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[1] Archiving Loss: Reconstruction, Simulation, and Historical Value
From: Karina Pawlow
Date: Oct 12, 2026

How does loss acquire historical and evidentiary form? At a moment when the past may be reconstructed through lost media environments or simulated without any referent, the ways objects and images are granted the status of pastness, damage, or historical survival have become urgent.

Scholarship from Derrida’s Archive Fever to Hal Foster’s “archival impulse” has shown that records actively produce rather than simply preserve historical meaning. More recent work by Sara Callahan on the archival turn in contemporary art and Roland Meyer on AI image generation has sharpened questions of visual authority and trace. Yet the medial and institutional conditions under which loss becomes legible and meaningful have received less attention.

Two contrasting examples indicate the session’s scope: the V&A’s reframing of Me at the zoo, where a born-digital object acquires epistemic status through reconstruction of an earlier platform environment; and fake archives such as The Archive In Between, circulating across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and print compendia, which use AI-generated imagery to produce documentary credibility and the appearance of a past without any originating event. In one case, historical value is stabilised through reconstruction and collection; in the other, it is generated through simulation and circulation.

Papers are invited from across periods and media addressing reconstruction, musealisation, fabricated damage, pseudo-documentary form, simulated pastness, and the unstable relation between trace and evidence.

The half-day session will open with a framing introduction, followed by four papers and a concluding discussion.

Themes: Archiving, Simulation, Evidence

Lead Convenor: Karina Pawlow, Saarland University, Germany

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance here and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/

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[2] Global Histories of Lithography
From: Mariana Zegianini; Tom Young
Date: Oct 12, 2026

Over the course of the nineteenth century, lithographic printing spread rapidly across the world. Originally invented in late-eighteenth-century Bavaria, this accessible, portable, and supremely affordable print technology was rapidly adopted across Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Oceania, catalysing dramatic cultural and political upheavals as well as stimulating novel identities, ideas, and institutions. Named after its ability to multiply marks made on stone, lithography afforded a faithful reproduction of scripts unsuited to moveable type; enabled creative new ways of integrating text and image; and chemically transferred original sketches—associating prints with a rhetoric of ‘autographic’ mark-making.

Despite the significance of this print revolution, existing work on lithography is generally limited to studies of the medium’s technical history, its position in the repertoire of satirical artists, or its status as a fine-art medium—particularly in France. In contrast, this panel will invite speakers to explore the full complexity and diversity of lithography’s global histories. We seek proposals for ten-minute papers, to be followed by a roundtable discussion.

A number of core concerns will animate the session. Should lithography be conceptualised as a homogenising force, shaping common social and cultural histories across the diverse territories in which it was adopted? Or do particular contexts exhibit unique adaptations of widespread styles and genres, or specific transformations of existing cultural traditions? Does foregrounding the technomaterial affordances of the medium provide new insights into the histories of globalisation, industrial capitalism, and empire, and how might it enable novel ways of writing globally connected analyses of race, gender, and class? Or do such media-specific histories require an intermedial framing, or run the risk of technological determinism?

Themes: global art history, materiality, print culture, cultural history

Additional format comment: 10-minute paper presentation plus a roundtable at the end of the presentations.

Lead Convenor: Mariana Zegianini, University of Oslo, Norway
Co-convenors: Tom Young, The Courtauld Institute of Art, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance here and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/

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[3] The postdigital book(work): surveying contemporary artists’ publishing
From: Gustavo Grandal Montero
Date: Oct 12, 2026

The postdigital book(work): surveying contemporary artists’ publishing (Panel 98 AAH 2027)

Since the early 20th century, artists have used books to engage with audiences directly, outside of the gallery space. Often, they have asked readers/viewers to reflect not only on the publication itself, but also on the way it has come into their hands. In recent decades, artists’ publications have explored the entangled, two-way relationship between printed books and digital media. Technology has transformed how artists make and distribute publications, and how they understand them. Amid the explosion of digital ‘content’, what is a book today and what can it do?

This panel proposes to explore artists’ publications after 2000, a period under-researched and unmapped, but highly significant in terms of widespread production and reception, adoption of digital technologies and development of new artistic networks and communities of practice, in the UK and internationally. Key themes would include new media and new materiality in artists’ publications, particularly the use of digital technologies and processes in intermedial practices, the evolving role of artists’ publishing in contemporary art, and expanded notions of the artist’s book.

Paper proposals are invited in response to these themes, forms and contexts, as micro-histories, case studies or sample surveys.

Themes: artists’ publications, digital media, contemporary art

Lead Convenor: Gustavo Grandal Montero, Tate, United Kingdom
Co-convenors: Karen Di Franco, Chelsea College of Arts/UAL, United Kingdom
John Timberlake, Middlesex University, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance here and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/

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[4] Writing Art History Otherwise: Artistic Practice, Exhibitions, and Museums in East and Southeast Asia
From: Soh Kay Min
Date: Oct 14, 2026

Who writes the history of art from and based in East and Southeast Asia, by what means, and from where? This session addresses a persistent tension in the field: how to account for practices rooted in local, postcolonial, and post-socialist histories when critical frameworks and institutional languages adopted were largely developed elsewhere. Rather than treating East and Southeast Asia as regions to be inserted into a global art history, the session approaches them as active sites where art history is written, challenged, repaired, and staged.

The proliferation of contemporary art institutions across the region from the 1990s onwards reflects a concentrated investment in the legitimacy of its modern and contemporary art, opening new and contested platforms for art-historical discourse. Critical scholarship has responded in kind: Ming Tiampo’s critique of modernism through Gutai; Patrick Flores’s theorisation of postcolonial curatorial histories in Southeast Asia; Joan Kee’s methodological challenges to canonical accounts of Korean contemporary art; David Teh’s writing on the currencies of the contemporary art in Southeast Asia; and Roger Nelson’s concept of “artistic art history,” in which artworks themselves perform historiographic work. Together they mark a field actively negotiating its own terms and methods.

We invite papers on exhibitions, museum displays, critical texts, or artists’ practices as cases through which alternative art-historical narratives have been constructed, challenged, or reimagined, attending not only to how East and Southeast Asian art expands art history’s objects, but to how it might transform its methods. The session comprises four presentations followed by an open discussion.

Themes: East and Southeast Asian art history, exhibition histories, artistic research.

Additional format comment: The session comprises four presentations followed by an open discussion..

Lead Convenor: Kahyun Lee, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom.

Co-convenor: Kay Min Soh, University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom.

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on the AAH website (https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2027-exeter/) and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.