CFP 2026
Conference 2026 Congrès
🆕 October 13–15 octobre, Concordia University, Montréal, QC
Call for Papers | Appel à contributions
Submission deadline | Date limite de soumission: May 31 mai 2026
Sessions (by title, alphabetically)
2. Acts of Mending: Material, Social, and Political Repair
4. AI and the Future of Collections (In Person)
5. Animaliser la recherche en histoire de l'art
8. Art/Theory: Revisiting the "Ancient Conflict"
10. As the World Turns: Re-imagining the Global Art History Survey
11. Beyond Darkness as Negativity: Rethinking Its Role in Art
12. Beyond Sense and Nonsense: Strategies for looking, listening, and reading in an AI present
13. Beyond the Face of It: Object-Based Selfhood in Still Life, Portraiture, and Material Culture
14. Black place-making in art history
15. Can-Content: the state of the erotic and the sexually explicit in Canadian art
16. Collecting Photographs of Infrastructure
17. Complicating Aesthetics: African Contemporary Artists Addressing Mass Violence
18. Curating the Village: Care as Method, Problem, and Possibility
20. Decomposition and its Possibilities in Art and Research
21. Design History in Canada: Local and Global Contexts
22. Design Studies Caucus open session
23. Diasporic Garment Narratives
25. Distributors, Receivers and Channels: Artists as Mediums
27. Elbows Up, Feathers Ruffled: Animals and Art in the Age of Nationalism
28. Enquêtes et contre-enquêtes
29. Faire parler la presse: enjeux, méthodes et perspectives en histoire de l'art
32. Internet Art in Canada: Histories and Futures
33. Interwoven Histories: Mapping Genealogical Intersections of Craft and Computing
34. "Jailbreak Our Imaginations": Abolitionist Aesthetic Praxis
35. Labour in the Early Modern World
36. Le jaillissement des concepts en histoire de l'art/The Emergence of Concepts in Art History
37. Le Musée palliatif – accueil de la dégradation en contexte de conservation
38. Making Art at the End of a World: Research-Creation as Activism and Spatial Practice
40. Networks of teaching and learning in global craft
41. New Research on Early Modern Art
42. Nothingness: Aesthetics of the Void
44. Photography After Exposure: Rethinking Opacity in an Age of Exhausted Critique
45. Photography Caucus Members Open Panel
46. Prototyping Commemorative Art Practices for the Present
47. Queer and feminist citational practice as artistic method in research-creation
49. Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Canadian Art Histories
50. Reading for the Africanist Presence
51. Real Bodies, Real Time & Space: Kinesthetic Learning in the Face of Virtual Art Education
52. Reinventing Photography: Originary Moments and Primal Scenes
53. Researching Access: Disability, Collaboration, and the Making of Method
54. Re-storying dis/repair and refusal beyond epistemologies of crises
55. Still-Moving-Images: In Between Motion and Stillness
56. Temporal Practices: Art, Method, and Conditions of Experience
57. The Land We Carry: Indigenous Technics Across Land, Body, and Digital Space
58. The Undervaluation of Galleries, Collections, and Art Spaces in Canadian Universities
61. "Unofficial" Art and Architecture in Premodern China
62. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise
63. Villainous Methodologies: Misbehaving Aesthetics and Deviant Practices
65. Whose Liberation? New Feminist Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art
Amanda Britton, Kennesaw State University, amandanbritton@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
The acquired may signal ownership, inheritance, appropriation, learning, memory, or attachment—and just as often, loss, excess, or disconnection. Objects and information enter our lives through systems of exchange, power, desire and care. What do we choose to keep, what accumulates unintentionally, and what is discarded or forgotten? How do these decisions shape both personal identity and collective histories? This session explores how accumulation functions as an artistic strategy and a lived condition. Participants are invited to consider practices of collecting, hoarding, archiving, sampling, repeating, cataloging, and inheriting, as well as acts of refusal and erasure. Attention will be given to how consumption, memory, and place inform material choices and creative processes, and how accumulated matter—physical or immaterial—carries traces of time, labor, and meaning. Accumulation can transform the way we make, remember, and relate to the worlds we inhabit.
Keywords: Memory, Materiality, Archives
Victoria MacBeath, Concordia University, victoria.macbeath@mail.concordia.ca
Co-chair: Pramila Choudhary, Concordia University, choudharypramila@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
Mending, at its most literal, means to repair through sewing or darning. Contemporary craft-based artists have taken up the practice in both material and symbolic forms: considering the reparative nature of craft practices in social, community-based, and political venues. Mending, as an act of repair, can be done through darning, patchwork, raffu, glueing, etc. It can also be done through conversation, attention, and taking responsibility. Mending can be a material, aesthetic, or historical act and often intersects with conversations around care, sustainability, and agency. Mending is a reparative act, but also involves a rupture. It can restore, or if done improperly, can make the rupture worse. This panel invites proposals that examine the role of mending in (re)making (materials, future, and pasts). Mending here can be a method, a material practice, and/or a framework for analysis.
Keywords: mending, craft, care, conservation
Natasha Bissonauth, Emily Carr University, natasha.bissonauth@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
Afro Asian Studies is best understood as a porous encounter across geographies, and although propositions are not without tensions, their internationalist framings have been generative. Yet, within this efflorescent, interdisciplinary field, attention to the aesthetic in animating these networks remains thin, save notable exceptions (i.e. Powell's, Sounds from the Other Side, 2020; the exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory, 2021; Kee's The Geometries of Afro Asia, 2023). This panel examines how visual culture gives new form to these borderlands. From the Indian Ocean, Caribbean, Arab World, across legacies of maritime trade, anti-colonial struggle, and Bandung nonalignment, Afro Asia is multivalent; arguably these fecund switch points require more engagement with the image and imaginary as extended formulations. This panel invites scholars, artists, curators, and other art professionals to address Afro Asia through artistic practice, aesthetic analysis, material cultures and histories, and other related processes within the visual, performative, and sensorial.
Keywords: Afro Asian Studies, borders, diaspora, internationalism, Black, Asia
Celka Straughn Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, straughn@ku.edu
Co-chair: Madeleine Trudeau, Library and Archives Canada, madeleine.trudeau@bac-lac.gc.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
As forms of artificial intelligence become more embedded in museum and archive practices, what are some of the impacts for collections and our responsibilities toward them? This panel invites papers that explore how AI may shape the future of collection stewardship, development, access, research, and sustainability. What techniques might facilitate new forms of engagement for the many different users of museums and archives? What sorts of policies and guidelines might benefit museum and archive professionals, creators and donors, as well as researchers, learners, and the variety of publics that engage with museum and archive collections?
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI); collections; development; engagement; sustainability
Vincent Lavoie, UQAM, lavoie.vincent@uqam.ca
Co-chair: Bénédicte Ramade, UQAM, ramade.benedicte@uqam.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
L'ouverture de l'histoire de l'art aux principes très divers des études animales (éthiques, éthologiques, culturels, philosophiques, politiques, écologiques) présente un véritable défi. Au-delà de l'hétérogénéité des études de cas, corpus prévalents dans les plus récents travaux critiques, comment intégrer le souci des animaux et le désir de mieux voir et faire connaître vraiment les animaux dans leur agentivité et leur singularité, là où ils ont eu essentiellement une existence symbolique ou métaphorique ? Ouvert à toutes les périodes et les origines, ce panel cherche à sonder les méthodologies et les épistémologies qui conduiraient à mieux penser l'image avec les animaux. Il s'agit de faire de l'histoire de l'art une discipline incontournable des études animales, de replacer les œuvres d'art au centre des récits, davantage qu'en marge ou en simples illustrations de ceux-ci.
Keywords: études animales, culture visuelle, épistémologie critique, point de vue animal
Dan Adler, York University, dadler@yorku.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Within today's accelerated landscape of consumption and extraction, how does the technique of assemblage offer a different mode of inquiry for contemporary artists? This panel will explore assemblage-based sculpture—the use of found, mundane objects, combined in new and surprising ways—as a crucial tool for interrogating our entangled experiences of life under late capitalism. How do assemblage practices help reflect artistic experiences of migration and diaspora, political upheaval, and ecological crisis? How does the materiality of assemblage sculpture enact new performative modes of engagement in the contexts of its display—museums, galleries, artist-run spaces, and elsewhere? Does assemblage-based sculpture prompt a different, slower, mode of looking? This panel welcomes art historical analyses of assemblage-based practices by contemporary and historical artists, alongside practice-based responses from artists who engage in this technique themselves.
