Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI) and Mathaf: Arab Museum for Modern Art are pleased to announce the 3rd Annual Conference of Visual Arts, which will look at the implications of the current pandemic on the futures of museums and cities. The conference will be held virtually from 25th to 27th April 2021. Expecting the conference to be an open platform for discussions and raising questions concerning the different potential scenarios to come upon us in the near future.
The conference conceptual framework mentions that there are turning points in history that we understand in retrospective, in a deferred insight. The current crisis, the pandemic, seems to act differently, for it contains an acute awareness that it is a major disjuncture between two eras, two regimes of human existence. Inherent to this tragic experience of a 'major break' is the orientation towards the future, loosely defined. The cultural fields of production are doubly bounded in this tragic experience. They are one of the most affected domains of this tragic experience which has deep and lasting effects on it. And, those most affected fields are expected to tell the story of this transition between the two regimes of existence.
DI and Mathaf invite those interested artists, intellectuals, practitioners and curators to send proposals to participate in the conference (up to 500 words), in accordance with one of the following topics:
1- Critical reading of the urban formative forces of the plagued city;
2- Revising the history of the modern museum in light of the current pandemic;
3- Foreseeing the future possible relations of the museum and the city;
4- The possibilities of visualizing the new bio-political regime(s), and the ways of resisting it;
5- The positionality of the viewer: The Southern Scene and its deconstructive charge\claim;
Kindly send the abstract before March 27, 2021 to the following email address: di.mathaf.2021@gmail.com
Note: This year's panel discussions will take place online, and selected papers will be published in the proceedings.
For more information, please click here.
