Verónica Tello | The University of New South Wales (original) (raw)
Books by Verónica Tello
prologue, intro and afterword of book Publication date: October 20, 2016 Abstract: Restrictive b... more prologue, intro and afterword of book
Publication date: October 20, 2016
Abstract:
Restrictive border protection policies directed toward managing the flow of refugees coming into neoliberal democracies (and out of failing nation-states) are a defining feature of contemporary politics. In this book, Verónica Tello analyses how contemporary artists--such as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green--negotiate their diverse subject positions while addressing and taking part in the production of images associated with refugee experiences and histories. Tello argues that their practices, which manifest across a range of contexts including Cuba, the United States, Australia and Europe, represent an emergent, global paradigm of contemporary art, 'counter-memorial aesthetics'.
Counter-memorial aesthetics, Tello argues, is characterized by its conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers and voices of many times and places, generating an experimental, non-teleological approach to the construction of contemporary history, which also takes into account the complex, disorienting spatial affects of globalization. Spanning performance art, experimental 'history painting', aftermath photography and video installation, counter-memorial aesthetics bring to the fore, Tello argues, how contemporary refugee flows and related traumatic events critically challenge and conflict with many existing, tired if not also stubborn notions of national identity, borders, history and memory.
Building on the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, this book offers a useful concept of 'counter-memory' for the twenty-first century. It shows how counter-memorial aesthetics is not only central to the nexus of contemporary art and refugee histories but also how it can offer a way of being critically present with many other, often interrelated, global crises in the contemporary era.
http://bloomsbury.com/us/counter-memorial-aesthetics-9781474252737/
Book Chapters by Verónica Tello
This essay attempts to redefine how I appear in relation to Australian art history when writing ... more This essay attempts to redefine how I appear in relation to Australian art history when writing about border politics. To try and redefine how I appear, I reflect on my art history training, especially during my PhD, when I was writing a thesis on the nexus of contemporary art and the aftermath of the Pacific Solution (2001) at a andstone university in Melbourne/Naarm. I also try to appear as a Latinx art historian shaped by my flight from Chile across the Pacific to Australia during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). Because the art historian’s possibility of appearance is always dependent on an external subject — the artist, the artwork, the museum — I chose as my object of affection and analysis the Chilean-Australian artist Juan Dávila, who also left Chile after 1973. I write this essay as a letter to Juan, who I address as “you.” So, when I speak as “I,” I do this in relation to Juan. I want to trace how, via Juan, it might be possible to locate a place in Australian art history for these kinds of intergenerational dialogues that embrace the experiences of migratory subjects, be they people crossing the Pacific after 1973 or those caught up in the Pacific Solution. However incommensurable migratory experiences are, is it possible for art history to allow an “I,” “you” and “we” to appear? Is it possible for art history to make intra-Pacific solidarity appear in Australia? If I have been able to appear at all, it is because I now work at an art school, which has cultivated in me a deeply undisciplined but generative approach to art history.
Barbara Cleveland Thinking Business, 2020
Essay on queer and female friendship (as a tactic of institutional critique) for the survey show ... more Essay on queer and female friendship (as a tactic of institutional critique) for the survey show on the art collective, Barbara Cleveland. Focuses on the work of Juan Dávila.
The Routledge companion to theatre and politics, 2019
Refereed Journal Articles by Verónica Tello
Third Text, Feb 4, 2022
From 1981 to 1990, the Australian art journal Art & Text and the affiliated Art & Criticism Monog... more From 1981 to 1990, the Australian art journal Art & Text and the affiliated Art & Criticism Monograph Series had a productive, if at times fragmented, relationship with a small but influential group of Chilean arts workers during the Pinochet regime (1973–1990). Initiated by the Australian-Chilean artist, Juan Dávila, this collaboration — including key figures such as Paul Taylor, Paul Foss, Nelly Richard, Patricio Marchant and Francisco Zegers − gave rise to multiple and significant essays, books and translations that contested the limits of Pinochet’s epistemological frontiers on the one hand, and Euro-North American centrist readings of the artworld on the other.
