Dear Colleagues,
Apologies for crossposting. Below our announcement and programme for the forthcoming AAH Summer Symposium ‘Gender in art: production, collection, display’ in Loughborough (8–9 June). Please help us spread the word to your colleagues and students. Kind regards.

AAH Summer Symposium 2016
Gender in art: production, collection, display

Loughborough University
8-9 June 2016

Keynotes:
Professor Katy Deepwell (Middlesex University London)
Professor Marsha Meskimmon (Loughborough University)

The development of critical feminist discourses since the 1960s has elucidated ways in which social, political and economic structures have impacted on the production and display of artwork. Gradually, the construction of gender in collecting, curating, exhibiting and producing art began to be understood as a reflection of wider social and cultural narratives, extending beyond gendered identities of individual artists or curators. In collaboration with Loughborough University, this year’s annual two-day AAH Student Summer Symposium will investigate current critical and art-historical approaches that develop theories, methodologies and debates to analyse the making, display and collection of art in light of concepts of gender.

As categorical differentiations between ‘sex’, as a biological distinction, and ‘gender’, as a culturally constructed version of masculinity and femininity, prove difficult, any critical debate about them inevitably requires careful engagement with the power relations that attempt to shape it. The same applies for the discourses around the power distribution at work in the making, collecting and exhibiting of art. Whether in the studio, in museums, private collections or domestic spaces, works of art and their curatorial framing remain important sites for the construction of meaning concerning the interactions of the sexes. On the other hand, can such heteronormative ascriptions be understood as leftovers of binary thought patterns unable to account for fluid contemporary understandings of gender? In an attempt to understand and explain gendered identities in art, issues of equality, the domestic life, the ‘body’, the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ may be explored as complex intersections of social, cultural and political landscapes.

Registration for two-day symposium includes: Two keynote addresses, fourteen papers showcasing new research, refreshments.
Tickets: £20; AAH Members £10
Bookings at http://www.aah.org.uk/events/summer-symposium or call +44 (0)20 7490 3211

Programme

Wednesday, 8 June

10.00-10.30 Registration/Refreshments
10.30-10.45 Welcome
10.45-12.15 Session 1: Private and Public
Elizabeth Kajs (University of Bristol): Woman as ‘split’: investigations of the public and private in Käthe Kollwitz’s early self-portraiture
Molly Eckel (Courtauld Institute of Art): ‘A little world within a world’: the Wardian fern-case in the Victorian home
Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (University of Leeds): Gendered collections: from the home to the museum—the case of Lady Dorothy Nevill
12.15-13.15 Keynote 1: Prof Katy Deepwell
13.15-2.15 Lunch
2.15-3.45 Session 2: Curating and Display
Madeleine Pelling (University of York): ‘That noble possessor’: the pursuit of virtuous knowledge and its materials in the collection of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715-1785)
Elina Suoyrjö (Middlesex University): On affects, emotions and feminist curating
Wendy Wiertz (KU Leuven, Belgium): ‘Honneur aux dames!’: displaying 19th-century Belgian amateur women artists
3.45-4.15 Refreshments
4.15-5.15 Session 3: Feminist Practices
Rose-Anne Gush (University of Leeds): Image-body space in VALIE EXPORT
Cat Dawson (University of Buffalo, USA): The literal impossible: a critique of literalism in minimalism

Thursday, 9 June

10.00-11.30 Session 4: Labour and Practice
Helen Osborn (Birmingham City University): Blue period: exploring themes of fertility and motherhood through media experimentation
Sarah Charalambides (Goldsmiths, University of London): Situating precarity in feminist art practice
Anastasia Philimonos (Collective, Edinburgh) Franki Raffles’s ‘Lot’s Wife’: documenting the domestic in the early 1990s
11.30-12.00 Refreshments
12.00-13.00 Keynote 2: Prof Marsha Meskimmon
13.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.00 Degree show tour
3.15-4.45 Session 5: Representing and Contesting Gender
Qiuzi Guo (Heidelberg University, Germany): The gaze of voyeur: female representation from porcelain to photography
Sabine Hirzer (Graz University, Austria): Women at arms: visualisations of gender in art
Minna Hamrin (Åbo Akademi University, Finland; Università di Bologna, Italy): Saint Francis of Assisi’s exemplary chastity: picturing hegemonic masculinity in post-tridentine Italian art
5.00 end

The Summer Symposium is generously supported by the School of the Arts, English and Drama at Loughborough University. Enquiries to the convenors: Emma Bourne, Sara Tarter, Sofia Mali and Tilo Reifenstein at [log in to unmask]