Keywords: Assemblage, sculpture, found objects, contemporary art
Reilley Bishop-Stall, McGill University, reilley.bishop-stall@mcgill.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This session examines the relationship between artistic experience, attention, and anxiety within the conditions of contemporary global precarity. Economic instability, geopolitical conflict, climate crises, and pervasive technological mediation have intensified what might be described as an "anxious present." Recent scholarship on attention and mental health—including rising diagnoses of anxiety and attention disorders—suggests that contemporary subjects inhabit increasingly fragmented perceptual environments. Simultaneously, the image field has undergone dramatic transformation through AI-generated imagery, deepfakes, algorithmic feeds, and expanding surveillance infrastructures, complicating the epistemological status of visual material. How might art intervene within these conditions? Can aesthetic experience cultivate alternative forms of attention that counter anxiety? Conversely, how do artworks stage, simulate, or amplify anxiety? From works that solicit contemplative attention to installations that overwhelm the senses or reproduce conditions of crisis, artists have long engaged anxiety as both subject and method. This panel invites papers examining historical or contemporary works across media that address attention, distraction, and anxious perception. Contributions that test emerging hypotheses or present works in progress are welcome.
Keywords: art, anxiety, attention, precariousness, surveillance
Dan Starling, University of British Columbia, dan.starling@ubc.ca
Co-chair: Jeremy Arnott, Concordia University, jeremy.arnott@concordia.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Plato identified an "ancient conflict" between philosophy and art—and this wound has never quite healed. Generations of theorists and artists have inherited (and contemplated) this antagonism, often treating the other's domain with suspicion or indifference. Yet some of the most consequential critical interventions have emerged precisely at this border, from Adorno's surrealist writings, to contemporary "auto-theory" or figures like Hito Steyerl who blur the distinction, operating simultaneously as artists and theorists. It also points to a broader trajectory: a long and underexamined history of theorists making art, and artists doing theory. We aim to hold art and theory in productive constellation, using art to refract theory and vice versa. This panel session invites presentations and reflections, from artists, theorists, writers, curators, and art historians that use art as a tool to deliver their theory; or who employ theory as a mechanism to charge art. We encourage reflection upon the (sometimes violent) tension between art and theory. How can we think about the on-going and persistent disciplinary boundaries that still prevent serious interdisciplinary cross-pollination, even when some of the best instances of contemporary critique come in the acute register of theoretically precise actions?
Keywords: art, theory, auto-theory, interdisciplinarity
Marc James Léger, Independent Scholar, leger.mj@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
The crises of neoliberal capitalism have resulted in the rise of populist and far-right governments that seek to entrench the power of the billionaire class at the expense of workers and civil society institutions. The need to politicize culture has now affected even those sectors that had shied away from leftism, including the realm of celebrity artists. Artists who are speaking out against ecological catastrophe, imperialist wars, the genocide in Gaza or ICE raids have added their voices to the many whose street demonstrations go unheard in the halls of power. This panel invites papers that consider the tensions between artistic autonomy and political polemic in a social context in which socialism and anti-fascism are being criminalized while imperialism and fascism are being normalized. The panel additionally invites papers that consider what it means to support diversity, or nationalism, without addressing the need to fight capitalism.
Keywords: neoliberalism, fascism, protest, solidarity, identitarianism
Tammer El-Sheikh, York University, tammer75@yorku.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Since the publication in 2021 of Thames and Hudson's The History of Art: A Global View, several resources are now available for teaching global art history survey courses. Others include Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A Global History and the open access resources of Smarthistory's extended Asia, Africa, South America, and Oceania sections. This has not eliminated the difficulties in teaching such an ambitious and unwieldy survey, but it has enabled instructors to better compare approaches to their work. Emerging frameworks for a reorganization of the global art history survey are also available in recent collections on eco-critical art history and decolonial art history. In this panel, art historians who have led, assisted with, or thought through the challenges of a (global) art history survey course will give presentations on their pedagogical strategies, on particular images, rubrics or frameworks that have helped them organize, narrate, and shape histories of art for post-secondary students.
Keywords: Global Art History; Teaching; Methods; Eco-critical Art History; Decolonial Art History
Hossein Azimi, PhD Candidate in Art History, Concordia University, hoseinazimiap@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel proposes that darkness, far from being merely the absence of light, functions as a productive and active element across visual media and historical contexts. Darkness has often been treated as a secondary counterpart to light and rarely examined independently. Long-standing art historical conventions have often associated darkness with reductive and predominantly negative notions such as death, fear, and evil. This panel seeks to challenge such assumptions by reconsidering its more complex and generative roles, including its capacity to signify calmness, contemplation, interiority, and even the sacred, as well as its active role in shaping both the formal and emotional dimensions of artworks. By foregrounding darkness as both a formal condition and a site of meaning, this panel aims to address its marginalization within art historical discourse. It welcomes contributions that critically engage with the formal, affective, and conceptual dimensions of darkness across diverse media, historical periods, and cultural contexts.
Keywords: Darkness- Chiaroscuro- Symbolism - Visual Culture- Emotional Tone
Alex Borkowski, OCAD University, alex.borkowski@gmail.com
Co-chair: Aline Zara, University of Toronto, aline.zara@mail.utoronto.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
With the proliferation of AI-generated media, we are confronted with images, texts, and sounds with a uniquely fraught relationship to indexicality, verisimilitude, and sense. Deepfakes and AI slop become meaningful in their circulation, despite their lack of coherence or believability; texts generated by large language models perform factity without any basis in fact. What becomes of the distinction between sense and nonsense in this moment, when AI hallucinations abound yet a belief in data's objectivity dominates? How might aesthetic practices help us to navigate the murky territory between meaningless and meaningful? We welcome submissions exploring artistic experiments with generative media, the affordances and limitations of machine listening and vision, and historical practices that might equip us with strategies for navigating our super-sensical present. We encourage traditional papers, exploratory performances, and participatory experiences.
Keywords: AI, nonsense, media arts, sound, text
Justina Spencer, University of King's College, justina.spencer@ukings.ca
Co-chair: Clare Sully-Stendahl, University of King's College, clare.sully-stendahl@dal.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This session invites papers that explore how objects participate in the construction and interpretation of the self across cultures and time periods. Moving beyond the primacy of traditional portraiture and figural representation, it examines how objects function as extensions of the body, repositories of memory, or proxies for absent subjects. What does it mean to speak of a portrait without a visible subject? From early modern to contemporary traditions, representations of objects in still lifes and portraits blur the boundaries between genres, producing varied and sometimes unexpected representations of the self. Recent scholarship has also underscored that objects are never neutral but are embedded in histories of extraction and colonialism, from early modern trade networks to contemporary debates on restitution and repatriation. This session, therefore, also welcomes papers that examine how object-based selfhood is shaped through global circulation and exchange. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): Representations of objects as proxies for persons; Autobiographical still life; Global or transcultural object histories and identity; Objects as mediators of memory.
Keywords: Object histories, still life, self-portraiture
Joana Joachim, Concordia University, joana.joachim@concordia.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
The last decade has seen a resurgence of institutional engagement with Black artists and curators, particularly in the Canadian context (Ikiriko and Fatona 2019). In this time, art historians, critics and curators alike have developed new practices to uncover, reevaluate and record otherwise overlooked Black visual histories. Digital and curatorial projects, archival collations as well as thematic publications have also lent themselves to reshaping discourses around Black art histories. New approaches have thus emerged, shifting how we think about and engage with Black life and art. This panel invites papers exploring innovative or "rebellious" methodologies in art history which centre Black art and makers (McKittrick 2021). This panel session is seeking papers which innovate in their approaches to documenting, curating or narrating artworks by Black makers across a range of timeframes and locations. With this panel we are seeking papers that foreground Black place-making as a fundamental aspect of art historical approaches and curatorial practices (McKittrick 2021).
Keywords: Black studies, Black feminism, Curating, Criticism, Archives
Jamie Ross, Artist, jamiecallumross@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
Canada has a long and on-going history of censorship of explicit sexual media, one that extends from the sexualized and gendered violence of the colonial project, a history that has also been consistently resisted and contested by artists and sex workers. As the censorship of broadcast, analogue and print media in the infamous late 20th century cases of the Little Sisters and Body Politic queer bookstore raids, book seizures and Porn Wars gives way to both the Postporn feminist performance art practices and also the insidious shadow-ban censorship of the social media algorithm, artists have had to devise new strategies to resist Canadian state control. Artist sex workers are increasingly self-determining the production and presentation of erotic work in Canada, but this dimension of art-making is sorely under-researched and under-historicized. This panel brings together artists, creators, critics and scholars who treat the erotic in historical art practices and curatorial attention, contemporary content creation, issues of gender, queerness and trans representation and liberation, camp, theatricality and performance, class analysis and commerce.
Keywords: porn, erotic art, sex work, censorship, post-porn
Emily Doucet, Independent, emily.g.doucet@gmail.com
Co-chair: Katie Addleman, Canadian Centre for Architecture, kaddleman@cca.qc.ca
Roundtable | Table ronde - at the Canadian Centre for Architecture
Departing from a group of photographs held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture— namely almost seven hundred prints related to bridges, docks, pipelines, and tunnels built around the British Empire by the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company, a UK-based entity, beginning in the early twentieth century— this roundtable examines photographs of infrastructure projects as they appear in institutional collections. Infrastructure occupies a complex position in visual culture. As instruments of propaganda, photographs position infrastructure as a spectacle of modern progress. Alternatively, infrastructure is conceptualized as evasive of representation, only becoming visible at its breaking point. Yet, when examining these materials as researchers, we encounter a more ambiguous record—less a grand spectacle and more a collection of clues. Moving beyond generalized claims about infrastructural visibility, this roundtable invites scholars, curators, and artists to present a single photograph of infrastructure, describing how it has generated future directions for research or creation.