This article returns to several archives across Australia and Chile to trace the simultaneous developments of southern thinking, and asks what can be learned about the co-production of epistemologies across two distinct Pacific locations. The almost instant anachronism of art criticism, especially that on the margins, has meant that Art & Text’s and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series’s history of supporting Chilean art writing during the dictatorship has not been effectively transmitted into the present. It is, by now, pretty much unknown or forgotten in both Australia and Chile − and elsewhere − awaiting the attention of a younger generation of art workers hoping to connect to these fragmented histories.
Verónica Tello y Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia
Third Text, 2020
Beginning with a brief analysis of what is broadly considered to be the ‘canon’ of institutional ... more Beginning with a brief analysis of what is broadly considered to be the ‘canon’ of institutional critique, this article asks: is there anything ‘contemporary’ about institutional critique? Following the work of Terry Smith and Peter Osborne, by contemporary I mainly refer to the experience of con-tempus, of being with others in time, within increasingly globalised art institutions where the demand of registering disjunctive subject positions – between subjects of the global North and South – is increasingly apparent. While analysing a range of projects, I mainly bring to the fore one work, The Silent University, initiated by Ahmet Ögüt in 2012 and aligned with what has recently been termed the ‘fourth wave’ of institutional critique, or ‘instituent practice’. To my mind, The Silent University offers a productive example of the nexus of contemporaneity, particularly correlative concepts of co-presence and institutional critique. It is an instituent practice founded to contest the individualism of neoliberalism and the divisive effects of globalisation/border politics through explicitly experimental collaborative practices galvanised by the promise of the contemporary ‘we’. It is an instituent practice that attempts to forge an infrastructure to sustain radical contemporaneity. In this article, I seek to trace both the potentialities and limitations of the speculative and empirical dimensions of instituent practice, and how it may catalyse the spirit of contemporaneity – being and working together in time against the teleology of global capital – in the context of failing public institutions (the UNHCR, national governments) and the lack of spaces for critical forms of collectivity.
Memory Studies, 2019
This essay traces a critical genealogy of counter-memory-spanning critical theory, film and conte... more This essay traces a critical genealogy of counter-memory-spanning critical theory, film and contemporary art-bound to what Rosi Braidotti terms nomadic subjectivity. Engaging with the work of feminist and postcolonial theorists and artists, this essay charts the import of nomadic subjectivity as a method for staying with the many times and histories of global contemporaneity. It aims to move beyond thinking of counter-memory as simply a means to maintain or register erased and/or contested histories, or as a dialectical mnemonic system. It charts an alternative concept of counter-memory, one that is post-dialectical, not bound to the formulas of either/or, us/them or self/other, but which is instead committed to the endless accumulation and proximities of things-the and-and. What is counter-memory? In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes (1980: 91) mobilises the term, albeit briefly, in order to evoke the amnesic qualities of photographs. That is, their capacity to counter memory-the act of remembrance. Barthes' engagement with the concept of counter-memory comes after Michel Foucault (1971), for whom it also connoted the process of being contra/coun-ter-memory, as well as contra/counter-history-but not so much vis-à-vis amnesia, as much as the desire to contest the hegemony of monolithic, monumental memory sites and historiography. Writing after 1968, a youngish and radicalised Foucault (1971) conceptualised counter-memory, or contre-mémoire, in an attempt to forge a 'totally different form of time' (p. 385) than that which was enabled by positivist, teleological models of history while simultaneously registering and maintaining otherwise scratched over and/or forgotten records of resistance and oppression. Counter-memory is a concept (for rethinking time) and agent of political subjectification that refuses the nationalist-normativity of remembrance-as tied up as it is with monuments and 'official', canonised histories-while also attempting to forge temporalities attuned to the social
![Research paper thumbnail of The Politics and Aesthetics of Aftermath Photography: Rosemary Laing's welcome to Australia (2004), [in Third Text]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/48190187/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Third Text
This article reconsiders the politics and aesthetics of aftermath photography. Many critics have ... more This article reconsiders the politics and aesthetics of aftermath photography. Many critics have argued that the emerging, experimental genre of documentary photography ‘abstracts’ and renders ‘sublime’ the traumatic historical events that it takes as its subject matter. While these terms accurately reflect the aesthetics of aftermath photography, their politics cannot, the author argues, be so easily dismissed. The article reconsider the genre through Gene Ray's theories of the sublime and Rosemary Laing's photograph welcome to Australia (2004), which documents the Woomera refugee detention centre, in order to offer a better understanding of what is at stake in this new mode of documentary photography.
