CONF Oct 29, 2024

Animal Products (London/online, 14 Nov 24)

V&A South Kensington, London / online, Nov 14, 2024
Registration deadline: Nov 14, 2024

Pandora Syperek, LONDON

Animal Products: Transhistorical Intersections of More-Than-Human Design and Display.

This symposium brings together artists, designers, curators and researchers to explore the interrelationships between ‘products’ made from, by and with nonhuman animals and their contexts of display. Taking the V&A’s historical Collection of Animal Products as a point of departure, speakers will explore the natural-cultural histories of animal materials alongside innovative contemporary approaches to making, designing and curating with the more-than-human in diverse contexts. Researchers and practitioners will consider legacies of colonial extraction, collection, trade, knowledge transfer and display, both in the wild and in the museum. The aim is to look beyond the Victorian paradigm of animal-as-product and its Eurocentric legacies, including traditional sustainability discourse, to explore interspecies relationships across art, design, curatorial practice, ecology and cosmologies.

Venue: Hochhauser Auditorium, Learning Centre, V&A South Kensington and Online

Programme:

10-10.15 registration, tea & coffee

10.15-10.30 Introduction
Pandora Syperek

10.30-12.15 Animals in Collections
Chair: Zofia Trafas-White (Senior Curator, V&A East Museum)

From a museum of art and design to a natural history museum: displaying ‘animal products’ and natural history specimens in Fashioned from Nature (2018-2019)
Edwina Ehrman (Dress and textile historian)

In the Teeth of Commerce: Ivory Artifacts as Troubling Objects
Marianna Szczygielska (Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Ecological Anthropology, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Art is delicious: following the creatures that eat artefacts
El Morgan (Artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Loughborough University)

12.15-1.15 lunch

1.15-3.00 ‘Products of the Sea’
Chair: Sarah Wade (Associate Professor in Museum Studies, University of East Anglia)

From Consolidation to Collapse: British Empire and Cetaceans at the Natural History Museum, London
Sophia Nicolov (Early Career Research Fellow, Natural History Museum)

Sea-work: Salvage, the Sculptural, and Marine ‘Growth’
Killian Quigley (Research Fellow, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University)

All My Relations
Tyler Eash (Artist)

3.00-3.30 tea & coffee

3.30-5.15 Human-Animal Reconstitutions
Chair: Anna Bates (Curator of Furniture, 1900 – Now, V&A South Kensington)

Human Materials, Animal Makers: The Multispecies Displays of Bowerbirds
Nina Amstutz (Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, College of Design, University of Oregon)

Sharing the world: narratives and case studies in the exhibition of more-than-Human design
Rebecca Lewin (Senior Curator, Design Museum)

Title TBC
Ron Wakkary (Professor in Design, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, & Professor and Chair of Design for More Than Human-Centered Worlds in the Future Everyday Cluster in Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology)

5.15-5.20
Closing statements – Pandora Syperek

This event is organised by Dr Pandora Syperek, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Institute for Creative Futures, Loughborough University London, and Visiting Fellow, V&A Research Institute.
Contact: andora Syperek, p.sypereklboro.ac.uk

The online option is available to book at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/bXK6AoWEJL/animal-products-sympossium-online-14-nov-2024.
The auditorium is wheelchair accessible.

Reference:
CONF: Animal Products (London/online, 14 Nov 24). In: ArtHist.net, Oct 29, 2024 (accessed Nov 3, 2024), <https://arthist.net/archive/43041>.

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