[1] After Turner.
From: Nicholas Robbins

J.M.W. Turner continues to exert a singular gravitational pull on artmaking and art history. On the 250th anniversary of his birth, this panel at the 2025 Association for Art History conference (9-11 April, University of York) reconsiders the many afterlives of Turner’s work, seeking to understand anew the cultural forms that have developed in its wake. At each moment that artists and critics have shifted in their focus—from national canon-formation to genealogies of modernism, to social histories of industrial modernity, to post-imperial critique and ecological revisioning—a new Turner has been adduced to address the present’s shifting grounds. Rather than settle his legacy into any final shape, the panel will seek to understand the necessarily fragmented and unstable nature of Turner’s effects from his lifetime into the present: how he has slipped in and out of timeliness, how artists have echoed and inverted the models of artmaking he advanced, and how critics have wrestled with the daunting heterogeneity of his art. The aim on this major anniversary is neither to tame that heterogeneity, nor to shore up Turner’s centrality, but instead to open art history to the dispersions and displacements that have become so much a part of Turner’s afterlives. We welcome proposals addressing any facet of art after Turner—artistic responses, historiographic episodes, critical encounters, experimental genealogies—and wish especially to solicit proposals from scholars who may not normally address the artist’s work.

Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenors (see below) by 1 November. 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 should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks.

Session chairs: Richard Johns, University of York, richard.johnsyork.ac.uk; Jeremy Melius, University of York, jeremy.meliusyork.ac.uk; Nicholas Robbins, University College London, n.robbinsucl.ac.uk

---

[2] The Visual Display of Art Historical Information.
From: Allison Stielau

The translation of visual and material phenomena into verbal form is usually framed as the central challenge of art historical method. Yet this translation often takes place alongside visual forms of description, quantification, and analysis. Models, didactic drawings, graphs, tables, reconstructions: such visual displays of art historical information (to paraphrase Edward Tufte’s classic study of data visualisation) have played a central, if underexamined role in the formation of the discipline. They include “family trees” of artistic schools, graphic analyses of composition, diagrams identifying iconography and explaining perspectival systems, among other formats. Building on a recent interest in the diagram as image across art historical fields, this session turns to art historians’ own use of graphic elements to communicate information seemingly unavailable in reproductive illustration. How have these contributed to, or undermined, the scientistic underpinnings of art history and mediated its vexed relationship to “objectivity”? How do diagrams or schematic drawings allow for different modes of analysis, synthesis or criticism? The expanding use of big data in the humanities has brought with it new visual models. What might the longer history of the discipline’s relationship to “data visualization” teach us about the affordances and pitfalls of these analytic forms?

Papers exploring these and other questions should focus primarily on a single example and be 10 minutes in length. Pairs of papers will be followed by a five-minute response, ending with a 25-minute panel discussion. Ideally contributions will consider art historical practice in a wide range of fields and across geographies, from prehistory to the present.

Please email a.stielauucl.ac.uk with title and abstract (250 words), your name and institutional affiliation, if any. Proposals due by November 1.

---

[3] Underground
From: Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, Freyda Spira

What do we see if we look down instead of up? How does artistic engagement with the spaces under our feet challenge traditional discourses in the history of art? What do literal and metaphorical underground networks have to say about ‘social and ideological forms of power’ that are ‘inseparable’ from the discourse of verticalism (Haacke, 2021, 1)? Building on the notions of the vertical turn and the subterranean imaginary, as well as projects like ‘Underground Imaginaries’ (https://spacesinbetween.jimdosite.com), this panel seeks to focus on artistic agency underground.  From the handprints made in the Maros-Pangkep karst in Indonesia almost 50,000 years ago to the catacombs deep under Rome to Vito Acconci’s performance of Seedbed (1972) at the Sonnabend Gallery, concealed, buried or hidden spaces have long encouraged artistic experimentation and exploration.  

We are interested in papers that explore not only the artworks and cultural objects that populate the underground, but the people who animate those spaces through their artistry and their lived experiences.  How have artists made use of the underground to comment on power—whether religious, political or social? How do their underground works comment on our ‘natural, cultural, and built environments’ (Haacke, 2021, 3)—or our displacement from them? We are especially keen for submissions that explore the underground in the Global South.

Please email a title and 250-word abstract for a 20-minute paper, along with your name and institutional affiliation (if any), by 1 November 2024 to:

Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, University of Essex, natasharessex.ac.uk
Freyda Spira, Yale University Art Gallery, freyda.spirayale.edu

---

[4] From Local to Global: Feminist Activism and Documentary Photography
From: Vivian Sheng

This panel aims to gather scholars, artists, curators and activists to shed fresh light on researching, archiving, exhibiting and disseminating feminist photography, provoking reassessment and revalidation of feminist social documentary work since the 1970s in its local, transnational and global contexts. While the power imbalances of documentary photography have been rigorously critiqued since this decade, many feminist practitioners have remained invested in the social and activist capacities of the documentary form. This panel seeks to build on ongoing reassessment of documentary photography in relation to intersectional feminist debates and transnational frameworks. It particularly welcomes papers which investigate the relevance of feminist documentary practice to contemporary transnational struggles and questions of solidarity; gendered inequalities and divisions of labour; systems of support and regulation; cultural and ethnic diversity; LGBTQ+ activism; and women’s interregional connections and disparities.

This panel follows on from the major exhibition in Newcastle at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works (2024-25). From her base in Edinburgh, Raffles pursued projects in China, the Philippines, Tibet, Israel, Palestine, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, addressing women’s working conditions, pay, health, care, housing, disability and education. Alongside research papers, the panel will include a roundtable discussion, and two Ignite talks led by artists and activists engaging with documentary practice, including but not limited to the issues addressed by Raffles’ work.

To offer a paper:
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).

Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convener: Vivian Sheng, viviankuangshenggmail.com.

Deadline: November 1, 2024.