Third Text, 28.6 (December, 2014), 555-562
Free download for those without access to Third Text:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/65x3pFdkmTNRu4ZkQbj9/full
Or
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775#.VbMVRjWzq-0
![Research paper thumbnail of Counter-Memory, Heterochronia, and “History Painting” (After Géricault): Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics [in Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/35434464/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, vol. 3, 2014
This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as ... more This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as represented by Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics (2001-2005). It analyses how the aesthetics of heterochronoia—multiple temporalities—play a crucial role in the development of a new understanding of the politics of “history painting.” As Schmidt’s work reveals, a radical conception of history exists outside the “singular moment,” and in dialogue with heterogenous visual cultures (news media, art history, advertising). In attempting to understand the import of Schmidt’s work, this essay considers his methodologies for creating a heterochronous mode of history painting, particularly his anachronistic engagement with the work of Theodore Géricault and the iconic history painting, The Raft of the Medusa. Unlike previous critical responses to Schmidt’s work, this paper argues that (after Géricault) the artist’s use of investigative “journalistic” methodologies for SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics do not generate an aesthetics of exposé but rather an aesthetics of “fictionalization.” This aesthetic is defined by the recalibration of documentary and speculative data as a means to reconceive the landscape of the perceptual. The findings of this research demonstrate that the use of disparate fragments—or data—to visualize otherwise diminishing historical events underpins contemporary history painting’s capacity for advancing a distinct economy of affect that circumvents the limitations of the news media and its “monopoly on reality.”
Tijdschrift Kunstlicht, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 16 - 23 Special issue: Shaping the Archive
Non-Refereed Journal Articles and Reviews by Verónica Tello
Short essay on the Silent University based on paper given at the 2016 Performance Studies Intern... more Short essay on the Silent University based on paper given at the 2016 Performance Studies International Conference
Afterall (September, 2012)
Artlink 29.2 (2009), special issue: After the Missionaries: Art in a Bi-Lateral World: 46-50.
Conference Presentations by Verónica Tello
The Forced Migration Research Network, UNSW (Australia) will be hosting the Academic Symposium, ... more The Forced Migration Research Network, UNSW (Australia) will be hosting the Academic Symposium, "Affective Shifts: Inside and Outside Nation and Body” on 21 February 2017. It is developed in partnership with the Refugee Council of Australia as a lead up to the Refugee Alternatives Conference, (http://www.refugeealternatives.org.au/event-info/unsw-academic-forum)
Speakers include:
Zanny Begg (Art & Design, UNSW); Ruth Balint (History, UNSW); Rose Butler (Sociology, UNSW); Jennifer Hyndman (Human Geography, York University. Canada); Stephanie Hemelryk-Donald (Film, Media, Asian Studies, UNSW); Belinda Liddell (Psychiatry, UNSW); Jane McAdam (Law, UNSW); Violeta Moreno-Lax (Law, Queen Mary University, London); James Nguyen and Verónica Tello (both Art & Design, UNSW); Sharon Pickering (Criminology, Monash University); Suvendrini Perera (Cultural Studies, Curtin University) and Joseph Pugliese (Cultural Studies, Macquarie University); Eileen Pittaway (Social Sciences, UNSW); Claudia Tazreiter (Sociology, UNSW); Dan Tyler (Norwegian Refugee Council); David Sanderson (Built Environment, UNSW); and Caroline Wake (Theatre and Performance, UNSW)
Edited Exhibition Catalogues by Verónica Tello
Catalogue to accompany exhibition of same name, with contributions from Anthony Gardner and Felic... more Catalogue to accompany exhibition of same name, with contributions from Anthony Gardner and Felicity Colman. Exhibition included the work of: Alex Martinis-Roe, Sarah Lynch, Andrew Atchison, Pia De Bruyn, Sue Dodd, Jessie Scott and Ali Sanderson.