Keywords: Photography, infrastructure, collecting, visual culture, methodology
Pauline B. Lomami, Independent artist-researcher, pauline.lomami@concordia.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Several devastating conflicts across Africa have continuously underscored deep inequalities in how violence and human toll are represented, circulated, and remembered within global media and cultural discourse. From protracted wars to episodes of mass violence and disregarded genocides, these crises raise urgent questions about the politics of visibility, memory, and representation, as much as infrastructures and internal and external protagonists. At the same time, contemporary African artists have remained vital voices, producing work that challenges erasure, complicates dominant narratives, asserts aesthetic and historical movements, maintains belonging to lands and waters, or leads to action. Focusing on regions affected by recent and ongoing cases, this panel examines how African artists, on the continent or in the diaspora, address war, mass violence, and genocide. It is interested in practices and aesthetics that critically engage with the experiences and enduring effects of such violence, and the ethics of witnessing and representation. In a world used to ignoring, consuming, or distancing from African suffering, the panel also discusses how they shape awareness and knowledge, political discourse and action, and collective memory and futures.
Keywords: African artists, critical aesthetics, violence, African geographies, necropolitics
Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan, Independent, shalonwh@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
This session emerges from Curating the Village, an ongoing research-creation initiative that approaches caregiving as both subject and working condition—one that reshapes how curatorial and artistic labour is structured, timed, and made visible. Marked by interruption, exhaustion, and relational obligation, caregiving unsettles dominant expectations of productivity, availability, and coherence in cultural work. While "care" circulates widely in contemporary arts discourse, it is still rarely accommodated structurally within programming, pedagogy, or institutional time. This session asks: what shifts when care is approached not simply as a purported value or theme, but as a curatorial method? Bringing together curators, artists, and cultural workers, the session combines short provocations with collective inquiry to consider care as a site of friction and possibility. How might interruption, ambivalence, and entanglement function as methodological forces? What forms of labour, refusal, or desire remain disavowed within "ethical" cultural practice? Positioned between panel, roundtable, and working session, contributions may take the form of short talks, performance lectures, or creative and research-creation outputs. The session invites participants to consider how care reconfigures authorship, temporality, and participation—and what cultural forms emerge when these tensions are held, explored, and worked with rather than smoothed over.
Keywords: Curatorial practice; Research-creation; Care as method; Institutional critique; Interdisciplinary
Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Memorial University, juliapolyckoneill@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
In No Archive Will Restore You (2018), Julietta Singh describes the experience of graduate student researchers "plummeting deeper and deeper into debt, which is in a sense its own hellish kind of archive" (21). McKenzie Wark, citing David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2014) in her book Capital is Dead (2019), posits that nothing goes undigested by capitalism's machine: "Not just our labor, not just our leisure—something else is being commodified here: our sociability, our common and ordinary life together, what you might even call our communism" (3). This panel invites scholarly and creative presentations that critically explore the relations between the relentless, systemic pressures of debt under late capitalism the archive, memory, and/or the historical cultural record. How is a poetics of debt (or other financial records, predicaments, data) and/as archive explored or made manifest in art and media?
Keywords: debt; archive; capitalism; financial records; art and media
Amanda White, Emily Carr University, amandawhite@ecuad.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel invites papers, artists talks, and other forms of scholarly and artistic presentation that expand on, engage with, or otherwise explore decomposition. Of particular interest are proposals addressing concepts and theories of waste, compost, and breakdown as processes of circularity, regeneration, and reimagination. Participants may engage with cyclical temporalities, seasonal rhythms, decay, material transformations, and related explorations of living, ephemeral, or unstable artworks. How might decomposition as both material condition and conceptual framework, challenge or reshape creative and interdisciplinary practices? This panel welcomes critical and creative approaches to rethinking value, waste, resisting capitalist and extractive systems, and envisioning regenerative futures.
Keywords: Decomposition, materials, ecology, regeneration
Sara Shields-Rivard, Queen's University, 22ssr@queensu.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel considers the shape and constraints of Canadian design history, bridging visual and material culture studies. The discipline of design history has long privileged British narratives and marginalized contributions from former colonies, including Canada (Fry, 1989). Academic scholarship seeks to situate Canadian design within a global canon, yet local institutions often subsume design under adjacent disciplines rather than treating it as a distinct field, unlike dedicated design museums abroad. The 2019 closure of the Design Exchange and the dispersal of its collection to the Royal Ontario Museum and the Canadian Museum of History underscores pressing challenges in preserving design heritage, despite digital initiatives like the xDX Project. As questions of national identity resurface, this panel examines how Canada contributes to local and global design histories through scholarship, exhibitions, collections, and institutional frameworks. Proposals in English or French are welcome, particularly those addressing colonialism, race, and gender.
Keywords: design, nationalism, collecting, heritage, global
Keith Bresnahan, OCAD University, kbresnahan@ocadu.ca
Co-chair: Gabi Schaffzin, York University, gabis@yorku.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
William Morris's plea for useful work — "the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill" in an age of industrialization — is today once more thrown into relief by AI. Promises of automation, which often serve to devalue work and workers, have at times found their antithesis in the crafted, the handmade, and the skilled work of the designer or artisan. Approaches to craft have often emphasized visible evidence of skill, time, and marks of making; design's smooth surfaces, in contrast, have frequently obscured the labour of production, privileging concepts and finished products over the work of shaping, assembling, and finishing. Recently, designer-maker, critical design, 'sloppy craft,' and other modes of intentional de- and re-skilling have interrogated and complicated these frameworks. What can design and craft histories tell us about the value of skill, labour, and technique today? This session encourages presentations from any perspective, location, or historical period.
Keywords: design studies; craft; skill; technique; de-skilling
Faseeh Saleem, Founder Artistic Xploratorium, faseehsaleem@hotmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel invites proposals that examine the garment as a material and cultural archive within diasporic experience. Clothing carries memory, displacement, and inherited knowledge; it mediates belonging and estrangement across shifting geographies. We seek papers and practice-led projects that explore how the dressed body becomes a site where migration, identity, and cultural continuity are negotiated and reimagined. Contributions may address garments as archives of migration; intergenerational textile practices; dress and the politics of belonging; embodied knowledge; narrative and material culture; or studio experimentation as diasporic inquiry. Interdisciplinary approaches from art history, visual culture, design, performance, and studio practice are welcome. By foregrounding garments as active participants in shaping personal and collective histories, this panel opens dialogue on how diasporic dress reimagines home, mobility, and transnational identity.
Keywords: Diaspora; Material Culture; Migration; Narrative Practices; Studio Research
Mélissa Andrianasolo, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), missa.andrianasolo@gmail.com
Co-chair: India-Lynn Upshaw-Ruffner, Concordia University, indiaupshawruffner.studies@gmail.com
Long Table Performative Roundtable
Our proposal centers on the importance of oral histories and spaces for dialogue in Black communities in Canada. We are seeking to create a space at the UAAC conference that can be a bilingual space to grieve, laugh, share, and explore being a Black curator, artist, academic, and/or cultural worker in the Canadian arts context, which can sometimes feel isolating. The Long Table format, inspired by Split Britches, involves placing a long table in the center of a room, with a microphone on each end. The table is covered in a paper table cloth with markers and pens, allowing participants to contribute to the discussion. Lastly, there are chairs at the long table, but also one or two rows of chairs that surround the long table. Attendees may get up at any point and sit at the table, but the only people who can speak at a given moment must have a microphone. We encourage performances, poems, gossip, serving, and dishing out. As co-chairs, we will moderate the session to ensure space taken up by participants is balanced, and will prepare questions to ask the group to start off the discussion.
Keywords: Oral histories, Black Canadian Art Histories, Black Feminisms, Cultural Workers, Community
Rhiannon Vogl, York University, rhiavogl@yorku.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel explores the diverse ways artists—within their practice or the works they produce—have functioned as "mediums": conceiving of themselves as agents, means, or materials of communication. Thinking expansively about the "medium" as a vehicle for information exchange, this panel welcomes papers that consider various substrates, methods, and technologies—from artist publications and computer networks to cinematic conjurings, (meta)physical performances, and parapsychological instruments. We are interested in how artists have used, or perhaps misused, these tools to facilitate different forms of communication, whether through the distribution of ideas, the reception of wireless messages, or the channeling of energetic frequencies. Particularly curious about boundaries between material, immaterial and dematerial realms, this panel asks how such artistic practices navigate ambivalences between information and irrationality, myth and science, or transcendence and technology. What beliefs or paradoxes do these exchanges require, and what pleasures or promises do they hold?
Keywords: medium, communication, technology, information, dematerialization
Swapnaa Tamhane, Artist & Curator, unit309@gmail.com
Co-chair: Jaret Vadera, Associate Professor in Intersectional, Feminist and Decolonial Image-Making Practices, jaret.vadera@concordia.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
How is drawing a way of knowing, seeing, thinking, or locating? In the 1993 exhibition catalogue "Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins", Jacques Derrida writes that drawing is made through turning away, from not looking. We propose to think of drawing as presence. Drawing has been practiced in multiple ways across all cultures, but is less known as a formal study outside of the West. Drawing is found in ritual, craft, writing, way-finding, and graphics that merge private and public spaces through text and image, political posters, calendar art, comics or advertising. This panel session explores how drawing – as practice, as medium, as subject – reveals an historiography that is part of ritual as ephemera, popular culture as repeat print, fine art as a form of presence, performance through storytelling, or mark-making as a collective experience. Drawing as a language will be considered through a variety of media, privileging the diaspora and the decolonial.
Keywords: Drawing, Popular Culture, Multivalent, Decolonial
Margaryta Golovchenko, Alberta University of the Arts, margaryta@ilmar.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
The Canadian goose has resurfaced as a prominent symbol in recent years, rallying support and national unity in a moment of socio-political turmoil. Yet it is not unique in its role as national symbol. Animals have served a similar function in art and visual culture from the age of empires to the resurging neo-imperial ideas in the air today. This panel seeks to examine how animals participate in the process of nation building through the visual representation of their bodies as well as their frequent physical presence. Paper submissions on a range of temporal and geographical areas are encouraged, as well as on a range of case studies spanning fine art, visual culture, and the decorative arts. Approaches that recognize animals' roles as symbols but also how "animalization" can creep into the language used to represent certain cultures and peoples are also welcome.
Keywords: animal studies, fine art, visual culture, decorative arts, empire and nationalism
Marie Fraser, Université du Québec à Montréal, fraser.marie@uqam.ca
Co-chair: Monika Wright, Université du Québec à Montréal, wright.monika@courrier.uqam.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
De quelles manières l'enquête peut-elle contribuer à transformer nos façons de produire, d'interpréter et de mettre en forme les savoirs ? Cette proposition de séance veut rassembler différentes approches à la croisée de l'histoire de l'art, de la muséologie, de l'architecture, de l'anthropologie, de la sociologie ainsi que des pratiques curatoriales et artistiques qui utilisent des méthodes de recherche et de création pour révéler des histoires souterraines, oubliées, manipulées ou contrôlées. Que ce soit pour reconstituer ou rétablir un fait historique, récolter des données sur un terrain ou rassembler des preuves, l'enquête n'est-elle pas aussi une contre-enquête visant à remettre en cause les apparences, la propagande, la dissimulation et la manipulation de l'information ? N'est-elle pas à la fois un modèle et un contre-modèle épistémologique pour dénoncer une certaine culture du secret ? Pour reprendre les mots de Tim Ingold, l'enquête serait un « mode de production de connaissances dissident », une méthode, un chemin, une trajectoire. Dans cette séance, il s'agira de mettre en commun des exemples et des études de cas qui explorent des modalités d'investigation : dépouillement d'archives, reconstitution, provenance, authentification, témoignages...
Keywords: Enquête, contre-enquête, culture du secret, archives, trajectoire
Sophie Quirion, Département d'histoire de l'art (UQAM), quirion.sophie@courrier.uqam.ca
Co-chair: Sydney Guy, Department of Art History (Concordia), sy_guy@live.concordia.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Si l'usage de la presse comme source historique constitue une méthodologie déjà bien ancrée dans divers domaines culturels, notamment en littérature et en histoire, son apport en histoire de l'art mérite d'être mis de l'avant. Bien plus qu'un simple espace de diffusion de l'information, la presse écrite et illustrée depuis le 19e siècle est un objet médiatique qui se retrouve au cœur de l'espace public et dans les interstices de nombreux enjeux de l'époque. Plus encore, la presse est utilisée pour documenter des pratiques sociales et culturelles. Comment l'analyse des différentes pratiques d'écriture, des illustrations, du rôle des publicités ou encore de l'absence de certaines pratiques artistiques ou architecturales contribue-t-elle au champ de l'histoire de l'art? L'objectif de cette séance est de réunir la pluralité des études de cas et des méthodes de recherche mettant en lumière la manière dont la presse écrite et illustrée documente, diffuse et construit les discours sur l'art et l'architecture. Les propositions portant sur les journaux et les périodiques publiés au 19e siècle et au 20e siècle, toutes aires géographiques confondues, sont les bienvenues. Nous accueillons aussi les propositions sur les outils numériques utiles aux recherches dans la presse.
Keywords: Presse écrite et illustrée - Humanités numériques - Discours médiatiques - Méthodologies de recherche - art et architecture
Carla Taunton, NSCAD University, ctaunton@nscad.ca
Co-chair: Julie Hollenbach, NSCAD University, jhollenbach@nscad.ca
Workshop | Atelier
In response to the ongoing local and global crises of environmental catastrophe, war, genocide, oligarchy, and austerity and the resulting extreme violence against people, land and waters legitimized by longstanding practices of empire and white supremacy, racism, settler colonialisms, capitalism, misogyny and so on, we remain committed to returning to the urgency of creating and dreaming the world otherwise. This workshop continues considerations of "fierce tenderness" and collective and speculative practices of dreaming the world otherwise brought to UAAC in a 2025 roundtable. This workshop is guided by the visionary work of artists and thinkers who advocate fiercely for love and joy—bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, adrienne maree brown, Sara Ahmed, and Kai Cheng Thom. We work with "fierce tenderness" as a collaborative methodology that emphasizes the radical power of actions of love, interconnection, accountability, reciprocity, abolition, and decolonial ways of being in relation (to human and more-than-human beings) to resist oppression and violence to imagine and build just and free worlds. We encourage artists, makers, researchers, curators, and cultural workers to submit proposals for experimental presentations, poetic gestures, creative expressions and forms, performances, and participatory actions.
Keywords: Collaborative methodologies, resistance, settler colonialism, dreaming, love
Sheri Osden Nault, University of Western Ontario, snault4@uwo.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel invites presentation proposals by artist-researchers engaged in the pursuit of more just creative methodologies. With a focus on responsible and responsive experimentation and innovation in material practices, this discussion addresses: • How artists might enact good relations with our social and physical environments; • 'Working with' rather than 'using' materials; • The potential of art practices to create and/or sustain local and global community connections materially and/or conceptually; • Ways in which research-creation furthers "the liberation of all living systems and the land" (Berne et al 2018). Knowledge produced through the invention and adaptation of material recipes and technical methods, whether traditional or as-of-yet unknown, is of particular interest, including failed attempts and artworks that remain in-progress. Perspectives grounded in disability justice; Indigenous, Black, and other anti-colonial futurisms; queer futurity; and practice-based research are emphasized as we turn to praxis to ensure that political and artistic potentialities be actualized rather than remain theoretical (Martineau & Ritskes 2014).
Keywords: research-creation; materials; methodology; sustainability; community
Jen Kennedy, Queen's University, jen.kennedy@queensu.ca
Co-chair: Mikhel Proulx, McGill and Helsinki Academy of Art, mikhel_proulx@hotmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
Despite Canada's significant contributions to early internet-based and networked art, net art remains unevenly historicized and infrequently exhibited within mainstream museum and gallery contexts. This session invites papers that examine Canadian net art and web-based projects from the 1980s onward, with attention to the cultural, technical, and institutional conditions that shaped their production, circulation, and reception. We welcome historical, theoretical, and practice-based approaches that address questions of authorship, platforms, software and hardware dependencies, documentation, exhibition histories, and preservation. Contributions might consider how net art has intersected with artist-run cultures, funding structures, pedagogical contexts, and transnational networks, or how contemporary curatorial and archival frameworks are reshaping its legibility today. By bringing together multiple perspectives, this session aims to expand and complicate narratives of Canadian digital art history and to situate net art within broader conversations about contemporary art, media, and cultural memory.
Keywords: Canadian art histories; internet art; networked art; born-digital media; web; 1990s
Ashley Scarlett, Alberta University of the Arts, ashley.scarlett@auarts.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
It has become common to recognise computing's historical indebtedness to weaving and automation across the textile industry. Both Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace acknowledged the centrality of the Jacquard loom in designing their analytical engine, with Lovelace claiming the "Analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." Scholars have begun mapping wider, shared genealogies of weaving and computing backwards through paper tape looms and algebraic weaving "programs" and forward across the Bauhaus weaving workshops, handweaver Janice Lourie's Textile Graphics Program, and e-textiles to demonstrate how deeply intertwined their histories are. Building upon this research, this panel seeks contributions that investigate historical and contemporary intersections between computation and craft more broadly. It asks: how have technologies, practices, and works aligned with craft informed or been informed by the computational? Of particular interest are art historical and technical case studies that have thus far been overlooked.
