Conceptualism - Intersectional Readings, Inter national FramingsSituating ‘Black Artists and Modernism’ in Europe

07.12 - 09.12.2017

Presented by Black Artists and Modernism in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum

Welcome to Conceptualism - Inter sectional Readings, International Framings, a conference presented by Black Artists and Modernism and Van Abbemuseum.

Conceptualism - Intersectional Readings, International Framings seeks to open up new understandings of Concep-tualism produced by artists based in Europe after the political and social upheavals of 1968. It adopts Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss’s definition of Conceptualism as a “wide array of works and practices which, in radically reducing the role of the art object, reimagined the possibi-lities vis-à-vis the social, political, and economic realities within which it was being made” (1999). The term ‘inter­sectio na lism’ is associated with a feminist approach that has acknow-ledged differences across ‘universa­list’ feminism since its early stages. Developing internationally from the US context, it examines the interrelation of race, class, gender and sexuality, under standing power differentials as co­constituted and co­constitutive.

The conference’s focus on Europe seeks to highlight the specificities and limits of dis­courses on ‘Blackness’ and Conceptualism between neighbouring contexts. Looking at artists based, or with long­term connections to Europe, we aim to open up debates around intersectional readings of artists’ practices and artworks that shift the inter­pretative paradigm from the question of how they represent identity politics, to how they arguably produce identity politics as constituted by the work. How might we re­read and re­frame these artworks from both intersectional and international pers­pectives? Secondly, given the con tin gency of art history’s revisions on ever more situa­ted perspectives, we ask how Concep­tualism per se might be re­thought and re­visioned through the very practices of artists?

introduction

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STRUCTUREThe conference opens with a keynote from Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler speaking on ‘Subversive Practices’. Over the following two days, two sessions will seek to address intersectional readings and international framings. Four further sessions have been shaped by a series of seminars generously hosted by FRAC Lorraine, Stedelijk, Mac Val and Iniva, which focused on works by Nil Yalter, Stanley Brouwn, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, and David Medalla respectively. In each case, the objective was to start with the work, de-privileging biographical or socio-political contexts.

The sessions on Yalter, Medalla and Abonnenc comprise three papers each. A fourth session titled ‘How to speak about the work?’ takes the form of a screening of Stanley Brouwn’s Steps (1989), and a panel discussion. Here we hope to explore a principal question driving our collaboration and the conference - namely, what happens when we de-privilege biography and / or socio-political contexts when looking at a work of art and what are the implications for the role of criticism and art history?

Day 2 ends with a screening of Abonnenc’s 2012 work, An Italian Film (Africa Addio), while Day 3 opens with our second keynote, Valerie Cassel Oliver, speaking on ‘Expanding Counsciousness: In the Wake of Concep-tualism’. The final afternoon will feature a tour of the exhibition, Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective, breakout sessions around works on display in the Van Abbemuseum’s new collection hang, and a performance by Patricia Kaersenhout of her work, Stitches of Power. Stitches of Sorrow (2014-ongoing).

All delegates are invited to communal lunches (Friday and Saturday) and dinners (Thursday and Friday). We look forward to the conversations over the next few days.

Nick Aikens, Sophie Orlando and susan pui san lok

07.12 - 09.12.2017

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07.12 DAY 1

programme CONCEPTUALISM - INTER SECTIONAL READINGS, INTERNATIONAL FRAMINGS Situating ‘Black Artists and Modernism’ in Europe

07.12 - 09.12.2017Van Abbemuseum EindhovenPresented by Black Artists and Modernism in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum

18.30 Registration

19.00 Welcome (Charles Esche) Keynote Hans D.Christ and Iris Dressler, ‘Subversive Practices’ Q&A moderated by Charles Esche

20.30 Dinner

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09.12 DAY 3

08.12 DAY 2

09.15 Registration

09.45 Welcome back (Nick Aikens)

10.00 Keynote - Valerie Cassel Oliver, ‘Expanding Consciousness: In the Wake of Conceptualism’ Q&A moderated by Sonia Boyce

11.00 Break

11.15 SESSION IV: CONCEPTUALISM AND INTERNATIONAL FRAMINGS Chaired by Hammad Nasar • Alice Correia, ‘Conceptual Photography and the Articulation of South-Asian Identities in the 1980s’ • Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, ‘Concep- tualisms and Liberation Theology behind the Iron Curtain’ • Juan Albarrán, ‘Re-positioning Spanish Conceptualism’ • Yu Wei, ‘The Conceptualist projects of David Medalla and Li Yuan-chia from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s’

13.00 Lunch (Van Abbe Café)

13.45 Rasheed Araeen Exhibition tour with Nick Aikens [Van Abbe, Old Building]

14.30 Works on display - breakout discussions around various works

15.30 SESSION VI: MATHIEU KLEYEBE ABONNENC Chaired by Sophie Orlando • Sandra Delacourt, ‘Back in Flow: Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s Inanimate Ancestors make the Canonical Minimalists do the Twist’ • Jennifer Burris, ‘Fragments and Forewords: Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’ • Lotte Arndt, ‘Fissuring the Erasures of Historical Violence’

17.00 Performance by Patricia Kaersenhout (2014-) Stitches of Power. Stitches of Sorrow

17.30 Plenary (Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando)

18.30 End

09.00 Registration 09.40 Welcome and Introduction (Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando)

10.00 SESSION I: CONCEPTUALISM AND INTERSECTIONAL READINGS Chaired by Annie Fletcher • Alexandra Kokoli, ‘Read My QR: Quilla Constance and the Conceptualist Promise of Intelligibility’ • Elisabeth Lebovici ‘The Death of the Author in the Age of the Death of the Author’ • susan pui san lok, ‘Found and Lost - A Genealogy of Waste? Shimizu, Takahashi, and Phaophanit/Oboussier’

11.30 Break 11.45 SESSION II: NIL YALTER Chaired by Sarah Wilson • Fabienne Dumont, ‘Is Nil Yalter’s work compatible with Black Concep- tualism? An analysis based on the FRAC Lorraine collection • Sumesh Sharma, ‘The idea of India: a non-national narration on Black Conceptualism - Nil Yalter and Judy Blum Reddy’ • Laura Castagnini, ‘Feminist and/or conceptual? Reading the socio-political in Nil Yalter’s Temporary Dwellings (1974-7) and Women at Work, Women at Home (1981)’

13.15 Lunch (Van Abbe Café) Screening of Stanley Brouwn, 1989, Steps, 40’ 15” [Auditorium]

14.15 SESSION III: ‘HOW TO TALK ABOUT THE WORK?’ Chaired by David Dibosa Screening of excerpt of Stanley Brouwn, 1989, Steps, 40’ 15”, followed by a discussion with Sophie Orlando, E. C. Feiss and Charl Landvreugd

15.15 Break

15:30 SESSION V: DAVID MEDALLA Chaired by Nick Aikens • David Dibosa, ‘Ambivalent Thresholds: David Medalla’s Conceptualism and Queer British Art’ • Eva Bentcheva ‘Conceptualism- Scepticism and Creative Cross- Pollinations in the work of David Medalla, 1969-72’ • Sonia Boyce, ‘Dearly Beloved: transitory relations and the queering of ‘women’s work’ in David Medalla’s A Stitch in Time (1967-1972)’

17.00 Break

17.15 Plenary (Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando)

17.45 Screening of Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, 2012, An Italian Film (Africa Addio), 25’

19.00 Dinner

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biographies & abstractsa-z

‘RE-POSITIONING SPANISH CONCEPTUALISM’