Talks by Verónica Tello
2018
Papers by Verónica Tello
Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 2014
This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as ... more This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as represented by Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics (2001-2005). It analyses how the aesthetics of heterochronoia—multiple temporalities—play a crucial role in the development of a new understanding of the politics of “history painting.” As Schmidt’s work reveals, a radical conception of history exists outside the “singular moment,” and in dialogue with heterogenous visual cultures (news media, art history, advertising). In attempting to understand the import of Schmidt’s work, this essay considers his methodologies for creating a heterochronous mode of history painting, particularly his anachronistic engagement with the work of Theodore Géricault and the iconic history painting, The Raft of the Medusa. Unlike previous critical responses to Schmidt’s work, this paper argues that (after Géricault) the artist’s use of investigative “journalistic” methodologies f...
Third Text, 2021
From 1981 to 1990, the Australian art journal Art & Text and the affiliated Art &... more From 1981 to 1990, the Australian art journal Art & Text and the affiliated Art & Criticism Monograph Series had a productive, if at times fragmented, relationship with a small but influential group of Chilean arts workers during the Pinochet regime (1973–1990). Initiated by the Australian-Chilean artist, Juan Dávila, this collaboration — including key figures such as Paul Taylor, Paul Foss, Nelly Richard, Patricio Marchant and Francisco Zegers − gave rise to multiple and significant essays, books and translations that contested the limits of Pinochet’s epistemological frontiers on the one hand, and Euro-North American centrist readings of the artworld on the other. This article returns to several archives across Australia and Chile to trace the simultaneous developments of southern thinking, and asks what can be learned about the co-production of epistemologies across two distinct Pacific locations. The almost instant anachronism of art criticism, especially that on the margins, has meant that Art & Text’s and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series’s history of supporting Chilean art writing during the dictatorship has not been effectively transmitted into the present. It is, by now, pretty much unknown or forgotten in both Australia and Chile − and elsewhere − awaiting the attention of a younger generation of art workers hoping to connect to these fragmented histories. Verónica Tello y Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia
prologue, intro and afterword of book Publication date: October 20, 2016 Abstract: Restrictive b... more prologue, intro and afterword of book
Publication date: October 20, 2016
Abstract:
Restrictive border protection policies directed toward managing the flow of refugees coming into neoliberal democracies (and out of failing nation-states) are a defining feature of contemporary politics. In this book, Verónica Tello analyses how contemporary artists--such as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green--negotiate their diverse subject positions while addressing and taking part in the production of images associated with refugee experiences and histories. Tello argues that their practices, which manifest across a range of contexts including Cuba, the United States, Australia and Europe, represent an emergent, global paradigm of contemporary art, 'counter-memorial aesthetics'.
Counter-memorial aesthetics, Tello argues, is characterized by its conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers and voices of many times and places, generating an experimental, non-teleological approach to the construction of contemporary history, which also takes into account the complex, disorienting spatial affects of globalization. Spanning performance art, experimental 'history painting', aftermath photography and video installation, counter-memorial aesthetics bring to the fore, Tello argues, how contemporary refugee flows and related traumatic events critically challenge and conflict with many existing, tired if not also stubborn notions of national identity, borders, history and memory.
