Abstracts

European encounters with devadasis in India produced representational and epistemological crises. The term devadasi, a shortened form of the Tamil term tevaradiyal, roughly translates as “slave of the god”. It designates a class of women who, through ritual “marriage” rites, were dedicated to temple deities and other sacred objects. Devadasis were responsible for a wide range of ritual, artistic, and religious labor. They were thus embedded within a sacred economy that challenged European understandings of sexuality and religious service. Faced with this unfamiliarity that threatened their moral, ethical, and economic institutions, European artists attempted to transform devadasis into recognizable figures drawn from their own visual traditions.

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This paper examines how these crises and confusion were negotiated through landscape representations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European images of devadasis. These images, varying from watercolors to engravings and lithographs, trace how devadasis were gradually displaced from temple space and relocated into more secularized and exoticized settings.

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Rather than understanding landscape representation as a fixed background, this paper argues that landscape functioned as a process through which the devadasi body was continuously redefined, reshaped, and reimagined under colonialism. Devadasis occupied an ambiguous position within colonial representations. Sometimes they were the god's slave; their body and presence are embedded within a sacred economy. Other times, they appear in lush, generalized landscapes that evoke European traditions of pastoral leisure and performance, thus effectively transforming them into exotic dancers reintegrated into the secular economic space of prostitution. These diverse landscapes reveal not a stable colonial understanding of devadasis, but an ongoing process of distortion through which European artists sought to render unfamiliar social and religious institutions legible. By reading the landscape as a site of colonial reinterpretation, this paper also highlights how visual culture engendered an identity crisis among devadasis during the colonial period.

This paper will explore the ecological awareness evident in Félix-Émile Taunay’s View of a Virgin Forest Being Reduced to Charcoal (c. 1843, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro). The painting adheres to many of the conventions of the Claudian and neoclassical landscape traditions, yet it depicts anything but an Arcadian paradise. It condenses different moments in the stages of the timbering process into a single composition and contrasts the grandiose and unspoiled landscape of a virgin forest with images of trees being slashed, fired and reduced to charcoal.

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Following Félix's depiction of the Tijuca forest and its subsequent institutionalization, the forest was formally recognized and protected through legislation through the establishment of the Tijuca National Park in the city. My research situates Taunay's ecological ambitions and the painting in relation to contemporaneous ecological debates in Rio. These debates were largely between social elites (to which Taunay’s family itself belonged), and they pitted the economic benefits of deforestation—primarily from extraction of timber, the production of charcoal, and the reuse of land for coffee plantations—against damage that deforestation caused to the environment and hence to human life through changes in the local climate and water supply. The terms of this debate were thus very specific to elite society in Rio, as both the pros and cons were primarily understood in terms of how they affected the wealthy citizens of the area.

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My initial hypothesis is that, by mixing neoclassical landscape, motifs drawn from scientific illustrations, and images of the contemporary exploitation of the forest, Taunay intended with his painting to update the representation of Brazil’s natural environment, renew the practice of landscape painting, and play a leading role in artistic, historical and naturalistic discussions about Brazilian forests. The painting reconfigured aesthetic experience, I propose, to include a new ecological perspective.

In April 2026, the Portuguese parliament approved drastic changes to its citizenship law. The new law tightens access for immigrants at a moment of intensifying nationalist, discriminatory, and anti-migration rhetoric in the country. It is within this political crisis that René Tavares’ (b. 1983, São Tomé e Príncipe) “Pessoa” por detrás do véu (2025) intervenes. The installation consists of twenty-four portraits of racialized individuals, sixteen of which are obscured by a translucent veil embroidered with the Portuguese coat of arms, stages citizenship not as a neutral legal status but as an imperial instrument of exclusion, violence, and erasure. The paper argues that Tavares exposes and critiques citizenship as a continuation of colonial logics by mobilizing national symbols as tools of critique. Drawing upon decolonial theory on citizenship, the analysis frames it as an unstable and invented tradition constructed by dominant groups to produce

political Others. Ariella Azoulay’s concept of the “imperial shutter,” developed in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019), further contextualizes the veil’s visual operation: the coat of arms severs individuals from their histories and reduces their identities to their citizenship status. The paper situates this within the post-colonial history of Portugal's relationship with São Tomé e Príncipe, tracing how centuries of extraction and enslavement continue to produce the

socio-economic marginalization of Santomean diasporic communities in contemporary Lisbon. Crucially, Tavares does not simply reproduce imperial binaries. The paper highlights the ambiguity embedded in the installation—why are some portraits covered while others are not?—and how it disrupts and destabilizes the categories citizenship imposes. By visually exposing their artificiality, Tavares renders the divisions of citizenship fragile, enacting a decolonial challenge to the structures that continue to determine belonging in Portugal.

