Contemporary artistic practices have prompted a reconsideration of boundaries between the roles of artists and institutional staff, and between processes of art production, exhibition, and preservation. This conference will provide a forum for professionals, researchers, and students working across different disciplines to discuss urgent questions regarding artwork identity, permanence and impermanence, reproducibility and replication, and the role of the artist and the institution in constructing and maintaining memory. It will explore these questions and other areas where artistic practice, curatorial practice, and conservation decision-making intersect through themes of materiality, memory and loss.

Programme

Wednesday 28th June

5.00pm – 6.30pm

  • Karla Black (artist): Keynote Lecture – Title TBC

Thursday 29th June

9.00am – 9.30am Registration

9.30am – 11.00am

  • Tiziana Caianiello (Zero Foundation): Keynote Lecture – (Re)Constructing Memories: Some Thoughts About Preservation
  • Jo Ana Morfin (Independent Scholar): Restored Behaviour: Performing Materiality

11.00am – 11.30am Coffee break

11.30am – 1.00pm

  • Simon Fleury (Birmingham School of Art & Design): Encountering the Museum-Object
  • Hans-Jürgen Hafner (Critic & Curator): Always Trouble with Flynt. Tracing Conceptual Art
  • Denise Petzold (Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst): (Im)Materiality in the Museum: Shaping Joseph Beuys’s Information Action through Curating Documentation

1.00pm – 2.00pm Lunch

2.00pm – 3.30pm

  • Gwynne Ryan (Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden): Refabricating, Re-Making, and Re-Thinking: A Continuation of the Artist’s Process
  • Yukiko Watari (HIGURE 17-15 cas): The Expanding Role of Art Installers: Distributed Model for Documentation Practice
  • Sanneke Stigter (University of Amsterdam): Picturing Peter Struycken’s Blue Waves: Collecting Memories as a Form of Conservation

3.30pm – 4.00pm Break

4.00pm – 5.30pm

  • Martha C. Singer & Kate Wight Tyler (Owner/Director, Material Whisperer; Brooklyn Museum): Boob Jobs: Treatments of Duchamp and Donati’s Latex Foam Breasts
  • Alison Norton (Moderna Museet): Migrating Facsimiles: Copies and Conservation Control
  • Louise Lawson & Acatia Finbow (Tate): Reflections on Tate’s Documentation of Performance Artworks: Creating the Institutional Memory of an Artwork

Friday 30th June

9.00am – 9.30am Registration

9.30am – 11.00am

  • Annie Fletcher (van Abbemuseum): Keynote Lecture – Title TBC
  • Ulrich Lang (Die Restauratoren): The Fortune of the Presence

11.00am – 11.30am Coffee break

11.30am – 1.00pm

  • Laura Leuzzi, Elaine Shemilt & Stephen Partridge (EWVA, DJCAD): Methodologies, Strategies and Practice Based Research Methods to uncover and narrate early European Women’s Video Art
  • Adam Lockhart (DJCAD): Machine Vision
  • Claire M. Holdsworth (Kingston School of Art): Vocal and Material Mourning: Stuart Marshall, Mouth Works (1975/76)

1.00pm – 2.00pm Lunch

2.00pm – 3.30pm

  • Lucy Askew (NGS) with contributions from collections management staff at NGS and Glasgow Museums: Steven Campbell (1953-2007), On Form and Fiction, 1989-90
  • Ariane Noël de Tilly (Emily Carr University of Art & Design): What Remains of ATSA’s State of Emergency

3.30pm – 4.00pm Break

4.00pm – 5.30pm

  • Hélia Marçal (Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa) Beyond Temporality: Performance Art Conservation as a Remembrance of Place
  • Anna Schäffler (Free University Berlin) Memory Process in Practice. On the Ensemble Art of Anna Oppermann and Contemporary Art Preservation
  • Nim Goede (University of Amsterdam) Tracing the Engram: Exploring the Neurophysiological Basis of Memory through Lead in Robert Morris’s Process-Type Objects, 1964-1965