[1] From: Tilo Reifenstein
Subject: CFP: Images through words: the ethics of "reading"

The relationship of images and ethics is often mediated, intensified or
otherwise altered by words. In a photographic context, Clive Scott (1999)
has problematized the relationship between images and language. Susan
Sontag (2004, p.80) argued that the photograph’s inability to “make us
understand” runs counter to “narratives”. Yet, the writing of
history, too, as Hayden White (1973, 2022) explored, emplots events into
narrative representations of reality through rhetorical devices. Related
questions of power that accompany image-and-text dynamics are weighted in
Saidiya Hartman's (2008) and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s (2019) approaches
to the archive as a space that facilitates history. By embarking on this
interdisciplinary context, this session seeks paper contributions that
explore how the coexistence of words and works harbours the ethics of
writing and “reading”.

Whether spoken or written, fragmentary or longform, poetic or
“factual”, the occurrence of the verbal next to/around/about/in the
work impacts our encounter with it. What are the ethical ramifications of
this image-and-text relation, or with the "imagetext" as per WTJ Mitchell
(1994)? How do viewers' ethical perceptions shift when they become readers?
How do titles participate in the ethics of the work and how should we
problematize cases where the language provision is beyond the creator’s
remit? Finally, from an art-historiographic perspective, how does our
writing practice meddle (with) the ethical dimensions of the work? From
photography scholarship to postcolonial studies and from queer theories to
contemporary discussions of ekphrasis, this panel will consider such
questions of power, agency and translation positioned at the crossroads of
words and images.

To offer a paper:

Please email your paper proposals direct to both session convenors:
Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, York St John University,
k.lignoutsamantaniyorksj.ac.uk
Tilo Reifenstein, York St John University, t.reifensteinyorksj.ac.uk

You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a
20-minute paper, your name and institutional affiliation (if any).

Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the
paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the
digital programme.

You will receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within
two weeks.

[2]
From: Elizabeth Pugliano
Subject: CFP: Attention in Pre-Modern Art and Visual Culture

Session convenor: Elizabeth Pugliano, University of Colorado Denver

In today’s world of perpetual digital connectivity and ever-evolving
algorithms, attention is a precious, fervently sought commodity, at once
carefully guarded and divided with abandon. While both the amount of
imagery that endeavours to claim our attention and the pace of its change
may well be at a never-before-seen pitch, concerns about attentiveness and
distraction are not uniquely modern. Building on recent explorations of
attention in pre-modern contexts such as Jamie Kreiner’s The Wandering
Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (2023), this session
aims to probe issues of attention specifically in relation to the
production, reception, experience and interpretation of ancient, medieval
and early modern artworks, architectural settings and other forms of
crafted objects and spaces. How did the design, iconography, materials or
presentation of an artwork garner, hold or direct attention? To what extent
did sensory enactment through the visual and the material serve to
cultivate attention? How were tensions between attention and distraction
navigated in the visual realm? How might modern understandings of cognition
and behaviour be productively applied to visual production in the
pre-modern world? In addition to generating new perspectives on pre-modern
artworks, attending to historical approaches to and concerns about
attention may beneficially expand how we understand the complex
relationships between visual input and attention both then and now.

Please email proposals for 20-minute papers to
elizabeth.puglianoucdenver.edu. Proposals should include a paper title,
abstract (250 words maximum), your name and institutional affiliation (if
any).

[3]
From: Lee Ann Custer
Subject: CFP: Art Histories of the Urban

We are currently welcoming submissions for our upcoming session, "Art
Histories of the Urban," scheduled for April 9-11, 2025 at University of
York, England.

Please send paper proposals (title and 250-word maximum abstract) directly
to session convenors (email addresses listed below). The deadline for
submission is November 1 but we would welcome earlier submissions.

Lee Ann Custer, Vanderbilt University, leeann.custerVanderbilt.edu Joanna
Grabski, Arizona State University, Joanna.Grabskiasu.edu

Cities offer paradigmatic spaces for artists to make and exhibit their
works and to make and sustain their careers. From Europe to the Americas
and Africa to Asia, artists represent, document, interpret, and intervene
in the cities where they work and live. Not only do cities provide both
subject and context for artistic propositions, they also create the
conditions for art institutions and communities to thrive. Bringing
together approaches and themes from art history and interdisciplinary urban
studies, this session examines the relationship among artists, art
production and exhibition, art institutions, art scenes and communities,
and the urban environment. While previous studies address aspects of these
topics, this session takes a comparative and comprehensive look at the
mutual constitution of art and the urban—with its unique spatial
proximities and juxtapositions.

We invite papers that consider from historical and contemporary vantage
points how the urban environment’s visual, material, spatial, and social
resources are vital to artistic production. In what ways do artists engage
with formal and informal structures to create their work and communities?
How do art institutions such as schools, museums, and biennales emerge from
cities, shaping opportunities for artists? How has the urban context
catalyzed experimental approaches to making? Contributing to efforts to
de-colonize the discipline, we ask how artists grapple with urban
structures to explore power, identity, and the creation of just and
sustainable futures. Finally, who is included or excluded from art
histories of the urban? What are the possibilities and limits of this
analytic approach?

[4]
From: Max Boersma
Subject: CFP: Abstraction, Artisanal Knowledge, and Craft Epistemologies

This session seeks to reexamine abstraction as a site of intersections and
dissonances between modes of making, focused especially on those between
the fine arts and so-called craft or artisanal practices. We aim to
interrogate how and why abstraction functions as a vehicle for expanding
notions of artistic making to include previously excluded techniques,
media, skills, perspectives, and associated forms of embodied knowledge. As
such, this panel invites papers that critically rethink abstraction as part
of a broad, inclusive and intersectional history of modern and contemporary
art.

Challenging Euro-American formalist narratives, recent studies by Sarah
Louise Cowan, Philip J. Deloria, and Julia Bryan-Wilson—among
others—have introduced new models for analysing abstraction within
African diasporic, Native American, and feminist histories of making.
Meanwhile, exhibitions such as Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern
Abstraction have foregrounded the long relationship between modernist art
and textiles. Building on these discussions, this session puts emphasis on
the manual expertise and craft intelligence involved in such exchanges. How
have artists channelled forms of embodied knowledge and specific
epistemologies of craft in their engagements with abstract art? What
opportunities has abstraction offered for elevating marginalised practices
and surfacing lesser-known histories?

We welcome papers across all geographic contexts and diverse media that
address abstract art in relation to forms of making occluded by material
and cultural hierarchies, imperialism and colonialism, and racialised and
gendered exclusions.

Organized by Cora Chalaby (University College London) and Max Boersma
(Freie Universität Berlin). This session will be held on location at AAH
2025 at the University of York.

Submissions should include a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a
20-minute paper, as well as your name and institutional affiliation (if
any). Please email your proposals directly to the session conveners
(corinne.chalaby.21 [at] ucl.ac.uk, m.boersma [at] fu-berlin.de).

[5]
From: Ceren Ozpinar
Subject: CFP: Community and Activism in the Global
South

Ceren Özpınar, University of Brighton, c.ozpinarbrighton.ac.uk
Eliza Tan, University of Brighton, e.tanbrighton.ac.uk

Art functions as a locus for exchange and organisation, where a sense of
community is formed. Here, community is often characterised by tensions and
contradictions as individuals unite to achieve a common dream or an
activist goal, driven by a feeling of incompleteness (Chan, 2010). Examples
include Ruangrupa’s artistic direction of documenta fifteen (2022), which
drew on the Indonesian agricultural practice of the ‘lumbang’ or
‘rice barn’ to reimagine collectivity, collaboration, and
sustainability. Nil Yalter’s performance at Halkevi Community Centre in
London (2024), organised with curator Övül Durmuşoğlu, aimed to ignite
greater interest in solidarity within the art world through exposure to
Kurdish music and culture.
This session welcomes papers that explore how artistic and curatorial
practices can contribute to research on community and activism in the
Global South, focusing on both connections and disconnections as key to
building collectivity (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). We seek to examine how
existing social infrastructures are remade through practices which engage,
for example, networks, space, data, embodiment, and affect to serve future
life.

Contributions might address the following questions (but are not limited
to): How do artists and curators create communities defined by ideas of
‘being-in-common’ (Nancy, 1991)? How do they engender alternative
models of self-organisation? How can art and exhibitions prompt acts of
generosity and sustainable resource sharing? How do spatial dynamics impact
the formation and expression of communities in artworks and curating? How
do embodied artistic experiences and performances shape community
interactions and dissent?

Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor(s).
You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a
20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional
affiliation (if any).