In his 1933 manifesto “Spirit of Truth” Le Corbusier — arguing for the particular ability of the movie camera to extend human vision beyond its standard capacities, or beyond the mediation of the world calibrated to human understanding — lamented, “I want the lens now to disclose the intensity of human consciousness to us through the intermediary of visual phenomena which are so subtle and rapid in nature that we have no means to discover and record them, we are unable to observe them, we simply feel their radiance.” Le Corbusier’s belief in cinema’s unique ability to disclose phenomena which is generally felt rather than seen and his desire for an expression of that unobservable radiance communicates both the limitations of visual representation and the cinematic apparatus’s ability to transgress these limitations. The act of translating what is illegible to human vision seems to anticipate the sentiment expressed in one of Derek Jarman’s journal entries which recalls early memories of his childhood garden, where the artist attentively observed the way light manipulated the color of spring flowers “in that precious time I would stand and watch the garden grow, something imperceptible to my

friends” The reward of sustained attention, an attunement to the seemingly imperceptible passage of time is at the core of Jarman’s seminal film Blue which, it can be argued, does disclose the intensity of human consciousness through its rejection of coherent narrative, its bubbling multiplicity, and its attempt to render the invisible and the undefinable through a visual medium.

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Blue’s use of poetic, even sublime, expression rather than traditional documentary modes and its multiple, nonhierarchical instantiations (none exist entirely separate from the others and the multiple access points vary but are not easily organized or contained) materializes meaning which may not have been possible to communicate explicitly or literally. The rejection of traditional filmic and documentary modes opens the door to the possibility of representation outside the limitations of capitalist realism and emphasizes the difficulty of depicting both a devastating crisis and institutional homophobia. Blue as both a visual object in a capitalist society and an explicit condemnation of the Thatcher administration’s inaction and suppression of research and resources during the HIV/AIDS crisis, provides a counter or an intervention into the totalizing visuality capitalist realism imposes on us. It could be said that Blue’s subversion of documentary and cinematic expectations (whether that be its rejection of figural representation or its manifold instantiations) encourages an alternative kind of vision attuned to multiple registers of evidence, and makes the threshold of detectability – the fact that images are intentionally made illegible to human vision – clear.

Created during the Peninsular War and published only decades after its conclusion, Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–1820) has long been interpreted as a powerful condemnation of violence and human suffering. While scholars have emphasized the series’ universal critique of war, this paper argues that crisis shaped not only the subject matter of the prints but also their material production. Rather than treating material shortages as a minor historical circumstance, I examine how wartime scarcity became embedded within the physical structure of the series itself.

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Through close readings of selected plates, including ¡Qué valor! (Plate 7), No quieren (Plate 9), Y no hai remedio (Plate 15), and Yo lo vi (Plate 44), I explore how Goya dismantles heroic narratives and replaces them with images of anonymous suffering, moral ambiguity, and collective trauma. These scenes resist nationalist triumphalism and instead construct a visual language of violence that transcends specific historical actors and events.

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The paper then turns to the material conditions of printmaking during wartime Spain. Drawing on evidence of copper shortages, the reuse of earlier plates, and Goya’s adaptation of the lavis technique in response to the scarcity of high-quality rosin, I argue that the series

functions as a material archive of crisis. The physical deterioration of the plates across successive impressions does not merely record technical limitations; it mirrors the erosion of bodies, memory, and social order represented within the images themselves.

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By bringing together visual analysis and material history, this paper reframes Disasters of War as both a representation of catastrophe and a product of it. Goya’s prints demonstrate howartistic production is shaped by conditions of crisis, transforming material fragility into a lasting form of historical witness.