Spanish conceptualisms - the so called ‘nuevos comportamientos artísticos’- have suffered a long marginalization both in inter­national historiography and in its own context. In the last two decades those practices have been re-introduced in the collections and in some exhibitions at the two main museums in the country, MACBA (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona) and Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), especially during Manuel Borja-Villel’s time as director. This paper aims to analyze how Spanish conceptualism has been re-integra ted in the narratives of the contemporary, focusing on the relationship between Spain and Latin America, the political dimension of those practices, and the strategies sub ja cent to this institutional recuperation. To do so it will be necessary to revisit the seventies, when the Spanish theorist Simón Marchán - in a closed dialogue with the Argen tinian curator Jorge Glusberg ­ coined the expres sion ‘ideo logical conceptualism’ to allude to Spanish and Argentinian politicized practices.This proposal will explore the way this connection (Spain-Latin America) has been consolidated in the programs of MACBA and Museo Reina Sofía through the displays of their collections, but also through the colla-boration with the ‘Red de Conceptualismos del Sur (RcS) [Southern Conceptualisms Network]. We could consider the contiguities of Spain and Latin America as a strategy to insert Spanish (conceptual) art in the Global (South) art, but also as a way to reconsider the political goals of the museums in our societies through the incorporation of gender, race, and colonial issues in their agendas.

Dr Juan Albarrán holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Salamanca. He has taught at the Universities of Castilla-La Mancha, Salamanca, and, Duke University, Madrid. He is an assistant professor at the History and Theory of Art Department, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), and coordinator of the MA Program in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture (UAM / UCM / Museo Reina Sofía). His research focuses on contemporary art practices and theories, especially in the Spanish postransitional context. He has edited the books Arte y Transición (2012), Llámalo Performance: Historia, disciplina y recepción (2015), Santiago Sierra. Interviews (2016), and Miguel Trillo. Double Exposure (2017). Juan.albarran@uam.es

Nick Aikens is a curator at the Van Abbe-museum, Eindhoven, since 2012. Recent exhibition projects include The 1980s. Today’s Beginnings? (Van Abbemuseum, 2016 co-curated with Diana Franssen), The Place is Here (Nottingham Contemporary, co-curated with Sam Thorne, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and South London Gallery, 2017) and Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective (Van Abbemuseum, 2017 and touring to MAMCO, Geneva, BALTIC, Gateshead and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow through 2019). He is the co-editor of What’s the Use? Constellations of Art, History and Knowledge (Valiz, 2016) and a number of monographs, most recently Rasheed Araeen (JRP Ringier, 2017) and Too Much World. The Films of Hito Steyerl (Sternberg, 2015). Forthcoming editorial projects include The Long 1980s (Valiz, 2018) and The Place is Here (co-edited with Elizabeth Robles, Van Abbe­museum, 2018). He is a Research Affiliate of the CCC Research Master Program, HEAD ­ Geneva School of Art and Design and a member of the editorial board for L’Internationale Online. He is a course leader at the Dutch Art Institute (since 2012) and was recently a tutor at the Design Academy Eindhoven (2014-16).

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The titles of both works point to violations of human bodies in mass killings and in film history (Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, Africa Addio, 1966) that are kept invisible in the work. May the destruction of objects allow us to understand historical violence without reproducing the misuse of bodies?

The talk analyses the artistic strategies employed by Abonnenc, focusing on the formal choices and their capacity to cause disquiet, to render a complex field of histo­rical references present and to translate its destructive powers into sensitive anxieties.

‘FISSURING THE ERASURES OF HISTORICAL VIOLENCE’

Most of Mathieu K. Abonnenc’s conceptual practice deals with the possibilities for addressing colonial power relations, present- day racism and modernity’s binary divisions. Very sensitive to questions of representation, he nearly systematically subtracts the bodies of mutilated people from the picture. Instead, he marks absences and highlights gestures of resistance. Frequently, his work brings autobiographical elements into resonance with broader historical events. Intervening in chosen and refuted lineages, Abonnenc places himself in troubled zones where belonging is rarely at ease. He uses family archives, builds on the work of black modernist and conceptual artists (Maldoror, Piper, Eastman, Douglas…), and inter ro gates the art field’s inherent mechanisms to exclude and to assign, to unmark and neutralize both the work, and its makers.

In the discussed body of work (An Italian Film. Africa Addio (First part: Copper), HD, video, color, sound, 2012, 27’; and Sans titre (corps entassés), copper sticks, 2012), the artist seems to present a series of minimal copper sculptures and a film showing the gestures of their production. A closer look points to the use of a pre-colonial currency from the Congo that is transformed in the process. In order to become an abstract work of art, the so-called Katanga crosses are cut into pieces, melted and redesigned.

Dr Lotte Arndt Is a theorist and writer who lectures at the École supérieure d’art et design Valence, and accompanies the work of artists who interrogate the postcolonial present and the blind spots of modernity. Her PhD is dedicated to postcolonial nego-tiations in Paris­based cultural magazines related to Africa (2013). She works closely with the French artist and writers group Ruser l’image, is a member of the research group Global Art Prospective (INHA Paris), publishes on artistic strategies that aim to subvert Eurocentric narratives and institu-tions, and co­organizes cultural programs, screenings and discussions in artistic and academic spaces. In 2017, she co-curated Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (with Lucas Morin) at Bétonsalon, Paris, and was guest editor of the online magazine Qalqalah. In Winter 2016, she was Goethe fellow at Villa Vassilieff, Paris. Last major publications include Les revues font la culture! Négo cia­tions postcoloniales dans les périodiques pariens relatifs à l’Afrique, WVT, 2016; Crawling Doubles. Colonial Collecting and Affect (with Mathieu K. Abonnenc and Catalina Lozano), B42, 2016; Hunting & Collecting. Sammy Baloji (with Asger Taiaksev), MuZEE, Galerie Imane Farès, 2016.

Dr Eva Bentcheva is an art historian and cura tor. She completed her PhD in art his-tory at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her disser-tation on ‘The Cultural Politics of British South Asian Performance, 1960s - Present’ examined the relationship between perfor-mance art and expressions of diasporic identity in Britain. In 2016, she was awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship by the Tate Research Centre: Asia to study the partici-patory per formances of Philippines-born artist David Medalla during the 1960s and 1970s. She is currently an Adjunct Resear-cher for the Tate Research Centre: Asia, where she examines the emergence of Performance Art and Conceptualism in the Philippines during the 1960s-80s. She is co-director of Batubalani Art Projects, an independent initiative to promote Philippine art in the UK, and recently contributed to the establishment of an archive of perfor-mance art from Southeast Asia at the Live Art Development Agency in London.

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Prof. Sonia Boyce (MBE, RA) is an artist and academic who, since the 1990s, has been influenced by the relational practices of artist Lygia Clark. Earlier in her career, she was regarded as one of the key figures in the burgeoning Black-British art move-ment of the 1980s. Boyce has developed a social-art practice, including a NESTA fellowship in 2005 and an AHRC Research Fellowship in 2008-11, which culminated in a group residential laboratory ‘The Future is Social’. She has taught studio practice in art schools across the UK for over 30 years, and as an artist has repre sen ted the UK at the Venice Biennale in 2015. She exhibits extensively inter natio nally and has work in major collections including the Tate, V&A, and Arts Council England. Boyce is currently Professor of Black Art and Design at Uni-versity of the Arts, London and the Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded Black Artists and Modernism.

‘CONCEPTUALISM-SCEPTICISM AND CREATIVE CROSS-POLLINATIONS IN THE WORK OF DAVID MEDALLA, 1969-72’Philippines-born artist David Medalla has long espoused a diverse practice which converses with the notion of ‘Conceptual Art’ in a range of formal and philosophical ways. Describing his own sculptural and performance works in the 1960s and 1970s as non-instructional, open to all, poetic in form and content, and, above all else, rooted in an international outlook, Medalla’s works from the period offer rich case studies for questioning conceptualism as intersectional practice. My paper explores the possibilities and limitations of situating his early practices at the crossroad between conceptualism in Europe (as envisioned in the curatorial and academic frameworks of Harald Szeemann, Sigi Krauss, and Guy Brett, among others), and art and politics in the Philippines in the late 1960s. I will focus here on Medalla’s transition away from kinetic sculpture in the mid-1960s, towards a cross-pollination of conceptualism, performance art and socio-political engagements, that followed the artist’s travels around Africa and Asia and culminated in a longer stay in the Philippines in 1969. I propose that the Philippine Concep- tualism which surfaced around the time of Medalla’s return did not pose a formal influence on his practice. However, it infor­med his understanding of the potential of conceptual practices to become institu tio-nally and politically coerced - a notion which he then proceeded to explore and challenge through his practice in Europe over the course of the 1970s, and via his engagement with the ‘Black Art Movement’ in Britain during the 1980s.

Several critical accounts of ‘A Stitch in Time’ (1967-1972), by David Medalla, retell a mythic origination scene; one that invokes a net-work of cities, countries, transnational and desiring same-sex encounters between friends and strangers. As a sculptural-event, ‘A Stitch in Time’ invites audiences - often strangers - to stitch their own messages and mementos onto a long stretch of suspended cloth to build evidence of a collective mark.

In this paper, I situate ‘A Stitch in Time’ in and amongst the major upheavals that were taking place in art and in the wider social realm during the 1960s. Most notably, a defining break was being made from the dominant New Sculpture of the post-war period including artists like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who Andrew Causey suggests maintained a ‘tightly guarded boundary between art and life’ (1998). The shift away from art as an autonomous object toward greater social awareness was articulated in Lucy Lippard’s ‘6 Years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966-1972’ (1973). Lippard remarks that a radical emergent group of conceptual artists were keen to ‘escape the frame-and-pedestal syndrome in which art found itself’.

Remarkably, in the critical reception of ‘A Stitch in Time’, little has been said about the artwork employing needlecraft as its basis - a practice that was once considered ‘women’s work’. The softness and ephemeral nature of the artwork stand in stark contrast to the over-arching conventions of the rigid sculpture of the time. Which begs the question, to what extent is ‘A Stitch in Time’ in dialogue with feminist and other concep-tual critiques of the hierarchical values within art?

I argue that the artwork acts as a transitory object that brings people together, as opposed to a transitional object: funda men-tally linked to the mother’s body. ‘A Stitch in Time’ questions how transitory relations might be in conversation with, and a departure from, the comparable artworks of artists like Lygia Clark.

‘DEARLY BELOVED: TRANSITORY RELATIONS AND THE QUEERING OF ‘WOMEN’S WORK’ IN DAVID MEDALLA’S A STITCH IN TIME (1967-1972)’

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‘VEJAM BEM: MATERIAL FRAGMENTS IN THE WORK OF MATHIEU KLEYEBE ABONNENC’

In 1970 Sarah Maldoror, a French filmmaker of Guadeloupean origin, traveled to Guinea­Bissau to shoot a feature-length, semi-fictional, Third Cinema film focused on the liberation struggles of Portuguese-speaking Africa. Shot from a feminist perspective, Guns for Banta told the story of a woman named Awa whose involvement in the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) was central to the indepen­dence effort. However, the reels were con­fis cated by the Algerian army ­ who financed the film ­ and have to this day remained unseen. In 2006, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc met Maldoror at a talk she was giving in Paris on the Négritude poet Léon Damas. Their growing friendship resulted in a series of interviews: spooling traces of the lost film through memory and recollection.

Through a close reading of Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s artworks as a conceptual mode of examining histories of colonization through the cultural repositories of time-based works (specifically film and music), this talk focuses on how relational identities are both made and unmade over time through the adaptive re-use of these living fragments. Moving image clips, audio archives, found texts, and faded photographs coalesce within these gaps in historical memory. Opening with a discussion of Abonnenc’s extended work with histories of revolutionary cinema, this talk also addresses the artist’s growing interest in protest music, specifically, the compositions of Julius Eastman and Zeca Alfonso.

Dr Jennifer Burris is a curator and writer based in Bogotá, Colombia. She has orga-nized exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Haver ford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadel phia, and The Kitchen in New York City. In 2015 she co-founded Marfa Sounding: an ongoing series of performan-ces, sound installations, and screenings in the town of Marfa, Texas. As a writer she has contributed to publica tions including The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Studies in French Cinema, Bomb, Revista Código, Afterall Online, and Frieze, as well as artist monographs for Brian Weil (Semiotext(e)/MIT Press), Godfried Donkor (ARTCO Publishing), Alexandra Navratil (Roma Publications/Kunstmuseum Winter-thur), and Raphael Montañez Ortiz (LABOR). A graduate of the University of Cambridge (Ph.D) and Prince ton University (A.B.), she was a Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program and the 2011–2013 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

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Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to her position at the VMFA, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston where she worked from 2000-2017. She has served as director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995-2000) and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1988-1995). In 2000 she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art. During her tenure at the CAMH, Cassel Oliver organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009); a major retro-spective on Benjamin Patterson, Born in the State of Flux/us (2010) and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012). She has also mounted significant solo exhibitions for Donald Moffett, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennie C. Jones, Angel Otero and Annabeth Rosen. Cassel Oliver is the recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007); the David C. Driskell Prize (2011); and the Goldberg Foundation­to­Life Fellowship at Hunter College (2016). She was a 2016-17 Senior Fellow in Curatorial Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cassel Oliver holds a M.A. in art history from Howard University in Washington, D.C. and, B.S. in communications from the University of Texas at Austin.

KEYNOTE

‘EXPANDING CONSCIOUSNESS: IN THE WAKE OF CONCEPTUALISM’For more than a decade, the exhibition, Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 has engaged in a vigorous discourse around the contexts, frameworks and historicity of contemporary art making by black artists. The scope of this conference and its framing around globalism, provides an opportunity to expound upon the exhibi-tion, which in 2005, was ground-breaking in its assertion that the practices of black artists be legitimized within a larger narrative of conceptualism. In the adoption and re-appropriation of ordinary materials, texts and performances commonly identified with conceptual art, African-American concep tual artists created a new language that not only enabled them to resist invisibility with the contemporary art landscape but also, examine and critique the complex social realities of present-day life. The talk, like the exhibition some fifteen years before it, illus­trates how the work of African-American artists has left an indelible impression on the history of conceptual art in America and in doing so, established its place in contem-porary art history. As the canon continues to expand, we are now assessing how such discourses exist within the larger global narrative, including the conceptual practices employed by artists living on the continent of African as well as the Diaspora. Now, more than ever, there is a groundswell of information coming to the fore. This talk explores the expanding actions of recovery, interpretation and framing of art history and the artists that have shaped its trajectory.

