CALL FOR PAPERS
Unfinished Empire? Visual Arts and Architecture in Post-Imperial Contexts, 1900–2022
CRAACE conference, 18–20 May 2023
Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague
CALL FOR PAPERS
Unfinished Empire? Visual Arts and Architecture in Post-Imperial Contexts, 1900–2022
CRAACE conference, 18–20 May 2023
Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague
The CRAACE conference Exhibitions, New Nations and the Human Factor, 1873–1939 took place at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris on 4–5 April 2022. Focusing on world’s fairs and international exhibitions, it looked beyond their official, state-sponsored aims and considered the role of individuals and groups in them. Who were the people who organised them, designed them, worked in them and visited them? The conference placed agency at the heart of the discussion. To what extent did those involved adhere to or challenge the ostensible purpose of these events?
For those who missed the conference or would like to revisit the talks, we will make recordings of the individual sessions available on Youtube for a limited time. The sessions will be posted below on this page one by one as they become available, so watch this space.
The 110th Annual Conference of the College Art Association takes place online 16 to 19 February and 3 to 5 March 2022. CRAACE researchers will be involved in a number of sessions:
Our conference Exhibitions, New Nations and the Human Factor, 1873–1939 will take place at
the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris
on 4–5 April 2022.
The conference on world’s fairs and international exhibitions looks beyond their official, state-sponsored aims and considers the role of individuals and groups in them. Who were the people who organised them, designed them, worked in them and visited them? It places agency at the heart of the discussion. To what extent did those involved adhere to or challenge the ostensible purpose of these events?
CALL FOR PAPERS
Exhibitions, new nations and the human factor, 1873–1939
CRAACE symposium, 4–5 April 2022
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris
Keynote speaker: Professor Mary Pepchinski, Technical University Dresden
It is widely recognised that new political entities that came to existence as nation states from the end of the nineteenth century sought to legitimise their identities externally through participation at world’s fairs and internally through consolidation of their national collections in museums and galleries of art and design. While the official motivations and presentations have been examined quite thoroughly, the agency of many individuals involved in different stages of exhibition design has been overlooked.
This symposium aims to explore the relations – including discrepancies – between the official narratives of exhibitions, as devised by the organisers, and the narratives by individuals whose participation helped to construct the meaning and content of the exhibits. By this, the discussion moves away from the focus on the state apparatus and official ideologies towards the people who designed the national presentations, worked in them and visited them. Our main focus is on how exhibitions were used to consolidate new political identities. The period covered by the symposium begins with the Vienna World Fair of 1873 and concludes with the outbreak of the Second World War. It saw important changes in political and geographical circumstances globally, with the creation and recreation of, for instance, Romania, Turkey, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary.