Global New Voices: Art History and the Contemporary.
Global New Voices is the Association for Art History’s annual one-day conference for new postgraduate research about art, art history and visual culture.

Free online symposium.

Our contemporary moment is marked by a set of very present urgencies, from geopolitics and the climate crisis to emerging technologies. However, curators and art historians increasingly consider the relationship between the contemporary and the past, seeking resonances that transcend the discipline’s conventions of periodicity. Recent exhibitions of Medardo Rosso in Zurich and Basel (2025), Frida Kahlo in London (2026) and Cézanne in Paris (2026) have explored the relevance of art-historical icons to contemporary creative practices. Artists such as Beatriz González, Shahzia Sikander, and Yinka Shonibare actively rework art history’s global canon. Such interests are not unique to our twenty-first-century moment: in sixteenth-century Italy, Giorgio Vasari blurred the lines between artist and art historian, while in the early twentieth century, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Herbert Read looked to the past for examples of the ‘significant form’ they advocated in contemporary art. More recently, queer and feminist art histories have been reframing how the contemporary relates to the historical, considering the possibilities of alternative temporalities that trouble linear and teleological accounts.

This free online conference invites presentations that interrogate the relationship between art history and ‘the contemporary’ in its broadest sense.

These might include:

- Curatorial approaches to the integration of historical art, artists and histories into contemporary discourse (in exhibitions or publications)
- Contemporary or historical artists whose work engages with art history or the archive
- The relationship between artists and the notion of contemporaneity, considering practices that engage with ‘backwardness’, anachronism or cyclical time
-Queer and feminist scholarship that challenges linear or teleological models of art history

Speakers are invited to submit proposals for 15-minute papers via a 300-word abstract and a 150-word short biography.

Please email these to DECRforarthistory.org.uk and eventsforarthistory.org.uk by Sunday, 25 October
Event timings are subject to change, and the full programme will be announced in November. See also webpage to book to attend online.