Laura Castagnini is Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate. Her research focuses on British Art during the period 1940 to 1980, as well as contemporary performances of feminist, queer and de-colonial histories. Prior to working at Tate, she was Programme Coor-dinator for Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts). She holds a Master of Arts (Art History) from the University of Melbourne, where her thesis explored feminism and humour in contemporary video and perfor-mance art. She has published extracts in academic peer-reviewed journals On Curating, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (Routledge) and Philament journal of art and culture (University of Sydney). In 2013 she curated the survey exhibition Backflip: Feminism and Humour in Contemporary Art at Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts. Other curatorial projects include AS IF: Echoes from London (Westspace, Melbourne, 2015), Alice Lang Originals (Sydney College of the Arts, 2014) and Memory Screens (Austra-lian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2013). Alongside collaborators Helena Reckitt, Maura Reilly and Lara Perry, Laura runs Feminist Curators United (FCU), a net-work of 40+ curators and scholars dedicated to developing feminist curatorial practice through a range of programmes. She also writes reviews for frieze magazine, Artlink and Un magazine.

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represent the everyday experiences of Yalter’s subjects. This methodology can, and should, be characterised as a common approach of Conceptualism - which as the conference call for papers outlines, is a movement ‘all too often associated with resisting identity politics.’ That Yalter’s subjects are working class and immigrant women, however, inherently politicises the work and inserts an intersectional feminist narrative. It is well established that one of the defining characteristics of feminist art, particularly of the 1970s and 1980s, is an emphasis on women’s labour and daily experience. In fact, the artwork title ‘Women at/and work’ was so popular that it appears not only as the collective work of Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, Women and work: a document on the division of labor in industry (1973-5) but also as the title of the Hackney Flashers exhibition Women and Work (1975) and, further afield, the Melbourne exhibition Women at work: a week of women’s performance (1980). Comparing Yalter’s work and its reception to its British counterparts, I will argue Yalter’s use of socio-political tools should not be characterised as singularly ‘Conceptual’ or ‘Feminist’ but instead challenge the limits of these discourses. By focussing on the work itself as well as its conditions of display, I will take up the conference’s challenge to articu-late how Yalter’s early work ‘produces’ rather than simply ‘represents’ identity politics.

Dr Alice Correia is a Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Salford. Her current research examines British art and exhibitions in the 1980 and 90s, with a spe-cific focus on South Asian diaspora artists. In 2017 she was a Mid-Career Fellow at The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, undertaking a project titled ‘Articulating British Asian Art Histories’. She is co-editor of the 30th Anniversary Special Issue of Third Text titled ‘Partitions: Art and South Asia’ (Nov 2017). She is currently working on monographic essays on Nina Edge and Permindar Kaur.

In 1998 John Roberts argued that the recent ‘history of photography in Britain… is a his-tory of dispersed and embattled counter-hegemonic practices breaking out of the ideological confines of Modernism’. How­ever, the contributions of Britain’s Black and Asian photographers to this challenge has yet to be fully recognised. This paper will address the recent work of Mohini Chandra and Allan deSouza: artists of South Asian origin, whose work engages the potentia lit-ies of photography to pose questions about the place of the migrant in relation to trans-national borders - while simultaneously testing the limits of what might be identified as ‘British Art’.

Throughout his career Allan deSouza has investigated the politics of location and the subjective experience of migration. His photo-graphs of airport lounges, corridors, train-stations and runways present, what Marc Augé and others have described as, post-modern non-spaces. By taking the position of a migrant provocateur, deSouza’s works show these sites of mobility as inherently restrictive, and often prohibitive, for non-conforming bodies. Relatedly, issues of journeying and belonging, and how they might be articulated through the photo-graphic object have been prescient concerns for Chandra. In her film and photographic works, that utilise and reflect upon her father’s personal archive, migration is pre-sented from the space of transit: from the interior space of the aeroplane it is shown as

‘IN-TRANSIT: PHOTO-GRAPHY AND MOBILITY IN THE WORK OF MOHINI CHANDRA AND ALLAN DESOUZA’

This paper proposes an intersectional reading of the early work of Turkish/French artist Nil Yalter. In particular, I propose to examine the socio-political approach evident in two early works, Temporary Dwellings (1974-7) and Women at Work, Women at Home (1981). Temporary Dwellings is a multi- part video installation which records the details of the lives of immigrant communities in Istanbul, Paris and New York. Collected by Tate in 2012, and currently on display in the Switch House, the artwork comprises seven archival board panels displayed along-side six video documentary interviews. Women at Work, Women at Home was a public artwork, created in collaboration with artist Nicole Croiset, which recorded the daily experiences of ten working class women in the town of La Rochelle who took the same bus route to work. These testimo-nies, however, were not placed in a gallery but reimagined as large commercial bill board posters which could be viewed by the women from their daily bus journey. It could be surmised that both artworks utilise tools of feminism and conceptualism in an attempt to represent the experiences of working class and immigrant women.

In response to the conference theme, however, I want to unpack the following statement: How should we situate Yalter’s practice in relation to the overlapping but often separated narratives of Feminist and Conceptual Art? On the one hand, both cited artworks employ sociological tools - using documentary interviews and keeping detailed notes - in an attempt to accurately

‘FEMINIST AND/OR CONCEPTUAL? READING THE SOCIO-POLITICAL IN NIL YALTER’S TEMPORARY DWELLINGS (1974-7) AND WOMEN AT WORK, WOMEN AT HOME (1981)’

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Dr Sandra Delacourt holds a PhD in con-tem porary art history and is an associate researcher at HiCSA (University of Paris 1). After teaching at Paris 1 and at University of Nantes, she now heads the master program in art of the Esba TALM-Tours. Especially concerned with the emergence phenomena operating in the field of art history, her works deal with the processes of artistic recognition, the policies of the visible, and the construc-tion of historical narratives. Focused on the ‘academic turn’, her doctoral research shed light on the unprecedented intellectual authority accorded to American minimalists while cognitive capitalism and creative research imposed themselves as a new epistemological horizon. In 2016, she co­authored Le Chercheur et ses doubles (eds. B42). Through Mathieu Abonnenc, Kapwani Kiwanga and Otobong Nkanga’s works, this book questions the role and uses of art in the production of knowledge. Untitled L’artiste­universitaire. Un rêve américain au prisme de Donald Judd, her new book will be published in 2018 by B42. Sandra Delacourt is based in Paris where she also works as an independent art critic.

Over the past decade, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc developed a body of conceptual art practices addressing visibility and presentness as discriminatory processes. Breaking with the inertia to which countless bodies are subjected, most of his works re-inject in our collective imaginaries what had been made invisible, powerless and motion-less throughout/by history. Lives that had been objectified, reduced to insignificance, or contained (both physically, socially and symbolically), are re-involved by the artist in a moving, growing and potentially shifting process. During this talk, the focus will be on the specific dialectic that his artistic gestures settle between movement and paralysis, between fruitfulness and sterility - at a political, social, economic, historical, or individual level.

In this regard, two pieces realized in 2012 will require a close scrutiny, Sans titre (des corps entassés) and Un Film Italien (Africa Addio). This installation and this video intrin-sically tie the canonical forms and materials of American minimalism to the bodies of colonized copper producers. A turning point in the writing of the art history, minimal art was simultaneously celebrated (as soon as the mid-1960s) as the very climax of moder-nism and as the over whelming symptom of its brutal hegemony. Through a simple pro-cessual gesture, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc gathers in the same body two sides of the history of cultural domination that para dox i-cally had a common but asymmetric goal, to put back into play the relationship between power and knowledge and between domi-nant and minority narratives.

‘BACK IN FLOW: MATHIEU KLEYEBE ABONNENC’S INANI MATE ANCESTORS MAKE THE CANONICAL MINIMA LISTS DO THE TWIST’

both embodied experience and psychological state. In the work of both artists, the figure of the unsettled South Asian diaspora takes centre stage to remind us that migration is neither uniformly nor equally experienced.

