Presenter: Christine Litz, Director of Museum für Neue Kunst (Museum for New Art) in Freiburg, Germany 
Date and Location: Fr. 21st of April- 6 pm ZHdK 6.K04 

documenta is considered one the most significant and most intensely observed exhibition of contemporary art world-wide. This exhibition of international contemporary art is situated in Kassel, Germany and takes place every five years. Unlike the most large scale exhibitions on a recurring rhythm each documenta starts from scratch. Each artistic director can and have to arrange the organizational structure which respectively leverages the specific ideas and priorities. This freedom which is at the same time an obligation advances documenta’s throughgoing approach. A very down-to-earth report on the production of dOCUMENTA (13).
 
Since 2012 Christine Litz is director of Museum für Neue Kunst (Museum for New Art) in Freiburg, Germany, a museum of modern and contemporary art. She studied Art History, German Language and Literature, and Education in Cologne and Bochum, where she completed her PhD in 2002 titled “It is unsubstantial. On Textuatilty in the Visual Arts in the 20th Century”.

Immediately prior to her engagement in Freiburg, she worked from 2009 to 2012 as head of project management at the dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, and helped to realize the artistic contributions of the 193 invited international artists.
 
From 2007 to 2009 she was a visual arts expert in the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony. She became internationally known as the project manager of sculptur projects münster 07, where she worked from 2005 to 2007 and realized projects of Suchan Kinoshita, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Mark Wallinger, Rosemarie Trockel, Manfred Pernice, Annette Wehrmann and Mike Kelley amongst others. At the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Litz was responsible for a weekly film- and lecture series from 1999 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2005 she was assistant to Director Kasper König at the Museum Ludwig. For the Museum Ludwig she curated exhibitions with Bruce Nauman, Mauricio Cattelan, Heike Beyer, and Lily van der Stokker. She initiated the “film-bar” together with Peter Allmann and developed the educational programs “Art: Dialogues” and “Young Night.”
 ​

​Location Info: CAS/ MAS Postgraduate Programme in Curating ZHdK
Centre Further Education
Toni-Areal, Pfingstweidstrasse 96
Postfach, CH-8031 Zürich
8005 Zürich
Switzerland
www.curating.org

Source: On-Curating.org

Organized by the Iperion CH French node, the 2nd Iperion CH Doctoral Summer School (FID2S) will provide advanced lectures focused on research activities dedicated to the development of innovative instruments and diagnostic strategies to enhance both scientific investigation and conservation strategies of cultural heritage materials.

The lectures will be an opportunity to share information with international experts in the field of Heritage Science about recent advances regarding analysis performed with new portable techniques, large-scale facilities like neutron and synchrotron facilities or ion accelerators and the development of conservation protocols for museum collections or historical monuments.

The lectures are designed to offer the most in a very concentrated form by providing participants the opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas with scientific researchers and professional staff in the field of cultural heritage. It is also a valuable opportunity to network with participants from other countries and institutions.

For more information, the programme, and the registration form, click: HERE

Sources: IPERION CH | C2RMF

First Circular: Call for Papers

As part of the European network IPERION CH, a two-day conference will be held at The British Museum on 9-10 November 2017.

The aim of the conference is to explore the use of different 3D imaging methods and their wide-ranging applications in cultural heritage. Areas which will be covered include the visualization of objects and areas with optical techniques, X-ray CT scanning, the role of 3D imaging in the restoration of artifacts and low-cost 3D scanning techniques. The conference will also look towards the future of 3D imaging, and the potential of emerging technologies to impact the field of cultural heritage research.

At this stage we invite the submission of titles and abstracts of up to 500 words for presentations for consideration by the organising committee, using the form that can be downloaded from the conference website www.3dimaginginculturalheritage.org. The completed form should be emailed to :
abstracts@3dimaginginculturalheritage.org

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st June 2017. Conference places may be limited, so early registration is recommended. Those who express an interest in response to this announcement, or submit an abstract, will be notified when registration opens.

Expressions of Interest

To be added to the mailing list and express your interest in attending the 3D Imaging in Cultural Heritage conference, please email your full contact details to:

info@3dimaginginculturalheritage.org 

Using the subject line ‘Expression of interest'. Alternatively, further details of the conference programme, registration procedure and further practical information will be made available in due course from the website, www.3dimaginginculturalheritage.org.


For more information, please contact info@3dimaginginculturalheritage.org

Source: Integrated Platform for European Research Infrastructure on Cultural Heritage (IPERION CH)

Conference on ‚Tempera painting between 1800 and 1950. Experiments and innovations from the Nazarene movement to abstract art‘

Hosted by the Doerner Institut and funded by VolkswagenStiftung and the EU project H2020 IPERION CH

The conference aims to explore the revival of tempera painting between 1800 and 1950 from the perspectives of art history, technical art history, conservation and material analysis. In the 19th century, the defining feature of tempera paints was their water-miscibility – a characteristic that clearly separated them from oil paints. In the first half of the 20th century, this use of the term was extended by some scholars and artists to every mixture of aqueous and non-aqueous binding media.

The renewed interest in tempera paints in the 19th century was, in part, due to a growing dissatisfaction with oil paints, which were felt to have too many drawbacks, such as insufficient luminosity of colour, slowness in drying and a tendency to crack, wrinkle and darken as they aged. Tempera, revered as part of the lost technique of the ‘Old Masters’, seemed a failsafe means with which to address the problems at hand. The study and ‘rediscovery’ of historic tempera systems took various forms: scholarship applied to the ancient texts on painting, such as Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte , direct examination of the paintings of antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well as material analysis and characterisation.

These findings influenced artists’ practice and their choices of binding media: They experimented with a growing number of historically oriented and at the same time innovative tempera formulations. These could contain any of the following ingredients, often in complex combinations: egg, animal glue, plant gums, casein, waxes, soaps, milk, resins, glycerine and even drying oils.

These paints were used both in Europe and America in manifold ways and with various motivations: At the beginning of the 19th century mural painters of the German Nazarene movement used tempera, later followed by those of the Wilhelmine era and by the French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. From c. 1850 onwards, tempera paints were employed in easel painting by many artists of a wide variety of schools (e.g. Academism, Symbolism, Historicism, Expressionism, New Realism, Surrealism, Futurism), including Arnold Böcklin, Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Mueller, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Giorgio de Chirico and Gino Severini. However, they were also used for polychromy of sculpture, miniature painting on paper, scene painting and for room decoration.

​To better understand the tempera revival and its consequences for 19th and 20th-century art, the conference aims to create an interdisciplinary platform for knowledge exchange. A program of lectures and poster presentations will be complemented by practical workshops on tempera painting based on historic recipes as well as guided tours to Munich galleries, where we will explore the visual effects of tempera paints in 19th and early 20th-century works of art

The conference will focus on the following topics:

​1. The bigger picture: Exploring the cultural historical context of the 19th and early 20th century’s interest in painting techniques of the past.
- developments in nineteenth and twentieth-century art theory (e.g. “material-oriented aesthetics”) and discussion of their possible interactions with the interest in tempera painting
- tempera painting as an alternative trajectory to the dominant history of oil painting
- the various impacts of industrialization on artists’ materials, ideas and working processes in relation to the interest in painting techniques of the past
- interactions between tempera painting techniques with other contemporaneous technologies (e.g. photography, printing processes, newly introduced machines for paint application such as airbrush etc.)
2. A closer look at the sources: terminology and interpretation of 19th and early 20th-century sources on tempera painting.
- art-technical sources on tempera painting techniques
- problems of terminology and language: meaning and interchangeability of the terms ‘tempera’, ‘Leimfarbe’, ‘Wasserfarbe’, ‘watercolor’, ‘distemper’, ‘peinture a la colle’, ‘détrempe’, ‘tempera grassa’ etc. in 19th and 20th-century sources
3. In the studio: the practice of tempera painting between 1800 and 1950 and possible implications for conservation decisions.
- the manifold ways of working in tempera on different supports, for painting sculpture, for mural, scene and decorative painting in European countries and in North and South America
- artists’ individual motivations, their definition(s) of the term ‘tempera’, their sources and materials and their role models
- relations between individual painting techniques or working processes and the artistic content
4. A closer look at the material: Methods for the scientific investigation of complex binder mixtures and materials in multilayered works of art. Progress and challenges in analysis and interpretation of analytical results.
We invite art historians, technical art historians, conservators, and conservation and academic scientists to submit abstracts in English, of maximum 500 words, for lectures or posters. They must contain the title, name(s) of author(s) and indicate the kind of contribution intended (lecture or poster). All contributions will be held in English. Help for translations of lecture manuscripts can be provided on request. Please send the abstracts together with a short biography (max 100 words) by 31 May 2017 to tempera @doernerinstitut.de. We intend to publish all lectures and posters as postprints.
We are happy to support young researchers with travel grants (max. 350€ each). Their applications should contain the abovementioned abstract, the short biography and a short description of the individual scientific or scholarly interest (the latter max. 100 words).