Building on the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, this book offers a useful concept of 'counter-memory' for the twenty-first century. It shows how counter-memorial aesthetics is not only central to the nexus of contemporary art and refugee histories but also how it can offer a way of being critically present with many other, often interrelated, global crises in the contemporary era.
http://bloomsbury.com/us/counter-memorial-aesthetics-9781474252737/
This essay attempts to redefine how I appear in relation to Australian art history when writing ... more This essay attempts to redefine how I appear in relation to Australian art history when writing about border politics. To try and redefine how I appear, I reflect on my art history training, especially during my PhD, when I was writing a thesis on the nexus of contemporary art and the aftermath of the Pacific Solution (2001) at a andstone university in Melbourne/Naarm. I also try to appear as a Latinx art historian shaped by my flight from Chile across the Pacific to Australia during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). Because the art historian’s possibility of appearance is always dependent on an external subject — the artist, the artwork, the museum — I chose as my object of affection and analysis the Chilean-Australian artist Juan Dávila, who also left Chile after 1973. I write this essay as a letter to Juan, who I address as “you.” So, when I speak as “I,” I do this in relation to Juan. I want to trace how, via Juan, it might be possible to locate a place in Australian art history for these kinds of intergenerational dialogues that embrace the experiences of migratory subjects, be they people crossing the Pacific after 1973 or those caught up in the Pacific Solution. However incommensurable migratory experiences are, is it possible for art history to allow an “I,” “you” and “we” to appear? Is it possible for art history to make intra-Pacific solidarity appear in Australia? If I have been able to appear at all, it is because I now work at an art school, which has cultivated in me a deeply undisciplined but generative approach to art history.
Barbara Cleveland Thinking Business, 2020
Essay on queer and female friendship (as a tactic of institutional critique) for the survey show ... more Essay on queer and female friendship (as a tactic of institutional critique) for the survey show on the art collective, Barbara Cleveland. Focuses on the work of Juan Dávila.
The Routledge companion to theatre and politics, 2019
Third Text, Feb 4, 2022
From 1981 to 1990, the Australian art journal Art & Text and the affiliated Art & Criticism Monog... more From 1981 to 1990, the Australian art journal Art & Text and the affiliated Art & Criticism Monograph Series had a productive, if at times fragmented, relationship with a small but influential group of Chilean arts workers during the Pinochet regime (1973–1990). Initiated by the Australian-Chilean artist, Juan Dávila, this collaboration — including key figures such as Paul Taylor, Paul Foss, Nelly Richard, Patricio Marchant and Francisco Zegers − gave rise to multiple and significant essays, books and translations that contested the limits of Pinochet’s epistemological frontiers on the one hand, and Euro-North American centrist readings of the artworld on the other.
This article returns to several archives across Australia and Chile to trace the simultaneous developments of southern thinking, and asks what can be learned about the co-production of epistemologies across two distinct Pacific locations. The almost instant anachronism of art criticism, especially that on the margins, has meant that Art & Text’s and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series’s history of supporting Chilean art writing during the dictatorship has not been effectively transmitted into the present. It is, by now, pretty much unknown or forgotten in both Australia and Chile − and elsewhere − awaiting the attention of a younger generation of art workers hoping to connect to these fragmented histories.
Verónica Tello y Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia
Third Text, 2020
Beginning with a brief analysis of what is broadly considered to be the ‘canon’ of institutional ... more Beginning with a brief analysis of what is broadly considered to be the ‘canon’ of institutional critique, this article asks: is there anything ‘contemporary’ about institutional critique? Following the work of Terry Smith and Peter Osborne, by contemporary I mainly refer to the experience of con-tempus, of being with others in time, within increasingly globalised art institutions where the demand of registering disjunctive subject positions – between subjects of the global North and South – is increasingly apparent. While analysing a range of projects, I mainly bring to the fore one work, The Silent University, initiated by Ahmet Ögüt in 2012 and aligned with what has recently been termed the ‘fourth wave’ of institutional critique, or ‘instituent practice’. To my mind, The Silent University offers a productive example of the nexus of contemporaneity, particularly correlative concepts of co-presence and institutional critique. It is an instituent practice founded to contest the individualism of neoliberalism and the divisive effects of globalisation/border politics through explicitly experimental collaborative practices galvanised by the promise of the contemporary ‘we’. It is an instituent practice that attempts to forge an infrastructure to sustain radical contemporaneity. In this article, I seek to trace both the potentialities and limitations of the speculative and empirical dimensions of instituent practice, and how it may catalyse the spirit of contemporaneity – being and working together in time against the teleology of global capital – in the context of failing public institutions (the UNHCR, national governments) and the lack of spaces for critical forms of collectivity.
