum’s archive in Rotterdam (The Depot, 2021) to the hybridizations of the Atelier van Lieshout, the alternative models of social and economic organizations of Superflex and the display projects of Adrien Gardère Studio, it becomes clear that artworks are not the only parts integral to an exhibition. Rather, architectural and design structures, as well as different types of spaces and materials (see Carlo Scarpa’ travertine panels at the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice), become important signifying and relational exhibition parameters that question the exhibiting in terms of curating, displaying, experience and contents. The close relationship between exhibits and design elements defines a kind of spatial dramaturgy that resurfaces today in hybrid exhibitions (temporary and permanent), where the ontological limits of their components are challenged by a post-media creative approach. Moving beyond rigid positioning and strict epistemological margins, a new ontology of exhibition devices seems to offer a new compositional freedom to conceptualize and articulate a range of curatorial intents, meanings and means of communication.
This session aims to question what exhibition design could be and could do today in terms of the ontology of an exhibition, and to explore the role of its materiality, both technical and theoretical, in the narrative processes. Neither a simple process of visual representation nor a product of an architectural gesture, exhibition design could be understood as integrating the idea of an art form in itself.

We invite papers that reflect on, but are not necessarily limited to:
- The ontology of different exhibition devices and exhibition-making processes
- How the materiality of exhibitions shapes meaning, knowledge, experience and speculative
narratives
- Materials (of display structures) as means to articulate narratives
- Designing spatial narratives and spatial dramaturgy
- Visitor’s experience in different types of spaces (e.g. material, immaterial, social, domestic…)
- Case studies across different geographical contexts, global perspectives and types of
exhibition spaces (museum of any type, alternative spaces…)
- Contemporary art case studies that engage with the above

Proposals must be submitted on the submission platform only, by following the official website https://www.cihalyon2024.fr/en/call-for-abstracts.

For further information regarding the call for paper, please contact the
CIHA secretariat - CIHA-Lyon-2024cfha-web.fr
Ot the corresponding authors:
Pamela BIANCHI - pamela.bianchiparis-belleville.archi.fr
Eve KALYVA - e.m.kalyvakent.ac.uk

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[2] Painting the Materials, Imitating the Techniques. A Dialogue between Mediums in Early Modern Art
From: Roxanne Loos
Date: Jun 14, 2023

How can we comprehend the trend for simulating materials in European painting between the 15th and 17th centuries? Was it simply a demonstration of technical virtuosity underscoring the superiority of pictorial practice over the other arts? These issues are worth revisiting in light of anthropological approaches and materiality studies regarding the communicative potential of early modern images.

Since Leonardo, debates on the paragone have essentially focused on the confrontation between painting and sculpture. However, Renaissance workshop practice shows that this comparison is far from limited to questions of art hierarchies. Recent scholarship on intermediality (Oy-Marra 2018), matter (Bol, Spray 2023) and colour (Boudon-Machuel, Brock, Charron 2012) has stressed that the quest for mimesis is inseparable from fantasia and a growing preoccupation with the agency of images. Jan van Eyck’s grisailles on the reverse of altarpieces or Fra Angelico’s fictive marbles are just a few examples illustrating the meaningful transpositions of materiality in both Northern and Southern Europe.

Feigned representations of marble, bronze, wood, stucco, mosaic, pietra serena, or tapestry emerge as critical loci for assessing how the skilful imitation of one medium by another could open up new ways for investigating the ability to deceive the eye. Far from incidental, such fictitious incursions usually underlie complex processes of intellectual and sensorial transfers. The choice of the counterfeit medium is also significant. Challenging literature on materiality (Anderson, Dunlop, Smith 2014) and mediality (Kiening, Stercken 2018; Weddigen 2011) points out the need to analyse materials (or techniques) in terms of their physical and visual properties, with specific symbolic connotations. Furthemore, anachronism offers a compelling avenue for further inquiry (Nagel, Wood 2010). The afterlife of Antiquity calls attention to the programmatic way in which the classical past is borrowed to enhance the dynamic interplay between mediums.

Whether motivated by aesthetic, spiritual or ideological objectives, material mimesis contends undoubtedly with a productive tension between the painted surface and realspace. These counterfeit elements often act as thresholds, underpinning the narrative’s construction and regulating its meaning-making process.

This session scrutinizes, therefore, the semantic and symbolic vitality conveyed by the painters’ reflection upon perception and appearance (fragility/solidity, flatness/rilievo, brightness/darkness, preciousness/simplicity) emphasizing the sumptuousness of the artworks at a lower cost. We welcome 20-minute papers that mobilize such interdisciplinary approaches or forge new ones, considering paintings produced in Italy, Flanders, and other areas beyond Western Europe. The aim is to build up a transnational discussion on the dialectics between the creative act and the performativity of mediums, especially when these mediums are purposefully pictorial decoys.

Proposals for papers (EN/FR) must be submitted by 15 September 2023 via the CIHA call for papers platform: https://www.cihalyon2024.fr/en/call-for-abstracts

For further information, please contact the session organizers:
- Roxanne Loos (Université catholique de Louvain): roxanne.loosuclouvain.be
- Valentina Hristova (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): valqhristovayahoo.fr

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[3] Dressing Bodies, Dressing Spaces: Challenges and New Approaches to Textiles and Adornment (300-1600)
From: Eiren Shea
Date: June 14, 2023

Holistic consideration of the interrelationships of pre- and early modern bodies and spaces across Eurasia (300—1600) has been limited by conceptual frameworks divided into geographic, temporal, and methodological specialization. Thus, work on dress has dealt with personal appearance, highlighting questions about identity through clothing, jewelry, and accessories. Likewise, scholarship on interior decoration has considered the relationship of ephemeral design elements to permanent architectural forms through function and placement. Further, scholarship on the body’s presence in space has tended to work with movement, placement, and perception of abstracted bodies, rather than concrete figures weighed down by clothing and jewels.

These approaches, divided largely by medium, reflect art historiographical biases and technical specializations which silo, on the one hand, experts in textiles (weaving), jewelry (metalwork), and sculpture (architecture), or of art historians, archaeologists, and architectural historians, on the other. Similar divisions of body and interior also occur in the broader perspective of material culture theory, while modernist aesthetics have further obscured the interrelatedness of human form and spatial environment. Museum contexts reinforce this divide: objects tend to be isolated within cases, leading to a view of these pieces as context-free, while the museumification of historical spaces means that attendant furnishings are often displayed in special exhibition spaces, whereas historical rooms lie empty.
The proposed panel considers adorned human bodies in their spatial environments to forge new theoretical frameworks drawn from decorative arts historiography, ornament studies, sensory archaeology, anthropology, and material spatiality. An intermedial approach is essential, such as advocated in Luke Lavan and Ellen Swift’s (2009) work on late antique dress and interior decoration and in Jonathan Hay’s (2010) explorations of the somatic experiences of surfaces in early modern Chinese decorative arts objects. Recent efforts to draw together diverse Eurasian experiences of dress and furnishing textiles include a conference on medieval wearables at the Bard Graduate Center (2022) and a panel on embodied movement and interior decoration at the ICMS-Kalamazoo (2023).

We seek papers that:
- articulate new theoretical approaches that treat pre- and early modern dress and furnishings as coherent visual and material systems;
- consider the concept and metaphor of “dress,” viewing bodies as structures for adornment and decor, and buildings as immersive environments that respond to the embellished body;
- evaluate dress and furnishings in a cross-cultural or comparative global framework, particularly in terms of status, value, ritual, identity, and somatic experience;
- include contributions that draw from museum collections, given the history of textile research and collections in Lyon

Submission deadline: 15 September 2023

Candidates should send the following information:
- Title of the paper
- Paper proposal: An abstract of 350 to 500 words, in English or French, including 4 to 6 key words and a possible bibliography.
- CV of 500 characters: First name, last name, title, position, institution, with a link to the personal or professional page if applicable.

Submissions should be made through the conference website: https://www.cihalyon2024.fr/fr/appel-a-communications

If you have questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to any of the session organizers:
Patricia Blessing pblessingprinceton.edu
Elizabeth Dospěl Williams williamsedoaks.org
Eiren Shea sheaeiregrinnell.edu

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[4] Virtual/Material: What Matters for Art History?
From: Elizabeth Mansfield
Date: June 15, 2023

Paper proposals are invited for the session “Virtual/Material: What Matters for Art History?” at next year’s CIHA conference in Lyon (23 – 27 June 2024). This session aims to promote conversation and collaboration between art historians working in Technical Art History and Digital Art History by focusing on questions related to the dematerialization and rematerialization of artworks.

Technical Art History valorizes material specificity, labor, and workshop practices while Digital Art History accepts that artworks and artists alike are also forms of data that may or may not take tangible form. Yet, these distinct practices share fundamental concerns. Both Technical Art History and Digital Art History ask scholars of visual culture to decide how—even whether—to distinguish the real from the ersatz, the complete from the partial. As a result, questions related to materiality become particularly relevant: how are objects represented as data? How are attributes like color, texture, or composition analyzed and represented using digital technologies? What are the consequences of artworks’ dematerializations and rematerializations via digital technologies? And what of the materiality of data itself? As the management of data, on laptops, cameras, and servers, becomes an increasing central aspect of contemporary research for repositories as well as individual scholars, what implications might this have for research and scholarship? Such questions are particularly relevant now given scholars’ increasing reliance on remote access and digitized sources.

Curators, conservators, and conservations scientists are especially encouraged to submit a proposal as are scholars working on questions of materiality and virtuality in a global context.

Proposals are due 15 September 2023 and may be submitted via the CIHA platform, which includes a full description of the session: https://livebyglevents.key4register.com/key4register/Abstract.aspx?e=148&abslogout=1&culture=en-GB

Elizabeth Mansfield (Penn State, USA), session co-chair with Hélène Dubois (Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Belgium) and Emily Pugh (Getty Research Institute, USA)

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[5] Materialising Loss: Absence and Remaking in Art History
From: John Rattray
Date: June 16, 2023

Paper proposals are currently invited for the session “Materialising Loss: Absence and Remaking in Art History” at the 36th Congrès du Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA) in Lyon, 23 – 28 June 2024, co-chaired by Francesca Borgo (University of St Andrews/ Bibliotheca Hertziana) and Felicity Bodenstein (Université Sorbonne). Proposals are due 15 September 2023.

The material turn in art history has reinstated a sensibility for the “thingness” of things (Brown, 2001), the properties of their constitutive materials (Ingold, 2007), and the activity of their matter (Miller & Poh, 2022; Latour 1991; Gell 1998; Bennett, 2010). More recently still, interest has extended beyond making and materials: processes of unmaking, deterioration, care, and preservation have become subjects of investigation, accompanied by growing critical engagement with conservation (Fowler, 2019; Fowler & Nagel, 2023) and increasing attention to the behaviour of matter across the deep time of geological history (Borgo & Venturi, CIHA 2019).

But what happens when, despite all our best efforts to conserve, protect, and make last, things disappear? Taking this question as its starting point, we invite papers that reconsider matter and materiality from an unusual point of view: the object’s loss or inaccessibility, and the practices undertaken to compensate for its absence, via physical replicas or virtual reconstructions. In centring itself on what has long been considered an epistemological endpoint in art historical studies – the disappearance of the original object – the session proposes a critical assessment of material and virtual remaking as site of art-historical knowledge. It asks how we might integrate that knowledge into the analytical methods of art history.

Looking at materiality from the seemingly paradoxical standpoint of absence reveals how much material studies takes for granted in terms of the object’s presence, permanence, and accessibility. Loss forcefully confronts us with the enabling operations and grounding conditions that go into writing material art history. It permeates everything we do, and yet it is distinctively undertheorized (Fricke & Kumler, 2022). What are the stakes of absence and reclamation? How does loss help us rethink the relationship between matter and form beyond the hylomorphic model? How do art historians deal with missing evidence, and how does its resurfacing or remaking change the canon and the narrative? Whose loss is worth talking about and why?

The threats of war, climate change and mass tourism give these questions a pressing relevance today, amplified by debates over sustainability, inclusion, and property rights. But art history seems sceptical of efforts to work against these risks: despite recent calls for ‘militant reproductions’ (Bredekamp, 2016), campaigns to widen the notion of originality (Lowe & Latour, 2010) and emphasize the seriality of the Classic (Settis & Anguissola, 2015), and appeals to the greater inclusivity of digital heritage (Terras, 2022; Michel, 2016), much of the discipline remains ambivalent about the remade, regarding it as ludic and nostalgic.

We live in a world in which heritage is constantly de- and re-materialised, formed and reformed in an unprecedented interplay between the material, immaterial, and neomaterial. And although the implications for objects and their histories are manifold, they remain largely unexplored. This session aims at remedying that imbalance, reflecting on the impact of physical loss on material art history and examining the value of remaking as historical method.

In the interests of crafting a more inclusive narrative of loss and remaking and of fostering exchange between scholars from different geographical and professional backgrounds, we especially welcome papers offering global perspectives.

Proposals are due 15 September 2023 and must be submitted via the CIHA platform. Instructions on how to submit your proposal can be found on their website: https://www.cihalyon2024.fr/fr/

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[6] Building Identity: Architecture’s material significations
From: Ariane Varela Braga
Date: Juni 19, 2023

Chairs:
Ariane Varela Braga (Académie de France à Rome–Villa Médicis)
Jonathan Foote (Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark)

How do building materials shape identity? Building materials have the power to transform the urban landscape and nourish human imagination. Beyond technical factors and availability, materials are loaded with significations. They carry associations that constantly evolve through changing historical, socio-cultural, economic and technical conditions.

Material identity, the correlation between materials and groups, geographies or histories, frequently runs parallel to power relations in architecture. The Roman marble trade is a well known case of building materials in service of imperial power, laying a blueprint for materials
to act in concert with colonial hegemonies. Beyond identifying with their place of extraction or production, building materials can also assume abstract values such as modernity or progress, as when copper was promoted by Anaconda Mining Company as a ‘Friend of Freedom’ by having been used to clad the Statue of Liberty.

Moreover, materials such as granite, in close relation with local geology, have been pivotal in strengthening the project of nation-building, as during the National Romanticism of Nordic countries in the late 19th-century. Examples abound when considering building materials in
defining inter-cultural relations, often with shifting cultural agencies, as in the use of imported Dutch clay tiles by Ottoman royalty in 18th-century Istanbul. Materials can also become a place of cultural hybridisation, as when brick was used to associate the 19th century concept of the mudejár with a specific kind of Spanish architecture of the 13th and 16th centuries.

Such relations tell a story of contaminations and exchanges, of technical and cultural transfers. Cultural identity is not understood as a static entity - a signifier and a signified - but as affective and provisional, a process of negotiation, channelled through national, ethnic, and even highly personal histories.

This panel considers building materials as elements that participate in the shaping and representation of such identities from the early modern period to the 20th–century. More broadly, it is interested in how material identity is constructed vis-à-vis political and social relations, and how building materials have been used to assert, subvert or maintain such
connections.

We aim for productive art historical discussions on materiality and identity as applied to the history of architecture. The issue of identity in architecture has been traditionally addressed through the notion of style. We would like to challenge this view and ask: What does it mean to think about cultural identity and architecture through the optics of building materials? What historiographical and methodological approach does it imply? We invite papers that deal with case studies and theoretical-methodological aspects involving topical themes such as:

- how architects and societies construct identity around building materials
- what practices or mechanisms are employed to construct such identities
- discourses and narratives motivating their perceived cultural and utilitarian employment
- activation, appropriation, transformation of meanings of specific materials across time and places
- creative opportunities which importing and exporting building materials afford
- materials as contested and potent symbols for cultural appropriation and shared identity
- historiographical interpretations of materials and cultural identity

For submissions, please refer to the official platform of the CIHA, available here: https://www.cihalyon2024.fr/en/