For further information please go to: Doerner Institut  

Sources: Art Hist List Serv | Doerner Institut

Announcing the 2017 Jane Fortune Conference, organized by The Medici Archive Project:
"A Legacy of Ladies: Women Artists and Patrons at the Late Medici Court
When: Friday, 21 April 2017 10am-5:30pm
Where: The Medici Archive, Palazzo Alberti, via de' Benci, 10 Firenze
Who: open to all and free of charge

The 2017 Jane Fortune Conference examines the deep imprint that women left on the artistic ferment of Baroque Florence, beginning under the regency of Archduchess Maria Maddalena of Austria and continuing through the last years of Electress Palatine. To do so, it will explore the cultural agency of both female patrons at the Medici court and the women artists who flourished there, from the mid seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century.

Only in recent years has attention been given to the complex web of female social patterns at the late Medici court. Vittoria della Rovere has been acknowledged as a key patron, yet her successors and their own patronage patterns have yet to be fully explored. The physical spaces used by noble women and their female households throughout Europe are essential to this study. Here, both heraldry and the displays of art collections helped to demarcate these spaces.

Thanks to their talents, some low-born women were given a degree of access to female courts. Exacting standards of moral conduct were expected of them, mitigating against their social station. Juxtaposing women painters with the irreproachable embroiders and lacemakers and the potentially licentious singers and actresses opens a discussion about the social and behavioral aspects of female creativity in early modern Florence.

10:00 Introductory Remarks

10:15 Adelina Modesti
Keynote Address: "Women Artists at the Medici Court of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere (1622-1694): Painters, Pastellists, Lacemakers, and Embroiderers"

11:15 Ilaria Hoppe
"Uno spazio di potere femminile: Villa del Poggio Imperiale, residenza di Maria Maddalena d’Austria"

11:40 Silvia Benassai
"‘Io ho grande ardire, e non temo niente’: Violante Beatrice di Baviera, mecenate nella Toscana degli ultimi Medici"

12:05 Laura Windisch
"Between Power and Privacy: Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici’s Patronage at Villa La Quiete"

12:30 Laura Cirri
"Le Granduchesse di Toscana: la loro rappresentazione attraverso l’araldica"

14:45 Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato
"Agnese Dolci: New Attributions"

15:10 Sheila Barker
"Suor Teresa Vitelli’s Natural History Paintings: Women Artists and the Scientific Culture of the Early Enlightenment"

15:35 Julie James
"A Nun Artist at the Medici Court: The Religious Pastel Works of Suor Teresa Vitelli"

16:15 Amy Fredrickson
"Giovanna Fratellini: Motives, Patronage, and Success within the Medici Court System"

16:40 Poiret Masse
"Violante Siries Cerroti at the Medici Court, ca. 1724-1737"

​17:05 Francesca Fantappiè:
"Donne in carriera: attrici, cantanti, musiciste alla corte medicea"

​Moderators: Alessio Assonitis, Elisa Acanfora, Susanna Cecilia Berger, and Catherine Turrill Lupi
Organizers: Sheila Barker, Amy Fredrickson, and Julie James

Sources: Art Hist List Serv | The Medici Archive Project

Liverpool: 19-20 May 2017
To book tickets, go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/thomas-rickmans-liverpool-tickets-32952770624
Registration deadline: May 12, 2017
http://www.thomasrickman.org/content/?page_id=21

2017 marks the bicentenary of the printing (in Liverpool) of Thomas Rickman’s ground-breaking book An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture. This event is being celebrated by exhibitions at Liverpool’s Central Library and the University of Liverpool’s Archives and Special Collections, and with walks and talks. To coincide with these events,  a two-day conference will be held in association with the University of Liverpool’s Eighteenth-Century Worlds Research Centre.

​The aim of the conference is to critically evaluate Rickman’s work and its influence in the context of the town where he lived and worked, where he discovered architecture and underwent the transformation from insurance clerk to professional architect. The conference is centred upon Rickman but seeks to encourage a deeper understanding of Liverpool, and its social and architectural environment during the period of his residence (1808-c.1821). Contemporary Liverpool was the ideal setting for a young man interested in buildings and eager for self-improvement: he arrived soon after the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807) which transformed Liverpool’s international trade and was an early member of the revived Literary and Philosophical Society (1812) where he honed his skills as a lecturer on architectural topics. He became involved with local building projects, notably the constructionally-innovative churches of local ironmaster John Cragg and built up a network of fellow enthusiasts and potential clients.

PROGRAMME

​Day 1: Friday 19 May 2017

In the morning delegates can take the opportunity to visit the Rickman exhibition in the Special Collections area of the Sydney Jones Library.