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Dr David Dibosa is a Reader in Museology at the University of the Arts London. He is co-author of Post­Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (Routledge, 2013). His other published work on museum culture includes: Fugitive Direction: Reflec­tions in the Tropenmuseum (2015); and ‘Engaging Reciprocity, Exhausting Critique, Countering Spectacle’ (2017). David Dibosa trained as a curator, after receiving his first degree from Girton College, University of Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD in Art History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. During the 1990s, he curated public art projects. He was Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts, London (UAL) from 2004-2008. He remains at UAL where he is currently Reader in Museology with responsibility for leading the MA in Curating and Collections, and Co-Investigator on the AHRC project, Black Artists and Modernism.

‘AMBIVALENT THRESHOLDS: DAVID MEDALLA’S CONCEPTUALISM AND QUEER BRITISH ART’

Focussing on the appearance of Medalla’s sculpture Cloud Canyons (mixed media, 1964) in the exhibition, Queer British Art (Tate Britain, London, 2017), this paper addresses the intersection between an internationalist art practice and a national discourse surroun-ding sexual dissidence in Britain. Working through exhibition layout and object juxta-positions, this paper argues that the concep-tualist framing of Medalla’s practice (Gooding, 1995) facilitated an ambivalent reading of Medalla’s art as an articulation of Queer British Art.

The paper develops an analysis of the cura-torial rationale underpinning the Queer British Art exhibition. In addition, through art histo-ri cal readings, it discusses the means by which Medalla’s works, particularly the bio-kinetic pieces, such as the Bubble Machines (1964-95), have been positioned in relation to British Conceptual Art traditions and, more broadly, to a conceptualist outlook.Finally, the paper argues that Medalla’s conceptualism placed emphasis on the re-deployment of terms such as ‘movement’, ‘morphology’ and ‘life’. The paper concludes that the inability of the Queer British Art show to incorporate the terms of Medalla’s conceptualism led to an ambivalent placing of Medalla’s Cloud Canyons on the thres-hold of the exhibition in 2017.References

Brett, G., (1989), ‘David Medalla: From Biokineticism to Synoptic Realism’, Third Text 8/9, Autumn/Winter 1989, pp.79-106Gooding, M., ‘David Medalla,’ Art Monthly, issue 184, March 1995.Preziosi, D., (2003), Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums and the Phantasms of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Iris Dressler, (*1966 in Neuss, director of Württem bergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart) studied art history, philosophy, and litera-ture in Marburg and Bochum. In 1996, she founded, with Hans D. Christ, the Hartware MedienKunstverein in Dortmund, which she directed until 2004. From 2002–2004, she also worked as curator at the Museum am Ostwall Dortmund. Since 2005, she is co-director of the Württembergischer Kunst-verein (WKV) Stuttgart with Hans D. Christ. One of the main focuses here is to explore collaborative, transnational and trans disci-plinary forms of curating. Dressler and Christ have presented at the WKV solo exhibitions of artists such as Stan Douglas (in collaboration with Staatsgalerie Stutt gart), Anna Opperman (curator: Ute Vorkoeper), Antoni Muntadas, Daniel G. Andújar, Teresa Burga (curator: Miguel Lopez), Michael Borremans, Pedro G. Romero (co­curator: Valentín Roma), Ines Doujak, and currently Alexander Kluge. They realized collabora tive exhibition projects such as On Difference (2005 + 2006), Subversive Practices (2009), Acts of Voicing (2012), or The Beast and is the Sovereign (2015). They are currently working on, among other things, a project about the German Bauhaus reception in 1968.

They have been appointed as the convenors of the Bergen Assembly 2019. Since 2014 Dressler teaches regularly as an associate lecturer at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. She largely published texts on contemporary art and its political and theoretical contexts.

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The point of departure of this lecture harks back to the research and exhibition project Subversive Practices that (including its pre-project Vivid Radical Memory) took place from 2006 till 2009 in Stuttgart and other places. Based on a network of curators, art historians and artists from different genera­tions and cultural contexts, such as Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Spain, Germany, Russia, Romania, and Hungary, this project aimed at a critical analysis and redefinition of the narratives of conceptual art practices. In focus were artistic practices ranging from the nineteen-sixties to the nineteen-eighties that were generated under conditions of military dictatorship and of communist and socialist regimes in Latin America and Europe: practices that were developed and communicated in the underground; that had to deal with censorship and invisibility; and that were/are marginalized and disregarded within the so called Western canon of art history.

One of the essential concerns of Subversive Practices was to regard these specific aesthetic and resistive practices, generated in the South and East, not as mere ‘reflec­tions, derivations, or even replicas of centre- based Conceptual Art but, instead, as local responses to the contradictions posed by the failures of post­World War II moderniza­tion projects’, as Mari Carmen Ramírez has put it. A serious critical re-evaluation of the Western discourses and narratives of art history cannot consist of simply accommo-dating within its existing maps and registries, some names that have been wrongfully left unconsidered. It must instead, again and again, question and reorganize its very maps and registries themselves. The lecture will reflect the Subversive Practices project from a current perspective.

KEYNOTE

‘SUBVERSIVE PRACTICES’

Hans D. Christ, director of Württem berg-ischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, studied art and literature in Dortmund. In 1996, he founded, with Iris Dressler, the Hartware Medien-Kunstverein in Dortmund, which he directed until 2004. From 2002–2004, he also worked as curator at the Museum am Ostwall Dort-mund. Since 2005, he is co-director of the Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) Stuttgart with Iris Dressler. One of the main focuses here is to explore collaborative, transnational and transdisciplinary forms of curating. Christ and Dressler have presented at the WKV solo exhibitions of artists such as Stan Douglas (in collaboration with Staats-galerie Stuttgart), Anna Opperman (curator: Ute Vorkoeper), Antoni Muntadas, Daniel G. Andújar, Teresa Burga (curator: Miguel Lopez), Michael Borremans, Pedro G. Romero (co­curator: Valentín Roma), Ines Doujak, and currently Alexander Kluge. They realized collaborative exhibition projects such as On Difference (2005 + 2006), Subversive Practices (2009), Acts of Voicing (2012), or The Beast and is the Sovereign (2015). They are currently working on, among other things, a project about the German Bauhaus recep­tion in 1968. They have been appointed as the convenors of the Bergen Assembly 2019. Christ, who has taught since the 1990s at different national and international art schools, works regularly as an associate lecturer at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and at other academies and schools. In 2004 he was co-curator of the Media City Seoul Bienniale. He largely published texts on contemporary art and its political and theoretical contexts.

Dr Fabienne Dumont is an art historian, art critic and professor at the European School of Fine Arts in Brittany. She is the author of Des sorcières comme les autres ­ Artistes et féministes dans la France des années 1970 (PUR, 2014), based on her PhD, the editor of the anthology La rébellion du Deuxième Sexe ­ L’histoire de l’art au crible des théories anglo­américaines (1970-2000) (Les presses du réel, 2011) and the co-director of L’histoire n’est pas donnée ­ Art contemporain et post­colonialité en France (PUR, 2016) and À l’Ouest toute! Travailleuses de Bretagne et d’ailleurs (Les presses du réel, 2017). She has written numerous articles (www.archivesdelacritiquedart.org/auteur/dumont-fabienne) and is currently writing a mono-graph on Nil Yalter, À la confluence des mémoires migrantes, féministes et du monde ouvrier.

