Art conference to explore "contact"

The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) annual conference at Victoria next week will explore the idea of 'contact' in the world of art.

The AAANZ annual conference is the leading forum for academic art historians, curators, critics and artists in this region. This year's conference is focused on a single overarching theme: Contact. Over 180 delegates will address this theme in all its multifarious forms from Wednesday 7 December to Friday 9 December.

One of the conference organisers, David Maskill, Programme Director and Senior Lecturer in Art History, says that 'contact' evokes encounters between cultures, peoples and objects and the issues and outcomes they spark.

"Papers will address the encounters between one culture and another, between viewer and art work or between one artist or art work and another. A wide range of papers address themselves to the notions of resistance and hybridity, intersection and divergence, purity and pollution, and other related questions raised by the theme of contact."

Keynote speakers at the conference are Director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Okwui Enwezor and Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby.

For more information visit the AAANZ conference website - http://aaanz.info/aaanz-home/conferences/conference-2011-contact/

What: AAANZ conference 2011: Contact

Where: Rutherford House, Pipitea Campus, Victoria University of Wellington.

When: 7-9 December 2011