12.45: Registration

​13.00-14.00: Keynote – Megan Aldrich: ‘Thomas Rickman (1776-1841): a Nonconformist Life in Architecture’

Session 1: Merchants and Shops in Liverpool c.1800

14.00-14.20: Sheryllynne Haggerty – ‘Liverpool’s Trade and Traders in the Atlantic World’

14.20-14.40: Jon Stobart – ‘Geographies of shopping and leisure in Georgian Liverpool’

14.40-14.50: Questions

14.50-15.05: Break

Session 2: Liverpool – Space, Place and Culture

15.05-15.25: Katy Layton-Jones –  ‘Rickman in Context: the changing landscape of Rickman’s England’

15.25-15.45: Hugh Hollinghurst – ‘Rickman, St Luke’s Church and the John Fosters, Senior and Junior’

​15.45-16.05: David Brazendale/Mark Towsey –  ‘ “To the convenience of men of business as well as men of leisure”: Reading, Community and Library Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain’

16.05-16.15: Questions

16.15-16.45: Walk to the Liverpool Athenaeum (directions will be provided)

16.45-17.30: Tea and exhibition at the Athenaeum

17.30-18.30: Keynote 2 – Joseph Sharples – ‘Improvement and embellishment united’: The Architectural Scene in Thomas Rickman’s Liverpool

After the paper there will be an opportunity to return to the University to view the Rickman exhibition in Special Collections or to participate in ‘Light Night’ in Liverpool (including a self-guided Rickman walk).

Day 2: Saturday 20 May 2017

9.45: Registration

10.00-11.00: Keynote 3 – Rosemary Sweet: ‘Thomas Rickman – A Modern Antiquary’

11.00-11.15: Coffee

Session 3: Contemporary Writings

11.15-11.35: Peter Lindfield – ‘Gothic Prevision: William Porden’s Architectural Awareness’

11.35-11.55: Stephen Clarke – ‘Hints to some Churchwardens and the Pleasures of Churchwardens’ Gothic’

11.55-12.05: Questions

​Session 4: Rickman’s Readers

12.05-12.25: Alex Buchanan – ‘Attempting to Discriminate: Thomas Rickman’s Readers’

12.25-12.45: Will Ashworth – title t.b.c.

12.45-13.05: Geoff Brandwood – ‘Lancaster to Lyons: Edmund Sharpe, Thomas Rickman and Travellers’ Tales’

13.05-13.15: Questions

13.15-14.00: Lunch

Session 5: Religious Architecture

14.00-14.20: Johanna Roethe – ‘Quaker Meeting Houses and their Architects’

14.20-14.40: Bill Walker – ‘ “Meeting Our Waterloos”. The Lancashire Commissioners’ Churches’

14.40-15.00: Christopher Webster – ‘Northern Church Building c.1810-20: An Important Episode in the Gothic Revival’

15.00-15.10: Questions

15.10-15.25: Tea

Session 6: Rickman’s Architecture

15.25-15.45: Mark Baker – ‘Thomas Rickman in Wales: Gwrych Castle and the creation of a gothick fantasy’

15.45-16.05: Frank Salmon – ‘Following “as nearly as may be”: Rickman’s New Court at St John’s College, Cambridge’

16.05-16.15: Questions

​16.15-17.15: Keynote 4 – Rosemary Hill: ‘Styles and Principles – Rickman, Pugin and the Gothic Revival’

We are also delighted to announce that on Sunday 21 May, delegates can visit Gwrych Castle for a tour of Rickman’s romantic design. This has been facilitated by the Gwrych Trust and the £10 entrance fee will support ongoing restoration work.

Source:H-Net Art Hist List Serv

Since its opening in 1830, Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum has been located in Berlin's highly symbolic centre, defined by the royal City Palace, Cathedral and Armory. While the museum's performative architecture responds to its location, the current curatorial concept and display no longer reflect the original museological significance of the building.

Taking Berlin's Altes Museum as a case study, the conference seeks to reconsider the museum's transhistorical political role and ask how the museum might critically respond to contemporary political controversies about the reconstruction of a former royal/imperial City Palace considered to house the non-European Ethnological Museum and Asian Art Museum.

The conference will discuss how museums might translate their museological legacy into the 21st century and retain socio-political relevance in an enforced dialogue with architectural symbols of political as well as corporate power in today's urban spaces.

Programme

​Thursday 11 May 2017
TU Berlin, Institute for Art History, Strasse des 17. Juni 150/152, lecture hall A 151

18:00 Welcome Bénédicte Savoy, TU Berlin

18:15 Museums, Power, Knowledge Tony Bennett, Western Sydney University

19:00 Reception

Friday 12 May 2017 TU Berlin, University main building, Strasse des 17. Juni 135, lecture room H 3005

10:00 Welcome and Introduction
Annette Loeseke and Andrea Meyer

10:15 From Schloss to 'Schloss': Whose museums?
Nikolaus Bernau, Architecture and museum historian, journalist, Berlin

10:45 Personal Development as Political Principle for the Berlin Museums: Museum for All?
Elsa van Wezel, Institut für Museumsforschung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

11:15 Museum Architecture and Location: The Legacy of Berlin's Altes Museum
Annette Loeseke, New York University Berlin

​12:00 Lunch break

13:30 Museum Architecture as "Truth Spot"? Materials and Memories
Paul Jones, University of Liverpool

14:00 Design for Creative Lives
Suzanne MacLeod, University of Leicester, School of Museum Studies

14:30 Coffee break

15:00 Exhibiting the Museum. Presenting the History of Berlin's Museum Island
Tom Duncan, Duncan McCauley, Berlin

15:30 Panel-Discussion: Rethinking Museums Politically
Nikolaus Bernau, Tom Duncan, Paul Jones, Suzanne MacLeod, Elsa van Wezel
Moderated by Annette Loeseke and Andrea Meyer

Conference language is English.
Participation is free. No registration required.

Convenors:
Dr Annette Loeseke, New York University Berlin
Dr Andrea Meyer, Technische Universität Berlin
​Facebook

 Sources: H-Net ART HIST List Serv | Institut für Kunstwissenschaft und Historische Urbanistik

During the late 1990s, the structure of the Venice Biennale underwent a dramatic overhaul, expanding into the Arsenale buildings that once housed the city’s shipyards and armouries. Its interconnecting rooms provide a counterpoint to the Giardini’s national pavilions, and the greater curatorial fluidity that this enables has been further extended through the introduction of collateral pavilions and events. These now proliferate throughout the Biennale, offering sites through which artists and curators can explore the charged issues of transnationalism, resurgent nationalism, and globalization. As was particularly evident in Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 Biennale, these interventions can resonate strongly with both Venice’s long history of maritime trading, and the current challenges it faces as a city inhabited primarily by tourists, in a continent struggling to respond coherently to the on-going refugee crisis, with an ecology that has been tangibly affected by climate change. While critics rightly continue to challenge the out-dated nature of the Biennale’s underlying structures, its vast expenditure and excess, and its imbrication in commercial markets, it is now an expanded and contested field of activity, in which the politics of representation and display are constant and highly charged.

The connectivity represented by the collateral events could be said to reflect increasing cultural homogenization, yet this programming might equally demonstrate the rise of diversity and a resurgence of interest in local identities. In Autumn 2001, the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) and its partner, the British Council, announced plans to exhibit new work from Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Scotland used the possibilities provided by the concept of the collateral pavilion and event programme to differentiate its cultural status from that of Great Britain. This example encapsulates cultural and artistic shifts around the way difference might be mobilized to gain visibility, as well as the intense debates about the status of national and cultural identities in an era of globalization. Equally, the logistical arrangement of these events and pavilions – as well as their very designation as ‘collateral’ – indicates the endurance of power imbalances and global inequalities both in the art world and wider culture.

Drawing on the rich history of the Venice Biennale, together with recent art historical interventions into issues such as globalization, migration, biennial and triennial culture, the status of ‘the contemporary’, and the relationship between art and politics, we invite papers that explore the ramifications of collateral pavilions and events in Venice. Possible topics for papers include but are by no means limited to:

• Relations between national pavilions and collateral events
• Competing politics of multiple curatorial platforms
• Issues of inclusion and representation at the Biennale, especially in relation to previously non-participating countries such as Haiti (2011), Angola (2013), and the Maldives (2013).
• Curating transnationalism
• Tensions between the local and the global
• The resurgence of nationalism and understandings of ‘the nation’
• Politics of space and place
• The role of new media and digital technologies in traversing borders
• Economics and the art market
• Strategies of disruption vs. co-option.

Please send proposals of maximum 300 words for papers of 20 minutes, together with a short biography of maximum 100 words to Dr Karen Brown (Director, Museums, Galleries and Collections Institute, School of Art History) at keb23@st-andrews.ac.uk by 24 April 2017.

​The Politics of Display: Collateral Events and Pavilions at the Venice Biennale is organised by Dr Karen Brown, Kate Keohane, and Dr Catherine Spencer as part of the EU-LAC-MUSEUMS project, run by the Museums, Galleries and Collections Institute. It is supported by the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 693669

Sources: H-Net ART HIST List Serv | Art Market Studies