Convenors;

Dr Laurie Benson (SOAS)

Professor Vivienne Jabri ( KCL)

Dr Pablo de Orellana (KCL)

Summary:

Artistic production marks and underscore political conflicts, from Leon Golub’s anti-war painting, Vietnam II (1973) to the censoring of The Battle of Algiers (1966) in France, and the Syrian pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The contemporary globalised market of art’s production and reception has further called into question the very grounds of critical practice and art’s relation to localities, exemplified in recent calls to decolonise cultural institutions.

This one-day workshop seeks to open space for new dialogue between International Relations (IR) scholars, Art Historians, and cultural practitioners working on issues of art and conflict. The core objective is to understand and map what constitutes the shared space between art and IR, its tensions, and the concepts and methods necessary for productive interdisciplinary engagements.

The nexus between the study of International Relations (IR) and Art History is ripe with conceptual, analytical, and empirical opportunities for critical understanding. Art History has long counted on and developed methods and concepts for the study of specific aesthetic functions, including conflict and identity. Likewise, areas of IR scholarship have addressed in various forms the relevance, function and power of the aesthetic, and has long sought to account for the role of such expression in politics. However, scholarship between these fields suffers from a lack of aggregation, particularly in terms of clear conceptual links and reflection on analytical objectives shared and contested by both disciplines. Though valuable contributions have been made, its analytical promise needs to be revisited. What might such an interdisciplinary crossover look like relative to the specifics of each discipline and in concrete research practice?

If you would like to attend please send an email to

warforpresence2018@gmail.com

Image credit: Natalia de Orellana?