Memory Studies, 2019
This essay traces a critical genealogy of counter-memory-spanning critical theory, film and conte... more This essay traces a critical genealogy of counter-memory-spanning critical theory, film and contemporary art-bound to what Rosi Braidotti terms nomadic subjectivity. Engaging with the work of feminist and postcolonial theorists and artists, this essay charts the import of nomadic subjectivity as a method for staying with the many times and histories of global contemporaneity. It aims to move beyond thinking of counter-memory as simply a means to maintain or register erased and/or contested histories, or as a dialectical mnemonic system. It charts an alternative concept of counter-memory, one that is post-dialectical, not bound to the formulas of either/or, us/them or self/other, but which is instead committed to the endless accumulation and proximities of things-the and-and. What is counter-memory? In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes (1980: 91) mobilises the term, albeit briefly, in order to evoke the amnesic qualities of photographs. That is, their capacity to counter memory-the act of remembrance. Barthes' engagement with the concept of counter-memory comes after Michel Foucault (1971), for whom it also connoted the process of being contra/coun-ter-memory, as well as contra/counter-history-but not so much vis-à-vis amnesia, as much as the desire to contest the hegemony of monolithic, monumental memory sites and historiography. Writing after 1968, a youngish and radicalised Foucault (1971) conceptualised counter-memory, or contre-mémoire, in an attempt to forge a 'totally different form of time' (p. 385) than that which was enabled by positivist, teleological models of history while simultaneously registering and maintaining otherwise scratched over and/or forgotten records of resistance and oppression. Counter-memory is a concept (for rethinking time) and agent of political subjectification that refuses the nationalist-normativity of remembrance-as tied up as it is with monuments and 'official', canonised histories-while also attempting to forge temporalities attuned to the social
Third Text
This article reconsiders the politics and aesthetics of aftermath photography. Many critics have ... more This article reconsiders the politics and aesthetics of aftermath photography. Many critics have argued that the emerging, experimental genre of documentary photography ‘abstracts’ and renders ‘sublime’ the traumatic historical events that it takes as its subject matter. While these terms accurately reflect the aesthetics of aftermath photography, their politics cannot, the author argues, be so easily dismissed. The article reconsider the genre through Gene Ray's theories of the sublime and Rosemary Laing's photograph welcome to Australia (2004), which documents the Woomera refugee detention centre, in order to offer a better understanding of what is at stake in this new mode of documentary photography.
Third Text, 28.6 (December, 2014), 555-562
Free download for those without access to Third Text:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/65x3pFdkmTNRu4ZkQbj9/full
Or
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775#.VbMVRjWzq-0
Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, vol. 3, 2014
This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as ... more This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as represented by Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics (2001-2005). It analyses how the aesthetics of heterochronoia—multiple temporalities—play a crucial role in the development of a new understanding of the politics of “history painting.” As Schmidt’s work reveals, a radical conception of history exists outside the “singular moment,” and in dialogue with heterogenous visual cultures (news media, art history, advertising). In attempting to understand the import of Schmidt’s work, this essay considers his methodologies for creating a heterochronous mode of history painting, particularly his anachronistic engagement with the work of Theodore Géricault and the iconic history painting, The Raft of the Medusa. Unlike previous critical responses to Schmidt’s work, this paper argues that (after Géricault) the artist’s use of investigative “journalistic” methodologies for SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics do not generate an aesthetics of exposé but rather an aesthetics of “fictionalization.” This aesthetic is defined by the recalibration of documentary and speculative data as a means to reconceive the landscape of the perceptual. The findings of this research demonstrate that the use of disparate fragments—or data—to visualize otherwise diminishing historical events underpins contemporary history painting’s capacity for advancing a distinct economy of affect that circumvents the limitations of the news media and its “monopoly on reality.”
Tijdschrift Kunstlicht, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 16 - 23 Special issue: Shaping the Archive
Short essay on the Silent University based on paper given at the 2016 Performance Studies Intern... more Short essay on the Silent University based on paper given at the 2016 Performance Studies International Conference
Afterall (September, 2012)
Artlink 29.2 (2009), special issue: After the Missionaries: Art in a Bi-Lateral World: 46-50.
The Forced Migration Research Network, UNSW (Australia) will be hosting the Academic Symposium, ... more The Forced Migration Research Network, UNSW (Australia) will be hosting the Academic Symposium, "Affective Shifts: Inside and Outside Nation and Body” on 21 February 2017. It is developed in partnership with the Refugee Council of Australia as a lead up to the Refugee Alternatives Conference, (http://www.refugeealternatives.org.au/event-info/unsw-academic-forum)
Speakers include:
Zanny Begg (Art & Design, UNSW); Ruth Balint (History, UNSW); Rose Butler (Sociology, UNSW); Jennifer Hyndman (Human Geography, York University. Canada); Stephanie Hemelryk-Donald (Film, Media, Asian Studies, UNSW); Belinda Liddell (Psychiatry, UNSW); Jane McAdam (Law, UNSW); Violeta Moreno-Lax (Law, Queen Mary University, London); James Nguyen and Verónica Tello (both Art & Design, UNSW); Sharon Pickering (Criminology, Monash University); Suvendrini Perera (Cultural Studies, Curtin University) and Joseph Pugliese (Cultural Studies, Macquarie University); Eileen Pittaway (Social Sciences, UNSW); Claudia Tazreiter (Sociology, UNSW); Dan Tyler (Norwegian Refugee Council); David Sanderson (Built Environment, UNSW); and Caroline Wake (Theatre and Performance, UNSW)
Catalogue to accompany exhibition of same name, with contributions from Anthony Gardner and Felic... more Catalogue to accompany exhibition of same name, with contributions from Anthony Gardner and Felicity Colman. Exhibition included the work of: Alex Martinis-Roe, Sarah Lynch, Andrew Atchison, Pia De Bruyn, Sue Dodd, Jessie Scott and Ali Sanderson.
Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 2014
This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as ... more This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as represented by Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics (2001-2005). It analyses how the aesthetics of heterochronoia—multiple temporalities—play a crucial role in the development of a new understanding of the politics of “history painting.” As Schmidt’s work reveals, a radical conception of history exists outside the “singular moment,” and in dialogue with heterogenous visual cultures (news media, art history, advertising). In attempting to understand the import of Schmidt’s work, this essay considers his methodologies for creating a heterochronous mode of history painting, particularly his anachronistic engagement with the work of Theodore Géricault and the iconic history painting, The Raft of the Medusa. Unlike previous critical responses to Schmidt’s work, this paper argues that (after Géricault) the artist’s use of investigative “journalistic” methodologies f...
Third Text, 2021
From 1981 to 1990, the Australian art journal Art & Text and the affiliated Art &... more From 1981 to 1990, the Australian art journal Art & Text and the affiliated Art & Criticism Monograph Series had a productive, if at times fragmented, relationship with a small but influential group of Chilean arts workers during the Pinochet regime (1973–1990). Initiated by the Australian-Chilean artist, Juan Dávila, this collaboration — including key figures such as Paul Taylor, Paul Foss, Nelly Richard, Patricio Marchant and Francisco Zegers − gave rise to multiple and significant essays, books and translations that contested the limits of Pinochet’s epistemological frontiers on the one hand, and Euro-North American centrist readings of the artworld on the other. This article returns to several archives across Australia and Chile to trace the simultaneous developments of southern thinking, and asks what can be learned about the co-production of epistemologies across two distinct Pacific locations. The almost instant anachronism of art criticism, especially that on the margins, has meant that Art & Text’s and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series’s history of supporting Chilean art writing during the dictatorship has not been effectively transmitted into the present. It is, by now, pretty much unknown or forgotten in both Australia and Chile − and elsewhere − awaiting the attention of a younger generation of art workers hoping to connect to these fragmented histories. Verónica Tello y Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia