Call for Papers | The Time of the Object: Temporality, Trace, Decay (CIHA World Congress 2024)
Call for Papers | The Time of the Object: Temporality, Trace, Decay (CIHA World Congress 2024)
Organizers: Julia Alting (University of Groningen), Raslene (independent artist/researcher, Jakarta)
Congress Dates: 23-28 June, 2024
Congress Location: Lyon, France
Contact: j.alting@rug.nl, heyraslene@gmail.com
Submission deadline: 15 September 2023
In art history the question of (historical) time is taken up more widely today as the discipline faces anxieties about its colonial foundations. As linear historical time is complicit with imperial ideologies of ‘progress’, alternative conceptualizations of time and history have been proposed, yet they have not been conceptually elaborated upon, nor have they been connected to new materialist art historical scholarship.This session aims to follow the lives of art objects’ materiality and their challenge to the traditional linear chronology of the discipline. ‘Timeless’ concepts of art negate the complicated trajectories of matter: the materiality of objects is never timeless, but is bound to its own temporality. Matter decays; it changes colour; travels; and leaves traces. This session explores the nonlinear temporalities that a focus on material brings with it.
How can we account for the structures of power intrinsic to historical time? What temporal layer is privileged in contexts of display? Which artistic approaches to archiving can be discerned? What are the temporal trajectories of the material?
Contributions could focus on one of the following topics:
– nonlinear (art) historical approaches and decoloniality
– the life of the object through global, transnational exchange
– artistic time in repurposing and reproduction
– the future in the present: conservation, climate change and extinction
– the past in the present: archival approaches in artistic research
We are particularly interested in approaches of time and materiality from ecocritical and decolonial perspectives and those histories of objects that traverse North/South dichotomies.This session will feature a combination of art historical and artistic research methods. In this sense we hope to bring theory and practice together with the focus on the epistemological as well as physical traces of art objects. We therefore encourage approaches from artistic backgrounds that do not necessarily follow a conventional presentation model. We are looking for 20 minute contributions that can take the shape of paper presentations, performances or conversations.
Read the full call for papers here. Please note that you have to submit your abstract through the official CIHA platform, more information can be found here.