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‘IS NIL YALTER’S WORK COM PATIBLE WITH BLACK CONCEP - TUA LISM? AN ANALYSIS BASED ON THE FRAC LORRAINE COLLECTION’I aim to question the link between Nil Yalter and the notion of Black Conceptualism from the pieces that belong to the FRAC Lorraine collection. These pieces were bought in 2016, following the first monographic exhibition of her work organized in France. The discussion will focus on the pieces themselves, as Nil Yalter did several multimedia projects that address migration and immigration issues, which she connected with feminism. It will therefore be necessary to understand the discrepancy between this concept and the frame of production, both for works and analyses, which enable them to be recorded in a theoretical and historiographic discourse in the long term.

Prof. Charles Esche is director of Van Abbe- museum, Eindhoven; professor of contem-porary art and curating at Central Saint Martins, London and co-director of Afterall Journal and Books. He teaches on the Exhibition Studies MRes course at CSM, and at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.

With the museum, he (co) curated Le Musée Égaré, Kunsthall Oslo 2017 and Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse 2016; Jakarta Biennale 2015; 31st Sao Paulo Bienal, 2014, U3 Triennale, Ljubljana, 2011; RIWAQ Biennale, Palestine, 2007 and 2009; Istanbul Biennale, 2005; Gwangju Biennale, 2002 amongst other international exhibitions. He is chair of CASCO, Utrecht. He received the 2012 Princess Margriet Award and the 2014 CCS Bard College Prize for Curatorial Excellence.

E. C. Feiss is a critic and PhD candidate in the History of Art department at the Uni ver-sity of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Afterall, Camera Austria, Little Joe, Radical Philosophy, and Texte zur Kunst, among other places. Recent essays have appeared in White Paper: On Land, Law and the Imaginary (Valiz, 2017) and Wendelien van Oldenborgh: Cinema Olanda. (Hatje Cantz, 2017.) Prior to moving to California, she was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and an instructor at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.

Annie Fletcher is currently Chief Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. She also tutors at De Appel, Amsterdam, the Dutch Art Institute Arnhem and the Design Academy Eindhoven. She recently worked on the museums retrospective of Qiu Zhijie and the ten day caucus projected called Becoming More. Other projects include ‘El Lizzitsky: the Artist and the State’ at IMMA Dublin, and a ‘Republic of Art’ at the Van Abbemuseum in 2015/16. She was lead contributor from the Van Abbe to the ‘Museum as Hub’ collaboration led by the New Museum in New York from 2006 - 2014 and is part of an on-going collabora tive team which developed the ‘Museum of Arte Util’ with Tanja Bruguera in 2013 and continues to develop the Association of Arte Util today. She curated ‘After the Future’ at Eva Ireland’s International Biennial of Visual Art in 2012. Other projects include solo exhibitions or presentations with Ahmet Ogut, Hito Steyerl, Sheela Gowda, David Maljkovic, Jo Baer, Jutta Koether, Deimantas Narkevicius, Minerva Cuevas, and the long term projects, Be(com)ing Dutch (2006-09) and Cork Caucus (2005) with Charles Esche. She was co-founder and co-director of the rolling curatorial platform ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’ with Frederique Bergholtz and Tania Elstgeest. With Sarah Pierce she developed the Para Education Department at Witte de With in 2004. As a writer she has contributed to various magazines and publications.

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Patricia Kaersenhout is a visual artist/activist/womanist. Born in the Netherlands but a descendant from Surinamese parents, Patricia Kaersenhout developed an artistic journey in which she investigates her Surinamese background in relation to her upbringing in a West European culture. The political thread in her work raises questions about the African Diaspora’s movements and it’s relation to feminism, sexuality, racism and the history of slavery. She considers her art practice to be a social one. With her projects she empowers (young) men and women of colour.

Dr Alexandra Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Middlesex University London and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. She curated ‘Burnt Breakfast’ and other works by Su Richardson (Goldsmiths, 2012) and has published widely on art, visual culture and feminism in journals including Art Journal, Women and Performance, n.paradoxa, Per­formance Research and Oxford Art Journal. Her books include The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016); and (as editor) Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference (2008); and The Provisio­nal Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts by Susan Hiller, 1977­2007 (2008).

‘READ MY QR: QUILLA CONSTANCE AND THE CONCEP-TUALIST PROMISE OF INTELLIGIBILITY’

This paper aims to contribute to the on-going questioning of the definitions of con­ceptualism from feminist, psycho analytic perspectives and in reference specifically to the practice of British artist Quilla Constance, aka #QC, the post-punk, neo-glam, gender-questioning performance persona of Jennifer Allen. In #QC’s practice, identity politics is not represented but produced and its pro-duction is framed in an exploration of the boundaries between sense, nonsense and different kinds of sensibility and intelligibility, acknowledging the inflection of knowledge and its systems by the vicissitudes of power. I will consider how the intelligibility of power, affect and desire is both entertained and resisted in #QC’s work and will begin to out-line how #QC’s performative engage ment with visual and material culture reveals a nuanced understanding of identity and (dis)identi fi ca tion and the role of art practice in mining them. Her video piece Pukijam (2015) scrutinises food as a signifying system onto which social class and ethnic identities are mapped out, from fried chicken in card board take­away boxes to tea in fine, bone china cups. The live performance equivalent of this tension between opacity and semiotic plenitude can be found in #QC’s lectures, in which a rigorous engagement with critical theory devolves (or evolves) into inarticulate cries. Uncomfortably juxtaposed, #QC’s lecturing voice and her screams trace the boundaries of linguistic intelligibility and pro bingly reference conceptualism’s deploy-ment of art as a reading instrument for visual culture.

Dr Elisabeth Lebovici is an art historian and art critic based in Paris, is a lecturer at Sciences Po, Paris and she co-organises (with Patricia Falguières and Natasa Petresin­ Bachelez) a seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She is a member of the research group Travelling Féministe. Her book ‘Ce que le sida m’a fait’ has just been released.

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‘THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR IN THE AGE OF THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR’

This paper tests the uses of queer theory for a corpus of conceptual procedures at work within the art of the 1980’s-1990’s, precisely at the moment of construction of such theory by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler or Teresa de Lauretis, a theory for which the work of Philippe Thomas brings a reflection, a response, a purpose and a practice. The area of my experiment is taking place within a constellation of proper names which intervened as heteronyms and as agents for the work, redefining both the notion of an author and of the work’s autonomy. It is a matter of testing the question of the transparency of the visual materials, seen as an intrigue in which an endless process of information manage-ment is organized, involving revelations and occlusions, and measured against the yard-stick of theory, which has made the circula-tion of knowledge regarding sexuality its driving principle.

Prof. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Amsterdam. Until 2014 she worked at the University of Ulster, Belfast. She studied at the Univer si-ties of Heidel berg, London and Cologne, where she gained her PhD in 2000. It was researched with a James Joyce Foundation Scholarship in Zurich and followed by a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at UCD, Dublin. Her publications include the books Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image, and Institutional Critique (Valiz 2017); Post­War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean (Steidl 2008, 2011), James Joyce als Inspi­ra tionsquelle für Joseph Beuys (Olms 2001), and Joyce in Art (Lilliput 2004). This book accompanied her exhibition on the theme, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. She has curated exhibitions internationally.

When art, its media and forms of distribution, had to be rethought in order to bypass cen-sors and reach audiences by being smuggled out of the Eastern Block during the Cold War, a conceptual impetus resulted in many works. Much of this conceptual art was, nevertheless, excluded from the early com-pilations of Conceptual art such as, When Attitudes Become Form, 1969. Here, how-ever, liberating socio-political attitudes did become form: clandestine performances in living rooms; allegorical use of language with references to the (Modernist) canon in simple, paper-based works; hand-produced mail art addressed to a non-existent address, but giving the intended recipient as the ‘sender’, thereby circumventing censorship. My exam-ples will be works by Zbigniew Gostomski, KwieKulik, Tama and some others.

The current topic can contribute the follow-ing to the conference theme - a reminder that, for oppositional circles behind the Iron Curtain, churches functioned as often the only spaces for relatively free speech, for art production / dissemination, ecological discourse and oppositional inter disciplinary group-formation in general. The exposure to liberation theology of many of the dissident / conceptualist producers in that region links their fight for freedom and democracy more clearly to ‘blackness’ than has thus far been understood. With it came exegetic but also poetic (indirect) work on ‘the word’, pacifi st strategizing and building solidarity against discrimination under hostile conditions.

These strategies won the peaceful (Velvet) revolution in 1989. The immediate infantili zing and colonizing of those successful grass­roots practices by Western capitalism and political structures also directly speaks to the conference theme.

‘CONCEPTUALISMS AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN’

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Charl Landvreugd is as a visual artist, mainly in the fields of sculpture, performance, installation, photography and video. Through curating and writing he focuses on research as artistic production. He grew up in Rotter-dam in an environment and time when many different migrant communities were making the Netherlands their home. Being part of this vibrant space is the basis for his thinking about citizenship and belonging and how this is expressed in the visual arts. He has been awarded several scholarships and grants to develop his visual practice and research into the arts produced by European (Dutch) Afro artists. Currently, Charl researches the visual strategies of Dutch Afro artists with a focus on the production of cultural citizenship. He argues that the discourse dominated by post-colonial, theoretical frameworks does not always suffice in describing the Dutch and continen tal European Afro art production. He advocates for local European concepts and language that have the potential to speak about the sensibilities specific to the area. Charl studied Fine Art & History of Art (joined hons.) BA at Goldsmiths University in London. As a Fulbright Fellow he continued his studies in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies MA at Columbia Univer-sity in New York. He currently continues his investigations at the Royal College of Art in London as PhD candidate in the program Curating Contemporary Art.

Dr susan pui san lok is an artist based in London. Her work ranges across moving image, installation, sound, performance and text, evolving out of interests in notions of nostalgia and aspiration, place and migration, translation and diaspora. Solo projects include: RoCH Fans & Legends at QUAD, Derby (2015) and CFCCA, Manchester (2016); Lightness, commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella (FVU) for Everything Flows at De La Warr Pavilion (2012); Faster, Higher (2008), commissioned by FVU and BFI Southbank to coincide with the Beijing Olympics, with stagings at BFI Southbank Gallery (2008), Hatton Gallery Newcastle (2009), Winchester Discovery Centre (2012) and MAI, Montreal (2014); DIY Ballroom/Live (2007-2008), a Cornerhouse / BBC Bigger Picture national touring commission; and Golden (2005-ongoing), an Arts Council England and AHRC-funded project, including exhibitions, residencies, a publication, live events, and commissions for Beaconsfield, London, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, and Guangdong Museum of Art. Recent group exhibitions include Diaspora Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and the 1st Asia Biennial & 5th Guangzhou Triennial (2015-2016). She is Associate Professor in Fine Art at Middlesex Univer sity, and a Co-Investigator on the AHRC project, Black Artists and Modernism.

In 1989, Kumiko Shimizu adorned the exterior of London’s Hayward Gallery with found objects - a wheel, a wheelbarrow, a type-writer. Curious jewels of salvaged goods, strung and hung from the rooftops, the concrete structure’s grey façade popped with colourful urban barnacles. In 2000, Tomoko Takahashi filled the Chisenhale Gallery in east London with discarded computers and office furnishings, a site­specific installation as material counterpart to a web-project called, Word Perhect, a fully functioning online version of the well-known software with idiosyncratic, hand-drawn interface. Curator Claudine Isé aligned Takahashi’s installations with Rauschenberg’s early combines, both attracting ‘One of the clichés often used to describe modern and contemporary art [namely] that it ‘looks like a pile of junk.’’ Takahashi’s combinations of ‘junk’ are significantly participatory, and invite questions of use, usefulness, technology, productivity and waste. In 1997, Phaophanit / Oboussier made Atopia, an installation in two parts: outside, anti-pigeon devices cover a Berlin rooftop, an orderly and insistent deterrent. Inside, rubber oozes through galvanised steel shelving, slowing giving up its solidity. In the sweltering heat, audiences move to avoid touching, or being touched by, the collapsing mass, clinging to sinewy strings. Between the two, imaginary bodies - avian, synthetic - are repelled and divided, expelled and dissolved.

This paper aims to consider these works in terms of their site­specificity, materiality, and practices of appropriation and de(con)-struction. How might they also be read for / as conceptual inscriptions of socially and culturally differentiated relations, or ‘diffe­ren ced’ subjectivities, attempting to trans-gress and subvert the institutional, corporate and industrial spaces that invite and resist them? How might they speak to each other, if at all? From Shimizu to Takahashi and Phaophanit/Oboussier, I venture to posit a tentative constellation of practices; a recuperative, participatory, collaborative genealogy of waste - in which the ‘lost’ is not necessarily misplaced but perhaps wilfully displaced, in order to be ‘found’.

‘FOUND AND LOST - A GENEALOGY OF WASTE? SHIMIZU, TAKAHASHI, PHAOPHANIT / OBOUSSIER’

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Hammad Nasar is an independent curator and Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, where he co-leads the London, Asia project. He is also Senior Research Fellow (Black Artists and Modernism) at University of the Arts, London, as part of which he is curating an exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery (May 2018). Earlier, he was Head of Research & Programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2012-16), and co-founded the London-based arts organisation Green Cardamom (2004-12). He has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions internationally. Recent curatorial projects include: Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2005-2013); Excessive Enthusiasm: Ha Bik Chuen and the Archive as Practice (2015); and Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play - the UAE’s national pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017).

Dr Sophie Orlando is an Art Historian based in Paris. She is Researcher for ‘Black Artists and Modernism’ (UAL / Middlesex University, London) and Associate Professor of Theory and Contemporary Art History at the National Art School, at the Villa Arson, Nice. Working in the field of Conceptualism, Black Studies, Feminist Studies, she has been writing on the British art scenes and on the Black Art in Britain in a series of academic papers in La revue de l’art, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Critique d’art, Critical Inter ven tions. She has also published a book British Black Art: Debates on the Western Art History, (Dis Voir Publishing, 2016) and she is also the editor of the monograph Sonia Boyce, Thoughtful Disobedience, (Villa Arson, Presses du Reel, 2017).

Sumesh Sharma (1983) is an artist, curator and writer. He co-founded the Clark House Initiative, Bombay, in 2010 where he is presently the curator. His practice is informed by alternate art histories that often include cultural perspectives informed by socio-economics and politics. Francophone immigrant culture, vernacular equivalents of Modernism, Black Consciousness move-ments in culture are his areas of interest.

‘THE IDEA OF INDIA - A NON-NATIONAL NARRATION ON BLACK CONCEPTUALISM - NIL YALTER AND JUDY BLUM REDDY’Modern and contemporary visual practices that have emerged from India have consis-tent ly taken roots outside the subcontinent, in dialogue with art history, contemplating a vocabulary of inclusion in art history. The Black Arts Movement in the United King-dom included numerous Indian artists who emerged on a scene that urged decoloni sa-tion and were also present in Paris and New York, at various printmaking ateliers run by Bob Blackburn, Bill Hayter and Krishna Reddy.

Along with other Afro American and Arab artists they founded the Asilah Print Shop in Northern Morocco in 1978, where they came together each Monsoon to make prints for exchange, this included the Indian artist Zarina Hashmi. The dialogue was never one way as the geographies to connect and collaborate moved away from Western capitals, with artists such as Nil Yalter - who arrived in India in the 1950s with a mime programme - calling her voyage in India as her ‘art school’. Her long term collaborator, Judith Blum Reddy, who came much later with her partner Krishna Reddy - has long told the stories of Indian artists and their meetings in Paris in the 1960s in her murals using lists of documented Indian bureau-cracy, its rivers and train stations. She also helped organize the first seminal exhibition of the politically engaged installation artist, Rumanna Hussain, at Art in General in New York, in 1998. Even now, they have not been claimed by Indian art historians for their role in modernity or conceptual art practice,

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per haps mimicking similar exclusions of women and diverse others in Western canons of art history. The paper extends the idea of a faltering with history through art and writing that imagines a post-colonial narrative, even though the process of decolo nisation is in its most nascent stages on the Indian subcontinent.

Wei YU obtained his MA in Art History and Art Criticism from Tainan National University of the Arts in 2003, and has served as an editor for Artco magazine in Taiwan from 2005-2007. Covering Taiwan’s art scenes and visual culture in post-war era, he has written articles for various art journals and exhibition catalogues; and has participated in the exhibition, View–Point: A Retro-spective of Li Yuan-chia (2014) at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, as the UK research coordinator. In 2015, he curated Shoot the Pianist: The Noise Scene in Taipei 1990-1995, at Peltz Gallery (London). He is currently a PhD candidate in Humanities and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck (London Consortium), University of London. His PhD research project focuses on Taiwanese avant-garde and counterculture from the 1980s to the mid-1990s.

‘CONCEPTUALIST PROJECTS OF DAVID MEDALLA AND LI YUAN-CHIA FROM THE MID-1960S TO THE MID-1970S’This paper will revisit the conceptualist projects of David Medalla and Li Yuan-chia from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s; and their engagements with the London’s avant-garde scene. Similarly influenced by Abstract Expressionism before arriving Britain in the 1960s, these two Asian artists later shared an interest in challenging the rigid, inflexible and closed framework of artworks. The period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s saw their works gradually move toward an open system. Parallel to the socio-political upheavals of the time, the idea of participa-tion and its democratic implication had been increasingly prominent in their development, which signalled the emergence of the poten-tiality of social engagement in their art.

On the one hand, this shift was exemplified by their various experiments, such as Medalla’s A Stitch in Time (1972) and Li’s interactive ‘cosmic points’ (1968). On the other hand, these experiments were inter-twined with various institutional practices, which took the formats of publications, artists collectives and art spaces, as seen in Signals and Signals Newsbulletin (1964-66), the Exploding Galaxy (1967­68) and Artists for Democracy (1974-77), which were initiated by Medalla; and the LYC Museum and the LYC Press (1971-82) founded by Li. By contextualising their artistic experiments in the institutional practices during this specific period, this paper will examine the way in which Medalla and Li assimilated, alternated or challenged the tradition of the Western modernism with their conceptualist approach.

Prof. Sarah Wilson is Professor of the His-tory of Modern and Contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Recent publications include The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (Yale, 2010) and Picasso / Marx and socialist realism in France (Liverpool, 2013). During 2012-2013 she held a Chair of Excellence at the Centre for the Cultural History of Contemporary Societies at the University of Versailles, Saint Quentin, where she launched the project ‘Globali sation before globalisation: avant-gardes, academies, revolutions’ focussing upon international exchange and artistic mobility including ‘Black Paris’ and Paris’s long relationship with Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia and recently India. She has published on Saleem Arif, Yinka Shonibare, Amrita Sher­Gil and Fahrelnissa Zeid and Russian artists (she is an active member of CCRAC, the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre.) She was principal curator of Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900­1968 (Royal Academy London, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2002­3) and Pierre Klossowski Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2006 (touring to Cologne and Paris) and co-curator of the First Asian Biennale/Fifth Guangzhou Triennale, 2015. Sarah Wilson was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French govern ment in 1997 and in 2015 was given the AICA Internatio nal award for distinguished contribution to art criticism. Her former students hold curato-rial, university, and other artworld positions in many different countries. www.sarah-wilson.london

Welcome to Conceptualism - Inter sectional Readings, International Framings, a conference presented by Black Artists and Modernism and Van Abbemuseum.

Conceptualism - Intersectional Readings, International Framings seeks to open up new understandings of Concep-tualism produced by artists based in Europe after the political and social upheavals of 1968. It adopts Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss’s definition of Conceptualism as a “wide array of works and practices which, in radically reducing the role of the art object, reimagined the possibi-lities vis-à-vis the social, political, and economic realities within which it was being made” (1999). The term ‘inter­sectio na lism’ is associated with a feminist approach that has acknow-ledged differences across ‘universa­list’ feminism since its early stages. Developing internationally from the US context, it examines the interrelation of race, class, gender and sexuality, under standing power differentials as co­constituted and co­constitutive.

The conference’s focus on Europe seeks to highlight the specificities and limits of dis­courses on ‘Blackness’ and Conceptualism between neighbouring contexts. Looking at artists based, or with long­term connections to Europe, we aim to open up debates around intersectional readings of artists’ practices and artworks that shift the inter­pretative paradigm from the question of how they represent identity politics, to how they arguably produce identity politics as constituted by the work. How might we re­read and re­frame these artworks from both intersectional and international pers­pectives? Secondly, given the con tin gency of art history’s revisions on ever more situa­ted perspectives, we ask how Concep­tualism per se might be re­thought and re­visioned through the very practices of artists?

introductioncolophon

07.12 - 09.12.2017 Van Abbemuseum, EindhovenPresented by Black Artists and Modernism in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum

CONVENORS Nick Aikens, Sophie Orlando, susan pui san lok

EDITING Nick Aikens, Sophie Orlando, susan pui san lok

PROOFING Eloise Cameron-SmithPROGRAMME DESIGN bregsch

THE CONVENORS WOULD LIKE TO THANK Stephanie Airaud, Mikaela Assolent, Christiane Berndes, Nadine Botha, Naomi Bulliard, Eloise Cameron-Smith, Jantine Claus, Anjalie Dalal-Clayton, Alexia Fabre, Anne-Laure Facelière, Paul Goodwin, Beatrice Josse, Melanie Keen, Frank Lamy, Charl Land vreugd, Bart Rutten as well as all the conference participants

BLACK ARTISTS AND MODERNISM is a 3-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council led by University of the Arts, London, in collaboration with Middlesex University

Conceptualism ­ Intersectional Readings, Inter na tional Framings is made possible with support from

IMAGES

David Medalla, (1967-2017) A Stitch in Time.Arsenale Venice Biennalecourtesy another vacant space, BerlinPhoto: Adam Nankervis (c)

Nil Yalter, (1976/2015) C’est un dur métier que l’exil / Exile is a hard jobcourtesy of the artist

Patricia Kaersenhout, (2014-ongoing) Stitches of Sorrow courtesy of the artist

Mathieu Klebeye Abonnenc, (2012)An Italian Film, (Africa Addio)courtesy of the artist

CONCEPTUALISM - INTERSECTIONAL READINGS, INTERNATIONAL FRAMINGS: Situating ‘Black Artists and Modernism’ in Europe

Conceptualism - Intersectional Readings, Inter national FramingsSituating ‘Black Artists and Modernism’ in Europe

07.12 - 09.12.2017

Presented by Black Artists and Modernism in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum

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