Keywords: Craft; Computation; Digital Craft
Hadley Howes, Independent artist, scholar, educator, organizer, hadleyhowes@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
The demand of abolition to change everything calls for radical imagination – imagination that is more powerful than the devastating, and delusional, imagination of fascism, imperialism, colonialism, and the ongoing disaster of Civilization. How are artists meeting and modelling this demand for collective, liberatory imagination? And what do artists have to learn from queer, trans, Indigenous, Black, disabled, and feminist organizers, scholars, and survivors who model abolitionist values and practices as methods of surviving and thriving the past 500+ years? Both abolitionist and artistic praxes teach us about the inseparability of methods from ethics, form from content – especially where ethics is understood through a liberatory, counter-Civilizational, anticolonial lens, as the terrain where we consider how to live together in good and just relationships. This panel invites artists, curators, writers, thinkers, survivors and community organizers to share how they do art-as-abolition and abolition-as-art. How are you answering Mariame Kaba's call to "jailbreak our imaginations"? Building on the success of the panel on archive as riot last year, this year‘s panel seeks to turn its focus to creative practice in struggles for abolition.
Keywords: Artistic praxis; abolition; social justice; radical imagination; practice
Anuradha Gobin, University of Calgary, anuradha.gobin@ucalgary.ca
Co-chair: Angela Vanhaelen, McGill University, angela.vanhaelen@mcgill.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This session seeks to assess the realignment of art, labour, and global capitalism during a period of systemic change (ca. 1492-1700). The transition from feudalism to capitalism precipitated new divisions of labour as the muscle power of humans and animals was deemed essential to the accumulation of profits. We invite papers that consider the proto-industrial exploitation of bodies, as well as those that approach labour as invention, especially focusing on the often-overlooked contributions made by Indigenous, Black, and female workers. Theoretical approaches that are attentive to the conflicting and oppositional practices of world making and take up questions raised by decolonial, anti-racist, feminist, Marxist, and ecocritical methods are especially encouraged. Other possible topics may include: The spectre of non-labour (witchcraft, itineracy, disability); Non-human animals; Technologies of labour; Extraction practices (mining, quarrying, hunting, monocropping); Spaces of labour (workshops, plantations, ports, gardens, prisons, mills); Material transformations.
Keywords: labour, art, early modern
Eduardo Ralickas, UQAM, ralickas.eduardo@uqam.ca
Co-chair: Charles-Antoine Goulet, UQAM, goulet.charles-antoine@courrier.uqam.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Quelles sont les choses pour lesquelles nous n'avons pas encore de mots? L'évidence selon laquelle, en tant que chercheur.euse.s, nous participons à l'élaboration de disciplines vivantes, s'accompagne de réflexions plus larges sur l'émergence de théories, de concepts et d'idées. Ce panel s'inscrit sous le signe de Giorgio Agamben, selon lequel « l'expérience proprement poétique de la parole s'accomplit dans la pensée et l'expérience proprement pensante de la langue a lieu dans la poésie » (Agamben, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie, p. 50). Comme toute forme, les concepts et néologismes relèvent de contextes particuliers et leur jaillissement mérite de faire l'objet d'une réflexion attentive, tant sur leurs utilisations que sur leurs potentialités. L'histoire de l'art est truffée de concepts, qui au départ apparaissent en tant que néologismes, avant d'être intégrés au langage de la discipline. Pensons à « hantologie » de Jacques Derrida, à « iconoclash » de Bruno Latour ou à « sympoïèse » de Donna Haraway. Ce panel propose de se pencher de manière critique sur ces concepts, de réfléchir la place de l'inventivité théorique en histoire de l'art ou de découvrir ensemble certains concepts singuliers pensés par nos collègues contemporains, quel(s) que soi(en)t leur(s) domaine(s) d'appartenance. Nous accueillons des interventions dans la langue de votre choix. What are the things for which we do not yet have words? The obvious fact that, as researchers, we participate in the development of living disciplines is accompanied by broader reflections on the emergence of theories, concepts, and ideas. This panel is inspired by Giorgio Agamben, who argues that "the truly poetic experience of speech is accomplished in thought, and the truly thoughtful experience of language takes place in poetry" (Agamben, What Is Philosophy). Like any one thing, concepts and neologisms are tied to specific contexts, and their emergence deserves careful consideration, both in terms of their uses and their potentialities. Art history is peppered with concepts that initially appear as neologisms before being integrated into the language of the discipline. Think of Jacques Derrida's "hauntology," Bruno Latour's "iconoclash," or Donna Haraway's "sympoiesis." This panel aims to take a critical look at these concepts, to reflect on the importance of theoretical inventiveness in art history, and to uncover some of the unique concepts developed by our contemporary colleagues, whatever their field(s) of expertise. We welcome presentations in the language of your choice.
Keywords: concepts, inventivité théorique, indicibilité / theoretical creativity, the unsayable
Zoë Renaudie, Université de Montréal, zoe.renaudie@umontreal.ca
Co-chair: Anne-Sophie Miclo, Université du Québec en Outaouais, anne-sophie.miclo@uqo.ca et Mélanie Boucher, Université du Québec en Outaouais
Panel Session | Session de panel
Comment l'usure, tant ordinaire que singulière, peut-elle cesser d'être considérée par le Musée en tant qu'échec symptomatique de sa mission et devenir une donnée mémorielle signifiante ? Longtemps fondée sur l'idéal de permanence matérielle, la conservation muséale est aujourd'hui contrainte de repenser ses fondements pour accompagner des œuvres et artefacts variables ou périssables, entraînant une reconfiguration des pratiques documentaires. À partir de la notion d'accept-decay (Muñoz-Viñas, 2024, p. 269-270) – entendue comme acceptation de la dégradation –, ce panel explore en quoi les institutions intègrent différemment à notre époque l'altération, comme dimension constitutive des œuvres, ce qui engage de profondes reconfigurations professionnelles et épistémologiques. Cette séance bilingue souhaite rassembler des approches issues de la recherche, de la recherche-création et des milieux professionnels en histoire de l'art et en muséologie autour d'études de cas concrets. Toutes les périodes, aires géographiques et approches méthodologiques sont les bienvenues.
How can wear and tear – both ordinary and unique – cease to be viewed by the museum as a failure that undermines its mission and instead become a meaningful element of memory? Long grounded in the ideal of material permanence, museum conservation is now compelled to rethink its foundations to accommodate variable or perishable works and artifacts, leading to a reconfiguration of documentary practices. Drawing on the concept of “accept-decay” (Muñoz-Viñas, 2024, pp. 269–270) – understood as the acceptance of deterioration – this panel explores how institutions today integrate alteration in different ways as a constitutive dimension of works, a shift that entails profound professional and epistemological reconfigurations. This bilingual session aims to bring together approaches from research, research-creation, and professional circles in art history and museology around concrete case studies. All periods, geographical areas, and methodological approaches are welcome.
Keywords: Musées - conservation - acceptation de l'usure - dégradation - pratiques documentaires
Ashley Snook, OCAD University, a.mm.snook@gmail.com
Co-chair: Stéfy McKnight, Carleton University, stefy.mcknight@carleton.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
In response to Natalie Loveless's provocation, "How to Make Art at the End of the World?", this year's Research-Creation Caucus explores artivism (Zapatistas 1997), craftivism (Greer 2003), resistance movements, and ecological sustainability. How can research-creation contribute to social transformation? How can this interdisciplinary methodology resist societal, cultural, and environmental pressures? This panel examines the forms research-creation can take when aligned with political commitments such as decolonization, social justice, environmental protection, and queer, feminist, and anti-fascist struggles. We invite participants to use this panel as a platform to present and exhibit practices that interrogate the agency of creative research and its real-world impact. Drawing on Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk's framework of creation as, for, and from research, we welcome experimental presentations, poetic gestures, creative forms, performances, participatory actions, and academic talks.
Keywords: Research-Creation, Artivism, Social Transformation, Decolonial & Feminist Practices, Ecological Resistance
Kashfia Arif, Western University, karif@uwo.ca
Co-chair: Bronte Cronsberry, Western University, bcronsbe@uwo.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Whether auditory or visual, silence carries the ghost of materiality within it. An afterglow of both presence rendered invisible and absence reinforced, silence possesses weight, texture, and consequence. This panel examines silence as a material presence in visual culture, not as the mere absence of sound or image, but as a substantive force that shapes, haunts, and exceeds representation. Whether through monochrome paintings (Klein), redacted documents (Holzer), missing photographs (Niro), or constructed voids (anechoic chambers), artists and curators work at thresholds where meaning is withheld or rearticulated. This panel invites papers that explore how visual practices grapple with what resists signification, and what remains when something is withdrawn or denied visibility. We are interested in discussions of both recent artistic production and potential uncoverings of silence throughout art history. Presentations for this panel will primarily be papers although more creative responses are welcome.
Keywords: silence, materiality, art theory, erasure
Molly-Claire Gillett, University of Galway and Trent University, mollyclairegillett@gmail.com
Co-chair: Elaine Cheasley Paterson, Concordia University, Elaine.Paterson@concordia.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Craft pedagogy sits uncomfortably within educational frameworks that prioritize text and value intellectual over embodied knowledge (Clark et al 2020; Marchand 2008). Often place-based (Carden 2022; Paneels 2023), and transmitted within families, between generations, and networks of apprenticeship and mentorship (Sharma 2026; Kay 2018; Paterson 2018; Gillett 2022), it has been co-opted and mediated by educational institutions (Dutta 2006), but can also intervene within them. Recent scholarship highlights learning through making together: Sherry Farrell Racette's 'kitchen table pedagogy,' and the activist potential of workshop structures explored by Fiona Hackney and Amy Twigger Holroyd, among others. How do networks, relationships, and spaces of craft pedagogy intersect with issues of place, reciprocity, relationality, and sustainability? How might craft pedagogies intervene in institutional teaching contexts, to liberatory, decolonizing, and anti-racist ends? We welcome submissions addressing case studies, theories and/or methodologies in craft pedagogy of any time and place, including those with participatory elements.
Keywords: craft, pedagogy, practice-based, embodiment, institutions
Steven Stowell, Concordia University, steven.stowell@concordia.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel welcomes new art-historical research on the early modern period, broadly conceived, and is open to proposals from both emerging and established scholars. In recent years, early modern art history has been enriched by numerous scholarly developments in fields such as: post-colonial and decolonial studies; studies of sexuality, gender, race, and ethnicity; new approaches to materiality, agency, and sensory engagement, to name just a few. These perspectives complement and enhance traditional methods – such as archival study, iconography, and contextual art history – which continue to shed new light on early modern visual culture. This panel aims to provide a forum for researchers in Canada to share work on any topic within early modern art history, including but not limited to those mentioned above.
Keywords: Early Modern; Renaissance; Visual Culture; late-medieval
Aydan Hasanova, Western University, aydan-hasanova@outlook.com
Co-chair: Julian Jason Haladyn, OCAD University, julianhaladyn@ocadu.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
The question of nothingness, whether it truly exists has been a consistent debate in philosophical inquiry. Can there be true nothingness, if its measurement and consideration co-constitute its existence? Whether it be an empty space as void, an absence as vacuum, or the refusal of forms, the concept of 'nothingness' has been traced throughout the practices of innumerable modern and contemporary artists. As Karen Barad in her text "What is the Measure of Nothingness?" describes 'nothingness' is not emptiness, but the plentitude of openness. This panel invites artists, scholars, and curators to submit research-based and creative papers addressing the concept of 'nothingness' in art.
Keywords: nothingness, absence, void, modern art, contemporary art
Erin J. Campbell, University of Victoria, erinjc@uvic.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Vast, mysterious, and diverse, oceans cover seven-tenths of the surface of the “Blue Planet,” account for 99% of the earth’s biosphere, generate half the oxygen we breathe, and absorb almost a third of carbon dioxide we emit. As complex and deeply intriguing ecologies, oceans have inspired artists across time, space, and geographies. This session invites presentations on historical or contemporary artworks, art practices, and curatorial projects that interrogate the multi-faceted relationships with oceans and their myriad forms of underwater life. Presentations may investigate, but are not limited to, the following topics: the ocean as metaphor; as environment; as a fragile ecosystem in the face of climate change, pollution, resource extraction, global trade, oil tankers, geo-politics and war; the importance of oceans in transatlantic slavery and Black studies; oceans and Indigenous thinking about water sovereignty; as the inspiration for formal innovation; as a site of desire, myth, imagination, or fear.
Keywords: Ocean Art Ecologies Biosphere Climate Change
Anton Lee, NSCAD University, alee@nscad.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel asks what it means to take obscurity and opacity seriously as artistic strategies in contemporary photography—not as naïve inversions of transparency, nor as retreats from the political, but as deliberate responses to an impasse: the widespread loss of confidence in revelatory critique and, along with it, photography's claim to truth. We are surrounded by images that uncover and document, yet exposure alone no longer seems to carry the political force it once promised. At the same time, redaction and anonymity have become normalized and weaponized by the everyday operation of state power. In this context, refusing or complicating visibility becomes at once more tempting and more suspect—a tension this panel takes as its starting point. The goal of this panel is not to celebrate darkness or illegibility for their own sake, nor to rehabilitate opacity as automatically resistant. Instead, the panel seeks contributions that approach obscurity critically, interrogating the specific conditions under which withholding or obfuscating the photographic image becomes, or fails to become, a meaningful artistic position. What forms of photographic image-making negotiate the current crisis of truth without either falling into aestheticism or doubling down on an evidentiary logic that has lost its footing? How do new visual technologies—facial recognition, gen-AI imaging, predictive surveillance—reconfigure what is at stake when an artist chooses not to show? Where may strategic withdrawal end and complicit disappearance begin? Rather than resolving these questions in advance, this panel proposes them as live problems.
Keywords: Photography, Obscurity, Opacity, Post-Critique, Visibility
Karla McManus, University of Regina, kmt767@uregina.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel is an open call to all who are members of the photography caucus and who wish to present their current research on the history, theory, and materiality of photography. The panel will be juried by the chair and current caucus members who are not also applying to the panel to present. Ce panel est un appel ouvert à tous les membres du caucus photographie qui souhaitent présenter leurs recherches actuelles sur l'histoire, la théorie et la matérialité de la photographie. Le comité sera composé par le président du et les membres actuels du caucus qui ne présentent aucune demande au séance.
Keywords: history and theory of photographies
Analays Álvarez Hernández, Université de Montréal, analays.alvarez@umontreal.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
In recent years, monuments have come under scrutiny because many continue to celebrate colonialism, racism, and other forms of systemic oppression. Institutional responses have included removal, relocation to museums, the placement of explanatory plaques, and the erection of new monuments. While such measures may be productive, they often leave fundamental questions unresolved: who decides what is remembered in public space, by what forms and materials, for whom, and for how long? If public commemorative art, traditionally a medium for consolidating hegemonic narratives, is expected to foreground a plurality of histories and experiences, then it must undergo a radical transformation. This panel seeks to bring together case studies from around the world that examine how artists or public art initiatives, such as Monument Lab, challenge inherited commemorative subjects, historical forms, public engagement, temporal conventions, and materials. Nous acceptons des propositions en anglais et en français.
Keywords: Public art, Commemoration, Temporality, Materiality, Counter-Practices,
Adrien Crossman, McMaster, crossmaa@mcmaster.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
In 'Living a Feminist Life,' Sara Ahmed refers to citation as the way in which we "acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow." Scholarly citation is systematized through style guides that lay out specific rules and formatting to follow. But what of the many artists who employ citation within their creative practices? Artworks that cite the work of other artists, that are in dialogue with theorists, and who make reference to media such as cinema, television, or internet memes? This session invites artists, researchers, and scholars who are practicing and/or thinking through Queer and feminist forms of citation as a medium of artistic research-creation. Traditional papers and creative approaches to presentations are encouraged.
Keywords: citation, queer, feminist, artistic practice, research-creation
Iraboty Kazi, Western University, ira.kazi@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
The panel will investigate the ways 2SLGBTQI+ artists, activists, and scholars engage with archival materials, spaces, and sites to consult, challenge, intervene in, or respond to dominant (patriarchal and nationalistic) narratives, reclaim erased histories, and imagine alternative futures and worlds. We also seek to explore how communities have adopted and adapted archival methods to create 2SLGBTQI+ archives and how queer, trans, feminist, and decolonial practices have influenced archives and archive-based art. The panel invites papers examining local, national, and/or international case studies that consider how archives constitute the production, survival, reception, and dissemination of queer histories. Topics include but are not limited to: 2SLGBTQI+ archival projects and art; Two-spirit and Indigenous queer histories, methods, and art; BIPOC 2SLGBTQI+ archives, projects, or histories; Digital 2SLGBTQI+ archives, projects, and spaces; Community-led art and archival initiatives; Queering the archive and archiving queer resistance; Queer approaches to public and private histories and memorialization.
Keywords: Queer; archives; activism, art history
Erin Silver, The University of British Columbia, erin.silver@ubc.ca
Co-chair: Adrian Deveau & Robin Alex McDonald, Concordia University (Deveau) & MacEwan University (McDonald), adrian_deveau@yahoo.ca; mcdonaldr45@macewan.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
"Think of the sequence of rooms through which your seductions have taken you, the living rooms, the bedrooms, and how their contents have impressed you, how they have been as sensual and as significant for you as their owners themselves." Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde, 1988. Queer Operatives seeks proposals for a series of "object lessons"—that is, a sequence of presentations, performances, or creative reflections, each centred on a specific object, thing, entity, material, or bit of ephemera related to 2SLGBTQ+ histories within so-called "Canada." Traditional "object lessons" employ objects as teaching tools in order to transform abstract ideas into tangible representations, while colonial processes of commodification have rendered objects isolated from their cosmologies and worldviews. We invite prospective panelists to consider what intangible queer histories, ghostly intimacies, or abstract concepts might unfold from centralizing a given object. For example: what lessons might a specific piece of historical protest ephemera offer contemporary 2SLGBTQ+ activists? What invisibilized histories of 2SLGBTQ+ (emotional, physical, and affective) labour are revealed by tracing an object's life-path? What insights are generated by exploring the tactile and sensorial elements of a given fetish-object? Possible directions, themes, and topics may include: -the queerness or transness of materials; -the ephemera of collective/social activities; -the artist multiple; -the politics and absence in collections and archives; -containers for affect; -object-based history projects (i.e. "Queeriosities" or "Trans History in 99 Objects"); -belongings that relate to communities often marginalized within dominant lesbian and gay politics or art histories; -*we especially encourage submissions that speak to rural or regional queer and trans art histories. Now in Year 3 (of 5), and corresponding to a collaborative 5-year SSHRC Insight project, "Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Canadian Art Histories," this multi-year session seeks to mobilize art historians, artists, and curators from across Canada to: 1) share research on historical and contemporary queer and trans Canadian art; 2) develop strategies for teaching queer and trans Canadian art; and 3) collaboratively brainstorm scholarly and educational outputs for students, scholars, and publics interested in queer and trans Canadian art.
Keywords: 2SLGBTQ+ art and art histories in so-called "Canada"
Muna Dahir, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, muna.dahir@queensu.ca
Co-chair: Milka Njoroge, Simon Fraser University, milka_njoroge@sfu.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison invites us to consider how the "Africanist presence" fosters a writerly imagination that propels the literary works of 19th century American writers. By agitating the dominant signifiers aesthetically encoding Africa/Africanness as silent, other, and shrouded in a "blank darkness" (38), Morrison demonstrates how we might excavate pathways within "master narratives" (51) towards more rebellious forms of literature and criticism. Similarly, M. NourbeSe Philp's A Genealogy of Resistance, draws attention to the necessity of memory by tracing the "essential humanness" (18) of her African genealogy. Together with Morrison, we read Philip's account of her genealogical descent as a practice that enumerates Africans's essential humanness, and the labour of the Africanist presence within cultural memory. Our session welcomes presentations that think through the Africanist presence and its hauntings across cultural frames of history, visual and material culture, theory, criticism, pedagogy, and curatorial and museological practices.
Keywords: Africanist presence, criticism, art history, haunting, methods
Megan Dyck, Alberta University of the Arts, megan.dyck@auarts.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
In the age of digital learning platforms, web-based learning environments, virtual mark-making, and A.I.-generated images, how do visual-kinesthetic learners thrive? Since the pandemic, post-secondary students have become accustomed to engaging with their instructors and peers through online portals: ingesting supplementary course content by watching instructional videos — often in place of observing live in-person technical demonstrations. While these virtual modes of communication are indispensable as secondary mechanisms, they can also leave those who absorb information through tactile engagement feeling disaffected and disconnected. In this panel, presenters discuss specific strategies and tactics for integrating movement, interactivity, and physical materials in the transmission of their course content as studio art educators. Championing the residue of materials, the phenomenology of perception, and the explorative nature of learning by doing, this panel invites papers from educators who specialize in all realms of studio art education: from pictorial to performative pedagogical specializations, and anywhere in between.
Keywords: In-person learning, studio teaching, tactile pedagogies
Martha Langford, Distinguished Professor Emeriti, Concordia University, marthalangford@sympatico.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
The French Ministère de la culture, in association with a scientific committee of scholars, curators, and artists, has officially designated 2026/2027 as the Bicentennial of Photography, marking the moment that Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in preserving the fleeting image formed by a camera obscura on a tin plate. A year of celebration includes exhibitions, publications, conferences, and commissions that mark the invention, while continuing to probe the nature of the medium, the effect and affect of practice and preservation, and its relevance today. Let us play. This session invites short papers, demonstrations, or performances reflecting on an image (mental or material) that flashed up before the presenter, and continues to do so, as an inspiration or counter-inspiration for their work. The image need not come from any artistic canon or scientific discovery, though it can. Perhaps you took such an image; perhaps you recognized it in an album, an archive or a flea market; perhaps it never existed (ekphrasis welcome!). This exercise need not be confessional or sentimental, though passion, from crazy love to righteous anger, is to be expected. In the interdisciplinary spirit of photography studies and the intermediation of contemporary art, and with the current upsurge in interest in the archival practices, possibilities are limitless. No geographical or temporal boundaries could or should be imposed. The session will be an opportunity to workshop ideas. Presentations will be short – 5 to 10 minutes maximum. Participants will be testing the waters for the contents of a special issue or book that will reveal the depth and audacity of current work on/in photography in Canada and in photography studies’ wider networks.
Keywords: photography; ontology; memory; imagination
Amanda Cachia, Professor of Practice in Museum Studies, Arizona State University, amandalouisecachia@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel brings together thinkers interested in the critical role of access as a central methodology in art history, performance, communication studies and research-creation. Inspired by research clusters such as Access in the Making (AIM) at Concordia University, Bodies of Work at the University of Illinois Chicago, the Dancing Disability Lab at UCLA, and the Rethinking Art History through Disability group at the University of Zurich, the session examines how access is collectively produced through interdisciplinary collaboration. These initiatives treat access not as a passive, retrofitted accommodation but as an ongoing, creative process that shapes knowledge production, artistic practice, and institutional critique. By foregrounding disability-led frameworks, participants will explore how artists, access workers and scholars generate new modes of making, sensing, and engaging with art across diverse contexts. The panel ultimately asks how such collaborative formations transform the conditions under which disability art is studied, produced, and encountered, advancing access as both a critical and generative force.
Keywords: Access as Methodology, Disability-Led Frameworks, Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Artistic Knowledge Production, Inclusive Creative Practices
Stephanie Springgay, McMaster University, springgs@mcmaster.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Care, reparative justice, and refusal have become increasingly central to contemporary arts practices in response to economic, social, and environmental precarity (Zhang, 2022). Feminist, Indigenous, disability, queer and trans care scholarship emphasizes radical relationality, collectivity, and vulnerability (Malatino, 2020), while being accountable to the ways in which care and repair have been commodified within settler states/institutions. Further, Indigenous and Black scholars argue that when crises are framed as unprecedented and urgent, care as a response reinforces colonial epistemologies (Whyte, 2021). Consequently, artists, curators, and scholars are turning to complex iterations of dis/repair and refusal that are frictionally imbricated in trauma, grief and 'precarious joys' (Fontaine & Lopez, 2024) to confront/refuse an epistemology of crises, and to re-story other possible worlds and futures. This panel considers what contemporary art and scholarship can offer from these frameworks and is open to conventional academic papers, research-creation, performances and other alternative methods.
Keywords: care, disrepair, refusal, epistemologies of crises
Kelann Currie-Williams, Concordia University, kelann.cw12@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
In its inception, still photography was positioned as incompatible with motion and movement. The separation made between moving images and still images further concretized the cinematic and the photographic as distinctive forms. However, as we have seen through still image films and freeze frames in cinema and the technique of chronophotography and motion blurs in photography, “the two media ceaselessly crossed the boundary and blend these categories” of stillness and movement (Guido and Lugon 2012). Drawing on Tina M. Campt’s concept of still-moving-images, this panel examines photographic and cinematic practices that produce works which "never arrive at a true state of stillness" (Campt 2017) such as Sandra Brewster's Blur series, where the blurring is not only indicative of motion but also the kind of movement that defines migration and continuous diasporic identity formation. How might we challenge the "motion/stillness dichotomy" (Kimiagari 2022) by attending to work that employs both in differing ways and to differing ends. This panel welcomes presentations from theorists, historians, artists, and curators working across the fields of visual culture studies and film studies who consider the interplay of stillness and motion within photography and cinema.
Keywords: photography, film, visual culture, motion, stillness, cinema
Toleen Touq, Independent curator, toleen.touq@gmail.com
Panel Session | Session de panel
This panel examines how artistic and curatorial methodologies function as technologies that produce, structure, and redistribute temporal experience. Bringing together artists, curators, and scholars, it attends to practices such as durational performance, repetition and rehearsal, hauntological return, and archival engagement as modes of working that reconfigure rhythms of attention and inhabitation. Rather than treating time as an external framework, the panel considers how it is materially enacted through artistic processes and exhibitionary forms. In particular, it asks how such methodologies unsettle dominant temporal regimes and linear orderings of time, opening conditions in which past, present, and future are folded, suspended, or made to coexist. How do artworks and exhibitions reorganize temporal perception beyond the logics of efficiency, immediacy, and productivity that structure contemporary life? What forms of duration and attention emerge within exhibitionary space when time is engaged as medium, method, and infrastructure? In foregrounding these questions, the panel advances a critical reorientation of how art is practiced, exhibited, and encountered in the present.
Keywords: Chronopolitics; Temporality; Curatorial practice; Exhibition studies; Artistic methodology
Hanss Lujan Torres, Research Coordinator, Indigenous Futures Research Centre, Concordia University, hansslujan@gmail.com
Co-chair: Lako'tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers,
Panel Session | Session de panel
Ecological theories and techno-scientific imaginaries maintain a division between "nature" and "technology," positioning the former as an inert resource and the latter as the domain of human innovation. Rooted in colonial logics, this division obscures the material continuities binding bodies, infrastructures, and environments: the minerals that compose human life are the same that circulate through circuits, satellites, and digital devices. To engage technology, then, is to engage transformed land. Drawing from Indigenous epistemologies that understand technics as relational, place-based, and sustained through reciprocity, technology here exceeds industrialization and encompasses longstanding systems of knowledge production, navigation, and ecological attunement. Recognizing that we are composed of and inseparable from the earth, this panel invites contributions from artists, curators, and scholars working in and around media art to examine how technology and digital space can be reframed as sites of Indigenous presence, continuity, and intervention, foregrounding Indigenous techno-futurities as ongoing, materially grounded practices.
Keywords: Indigenous Art, Technologies, Land-based practices, Media Art, Sustainability
Carolyn Butler Palmer, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Victoria, cbpalmer@uvic.ca
Roundtable | Table ronde
University art galleries and related art spaces in Canadian universities are being reshaped by austerity, administrative restructuring, and uneven commitments to equity, access, and public accountability. Long understood as sites of exhibition, pedagogy, research-creation, and community engagement, they are increasingly asked to justify their value while operating with diminished resources and shifting institutional mandates. At the same time, they remain important spaces for debates around Indigenization, anti-racism, cultural labour, allyship, and relations with surrounding communities. This roundtable asks how students, faculty, staff, artists, curators, and community partners are redefining the role of university galleries and art collections today. Bringing together perspectives from across Canada, the session will consider what university art spaces can still do, for whom, and under what conditions. It aims to identify emerging strategies, and possibilities for sustaining these spaces as critical sites of cultural production, learning, and public life.
Keywords: Galleries, Public, Value, Equity, Resources
Soheila Esfahani, Western University, skolahd@uwo.ca
Co-chair: Behnaz Fatemi, Western University, bfatemij@uwo.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
In the face of urgent political matters such as xenophobia and racism, it is crutial to foreground how the work of diasporic artists contributes to EDIDA (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Decolonization, Anti-racism) issues in Canadian society beyond a tokenistic approach of celebrating "cultural diversity" in Canada. This session intends to tackle this question by proposing that the work of culturally diverse artists creates the "third space of enunciation" as a generative site of in-betweenness where difference is contested and hybrid identities are constructed (Bhabha 1994). This session aims to bring together a panel of artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners to mobilizes diasporic artistic practices as a material site of negotiation and as situated, processual forms of knowledge production, in which the notion of the third space offers the viewer the opportunity to join the dialogue on displacement and cultural negotiation.
Keywords: cultural translation, diaspora, contemporary art, displacement, third space
Kirsty Robertson, Western University, kirsty.robertson@uwo.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Toxic friend, toxic enemy, toxicant, (in)toxicated. This panel covers it all and is particularly concerned with the manner in which the extraction of natural resources upholds the museum/art world: supplying funding for museums; creating art materials and exhibition infrastructure; and delivering the energy required for climate control to preserve artworks and artefacts. It is also concerned with the afterlives of those relationships. The profound inequities that accompany extractivism and climate emergency flow through museums. Additionally, museums are often tasked with storing and caring for the potentially toxic and hazardous remnants of extraction, occasionally in the form of off-gassing or chemically laden material heritage. What responses are possible? This panel encourages presentations that consider curatorial approaches, exhibition design, collections management, and art-making strategies that engage with extractivism or climate emergency; the breakdown of fossil-fuel-based materials in museum collections; toxic collections (however that is defined); and/or more sustainable or regenerative options for the sector.
Keywords: museum, extraction, sustainability, collections
Davin Luce, McGill University, davin.luce@mail.mcgill.ca
Co-chair: Jeehee Hong, McGill University, jeehee.hong@mcgill.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
The concept of "unofficial" in art and architecture defines itself against mainstream artistic modes, cultural perceptions, and knowledge production. Examinations of unorthodox images offer opportunities not only to broaden our perspective on accepted ways of thinking and creating but also to reveal the presence and voices of those outside the sociocultural hegemony. Focused on the porous boundaries between official genres and mediums in the material world, which have largely escaped our current understanding of classical Chinese art, this panel aims to explore what defined certain art as official or unofficial, and what their relationship can reveal about the discursive development of art in premodern China. We invite submissions on topics related to premodern Chinese art history, including but not limited to the following: • Notions of the 'strange' • Art and architecture from 'frontier zones' • Amateurism (intentional and otherwise) • The 'Other' (i.e., social, cultural, etc.) in art and architecture
Keywords: Chinese art; 'Unofficial' art and architecture; unorthodox images; amateurism; the 'Other' in art and architecture
Sandy Saad-Smith, Curator, Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto, Scarborough, sandy.saad@utoronto.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, a poetry book by Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, positions Palestine as paradise, poignantly reimagined through memory from Darwish's position in exile. By foregrounding poetic imagination as a method, this session will examine how artists and scholars engage with land as a site of memory shaped by family histories, oral storytelling, and embodied knowledges. Moving beyond fixed notions of landscape, it considers how concepts of land are constructed through layered narratives— the fragments, remembrances, and reimaginings across time and space. Panelists are invited to explore practices that draw on speculative approaches to construct imagined geographies, reflecting experiences of migration, displacement, colonial intervention, and environmental change. This session asks: how do we remember lands we no longer inhabit? How can artistic and scholarly practices reconfigure relationships to place under conditions of transformation? How do the stories we are told about the lands we, or our ancestors inhabited mediate our experience of the lands we have settled on?
Keywords: Land, Imagination, Displacement, Speculative
Sandra Huber, Concordia University, sandra.huber@concordia.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This session invites papers that explore mischievous, unruly, and "villainous" strategies in aesthetics, material culture, and politics. Inspired by figures such as the feminist killjoy, the trickster, the hysteric, the parasite, and other bad actors, we beckon methodologies, epistemologies, and pedagogies that refuse legibility, coherence, and respectability. From activist interventions to curatorial strategies, digital practices, and theoretical provocations, this session is interested in methods that disrupt, irritate, seduce, or misbehave. Against a backdrop of intensifying fascism, environmental collapse, and extractivist heteropatriarchy, how might artists, scholars, and educators cultivate risky, excessive, or ethically ambivalent modes of relation? What does it mean to work with rather than against discomfort, contradiction, and complicity? This session calls for villainy as method and encourages formats that are performative, speculative, scrappy, or practice-based.
Keywords: villainy, misbehaving aesthetics, feminist killjoy, epistemic disobededience, refusal
Emily Cadger, University of British Columbia, ecadger@student.ubc.ca
Panel Session | Session de panel
This session will explore the concept of "whimsy" in art history and how the consideration of "playful," "fanciful," or "eccentric" subjects in visual culture are not apolitical but rather quite discerning to matters of class, gender, imperialism, political, environmental, and other related discourses. Commonly associated with "unserious" or radical movements from the 1700s onward, whimsical or fantastical subject matter is often relegated to the sidelines of critical discourse, yet the imaginative space often allows for more experimentation with radical or new ideas. For the purposes of this panel "whimsy" can function in a variety of ways, emerging overtly or subtly in artists' work or as the premise for developed movements and styles. Responses to industrial modernity, Enlightenment ideals, changing social or political norms, and the emergence of work related to childhood and play are all welcome. Papers by graduate and early career scholars that deal with this theme are highly encouraged. While originally conceived as a 19th century panel, subjects outside of this time-frame are welcome.
Keywords: Interdisciplinary, Fantastic, 19th century, Global, Visual Culture
Nikki Georgopulos, University of British Columbia, nikki.georgopulos@ubc.ca
Co-chair: Juliet Bellow, American University, bellow@american.edu
Panel Session | Session de panel
Nineteenth-century art of Europe and North America was a primary focus for the first wave of feminist art-historical interventions in the 1970s and 80s. Since that time, those pioneering investigations of the struggles and accomplishments of women artists, and of the gendered conventions of visual culture, have both radically changed the discipline of art history and been critiqued for their gaps, limitations, and erasures. This panel invites papers that employ feminist approaches to the long nineteenth century on a global scale. We welcome papers that mobilize Black, trans, queer, anti-/decolonial, or Global South feminisms to rethink or move beyond earlier approaches to gender and its many intersections in that period. Of particular interest are papers that relate the artistic sphere to feminist or other liberation movements that emerged during the long nineteenth century.
Keywords: feminism, nineteenth century, queer, trans studies