In the fall of 1815, Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street became quite busy with the energy of American democracy in action. On election day, crowds of all ages pressed together outside the Pennsylvania Statehouse as American flags snapped overhead from brick facades. John Lewis Krimmel’s 1815 oil painting Election Day in Philadelphia captures this vibrant disorder. A gaudy election float carrying a familiar and comforting image of George Washington draws cheers. Men argue outside a tavern door, a drunken figure sprawls in the street as children chase dogs between the legs of the crowd. Women in bonnets and shawls gather in animated conversation and gesture toward posted broadsides. Black men and women stand among the

crowd hawking foodstuffs, claiming space even though they cannot cast ballots. Though these events may or may not have happened all at once or at all, election day was certainly a grand occasion that was marked by constant motion and competing claims to space and attention. Rather than presenting an idealized vision of republican harmony, Krimmel composed a lively unruly tableau of American life.

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John Lewis Krimmel’s painting reframes early republican democracy not as a fixed legal achievement secured by the American Revolution, but as a lived performative practice enacted in urban streets. Through his outsider perspective as a German immigrant, Krimmel reveals how democracy was lived and performed on Chestnut Street, where diverse Philadelphians asserted forms of belonging even as formal citizenship remained restricted. Krimmel depicted Philadelphia as a microcosm of the nation’s unresolved tensions, twenty-nine years after independence and mere months after the conclusion of the War of 1812. How does the outsider perspective of an immigrant artist transform an ordinary election-day crowd into a visual record about who belongs in the early American republic?

The Protestant Reformation constitutes one of the major crises of early modern Europe, marked by profound religious, political, and social upheavals. In this context of confessional fracture, printed images emerged as a crucial medium through which crisis was not only represented, but actively shaped and intensified. This paper examines Reformation engravings produced in the sixteenth-century Low Countries as artistic responses to crisis, focusing on their role in constructing and disseminating forms of visual violence.

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Drawing on a corpus including The Pope-Donkey, The Monk-Calf, Gorgoneum Caput, and the series Abbildung des Papstthums, this study approaches engravings as « rhetorical machines » that articulate critique through highly codified visual strategies. These images deploy grotesque distortion, hybridization, and scatological motifs to attack the Roman Church and its representatives, producing a form of symbolic violence that seeks to discredit, degrade, and ultimately dismantle the authority of the papacy. Such violence is not merely representational: it operates performatively, generating emotional responses (laughter, disgust, fear) that engage the viewer and transform reception into an active site of ideological positioning.

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In this sense, engraving functions as a form of early mass media, capable of reaching broad audiences through the combination of image and text. Its effectiveness lies in its reproducibility, circulation, and adaptability, as visual motifs are repeated and reconfigured according to shifting socio-political conditions and constraints of censorship. The tension between textual and visual registers is central to this process, forming a unified dispositif that enhances the persuasive and affective power of the image.

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By analyzing these works as responses to crisis, this paper argues that Reformation engravings do not merely reflect confessional conflict but actively participate in its escalation, transforming crisis into a visible, shared, and emotionally charged experience.

In the 2024 Icelandic presidential election, an unusual new candidate gained public attention: Snæfellsjökul, a glacier that sits on top of a 700,000-year-old stratovolcano along Iceland’s western coast. Perhaps most well known for being the geologic opening in Jules

Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Snæfellsjökul has long cultural and environmental ties to the people of Iceland; it is also projected to melt away by 2100. Thus, the movement to elevate Snæfellsjökul to the highest political office comes at an acute moment of crisis as an opportunity to move beyond just advocacy for the protection of natural features and establish legal rights for more-than-human entities following the precedent of Ecuador, who in 2008 became the first nation to constitutionally adopt the Rights of Nature. Similarly, in recent years artists like Olafur Eliasson have asserted the ways in which non-human beings (such as ice) act as participants in a globalized world, reframing them as agents of their/our future. This paper argues that these contemporary movements towards recognizing nature’s agency are deeply connected to a tradition of environmentally-minded conceptual art-making in Iceland that began

with the group SÚM in the mid-1960s. The members of SÚM came of age during the period of American military occupation and cultural imperialism of Iceland after WWII. Their work was routinely critical towards this interference, and often indexed the natural environment either by situating art outside or bringing elements of the outdoors into the gallery, such as soil, ice, moss, and animal droppings. Confronting the Western epistemological binaries of nature/culture and material/immaterial, SÚM challenged viewers to embrace the messy and unpredictable forces of Iceland’s landscape as a counter to imperialist rationality. In doing so, they demonstrated how art can mediate between systems enacted by humans and those governed by the laws of nature. This paper historicizes the climate crisis within an Icelandic context by considering SÚM’s legacy as increasingly relevant for the Rights of Nature movement. However, climate change recognizes no borders, meaning it is crucial that we recognize the broader environmental, political, and cultural implications of nominating a glacier for president.

Argentina’s Dirty War was characterised by the imprisonment and disappearance of iintellectuals, artists, and others who ran in the same circles as Héctor Germán Oesterheld. Oesterheld's own tragic story exemplifies the treachery of the Argentine landscape. He was a

journalist and comic artist who wrote popular children's books alongside the Eternauta series. The original El Eternauta ran in a weekly comic magazine called Hora Cero during the ban on use of

Peronist symbols and doctrines. Oesterheld obfuscates the political repression through abstraction, by referring to the autocratic invaders as aliens rather than the Aramburu regime. Despite this, Oesterheld was disappeared at the very beginning of the Dirty War at some point during the release of El Eternauta II from 1976 to 1978. He was captured, imprisoned, and murdered by the military regime, as were all four of his daughters by 1978.

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The original El Eternauta comic was published in 1957, then the 1969 comic, and finally Eternauta II, which ran from 1976 to 1978. A darker narrative and art style, the use of a different illustrator, and the presence in a general entertainment magazine distinguished the 1969 edition. All three versions of the comics told the post-apocalyptic story of an alien invasion of Earth and the resistance of an astronaut. The narrative shift in 1969 is that the alien invasion is no longer a global catastrophe. Rather, the global superpowers have negotiated with the aliens and given them South America. Rather than watering down or censoring El Eternauta for the more general audience of Gente, Oesterheld confronts them directly with the violent structures of neocoloniality, capitalism, and violence. Oesterheld used the contrast between context and content to drive home the precarity and contradiction of Argentine life and art in this period.

In the center of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania stands a brick building where Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Anyone passing by in the summer of 2024, however, came face-to-face with blinking eyes peering out of and obstructing each of its windows. These eyes belonged to descendents of either Robert Hemmings– the enslaved valet who accompanied Jefferson to Philadelphia– or other enslaved people of Jefferson’s plantation,

Monticello. The Philadelphia organization Monument Lab staged this temporary installation entitled Declaration House in collaboration with American artist Sonya Clark to create a countermonument in response to the question, “what does the Declaration of Independence mean to us today?” In doing so, they centered the forgotten history of Hemmings and the unspoken contradiction of slavery in the contemporary viewer’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence.

This paper argues that Declaration House offers three responses to the crisis of America’s foreclosed memorial landscape and its underlying history. First, the countermonument disrupted a site of anti-Black contradiction in order to generate new forms of historical value, conventional representation, and collective memory. Second, by engaging with existing sites of unfreedom as part of the struggle towards equality, Declaration House exemplifies Institutional Critique as a response to historical and representational crises. Third, and most critically, Declaration House’s restorative and institutional methodologies limit its redress of liberalism’s contradictions by

remaining within liberal epistemologies.

The legacy of slavery, the American monument landscape, and Institutional Critique in Declaration House triangulate and make concrete the intertwined crises of American history, art, and art historical methodologies. My goal with this paper, like that of Monument Lab but perhaps leading to different conclusions, is to develop aesthetics and histories which critique our inheritance without giving up on art and history as such.

Building on Anishinaabe literary scholar Grace Dillon's claim that the "Native Apocalypse" has already occurred, this paper examines how post/apocalyptic' photography reframes crisis by presenting apocalypse as a construct and consequence of settler modernity rather than a universal end. In dominant crisis discourse and the popular imagination alike, apocalypse usually appears as a future catastrophe rather than an already-lived condition. Indigenous Futurisms challenges this eschatological model by asserting that colonization has already produced world-ending conditions for Indigenous peoples through layered forms of colonial violence. In this context, apocalyptic imagery does not simply picture a world that might end. It confronts the afterlife of colonial world-ending and the persistence of Native peoples beyond it.

Focusing on Diné photographer Will Wilson's Auto Immune Response and Shinnecock photographer Jeremy Dennis's Rise, alongside selected images of Indigeneity from non-Native photographer Patrick Nagatani's Nuclear Enchantment, this paper considers how post/apocalyptic photographs expose apocalypse as a crisis generated by settler ways of life while offering distinct visions of survival, return, and continuity after catastrophe. Wilson imagines Diné survival in a toxic future, Dennis recasts zombie apocalypse and haunting motifs as settler fear of Indigenous return and invasion, and Nagatani places Indigenous cultural practice against the military technologies of nuclear apocalypse. When read through the tension between settler-colonial and Indigenous temporal frameworks, these images shift from showing a speculative future collapse to confronting an already post-apocalyptic present. As a result, what appears as collapse from the perspective of settler modernity becomes a scene. of Indigenous return, survivance, and resurgence.

How do artists register crisis when direct speech is censored? This paper proposes that women artists working with film and video in Argentina and Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s developed a dissident aesthetic language rooted in bodily gesture: a mode of expression that operated below the threshold of political visibility precisely because it drew on the ordinary. Examining works by Anna Bella Geiger, Letícia Parente, Narcisa Hirsch, and Marie Louise

Alemann, I argue that their use of quotidian, repetitive actions—walking up staircases, sewing into skin, injecting one's own body with “vaccines” against racism and political mystification, consuming raw liver and cultural artifacts—transformed the body into both a symptom of authoritarian violence and an instrument of its critique.

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Drawing on Michel de Certeau's theorization of the everyday as a site of tactical resistance, Arlindo Machado's account of new media as the “interface” between body and city, and Esther Gabara's analysis of gesture as non-performative yet politically charged, this paper traces how these artists mobilized the intimate scale of portable video and small-gauge film to produce what Nelly Richard calls a bodily rupture in hegemonic visual codes. The camera is understood not as a transparent recording device but as an active mediator: handheld framing, extended close-up, and unedited single takes all collaborate with the body to render visible what official media suppressed.

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Situating these practices within the broader “crisis” of Latin American military dictatorships and the conditions under which art was produced, distributed, and received, this paper also reflects on the methodological stakes of recovering experimental new media archives from Argentina and Brazil—archives that remain marginalized within global histories of video art—to better understand the intersection of crisis and creative practice.

In Letícia Parente’s 1975 video piece Marca Registrada, Parente takes a few steps, settles into a chair, threads a needle, and proceeds to sew the words “MADE IN BRASIL” into the sole of her foot. For just over ten minutes, the audience flinches and squirms at each push of the needle through the meat of her feet. As Parente’s movements stay practiced and consistent, the audience becomes a spectator to her practiced pain. In the final reveal of the words she has sewn into her flesh, we begin to understand this act of self-mutilation in conversation with broader critiques of Brazil’s contemporary political and economic reality, rather than a private or individual concern.

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Though her work stood as a departure from that of perhaps more explicitly militant works by groups like Tucumán Arde in Uruguay or the later Colectivo Acciones de Art in Chile, both championed by Latin American critics like Luis Camnitzer, Parente’s videos function within a similar liberatory strategic mode as the aforementioned groups. Limited by the violent consequences of Brazil’s military regime, Parente developed unique bodily strategies of political opposition. In bearing witness to the penetrative, violent manipulations she imposes onto her flesh, Parente’s audience is moved to understand state violence and repression not as a distant factor in their lives, but an urgent reality with stakes in their own body. It is through these strategies of political opposition, then, that Parente’s work comes to serve as a singular model for artistic resistance in the face of twenty-first century facism.

This paper argues for a reconsideration of the border as articulated by Central American performance artists Regina José Galindo and Guadalupe Maravilla, shifting from a site-specific framework to a geographically and temporally ambiguous one. The “ambiguous border” elucidates bordered systems of subjugation which permeate communities beyond border towns, as mechanisms of constraint, such as policing, detention, and surveillance, produce bordered places across the United States. By employing Border as Method and building on the scholarship of Kency Cornejo, this paper illustrates how gesture becomes a tool for articulating a relationship to the border which transcends specific place and time. Additionally this paper argues for an isthmus-based approach, looking to legacies of U.S. Cold War intervention and violent discourse around the “migrant crisis” to evidence the necessity of a Central American specificity. Drawing on lived-experience of Central American migrants in their performance practices, Galindo and Maravilla simultaneously reveal the systems of bordering which produce this fluid border and participate in a decolonizing of time and space. As technologies of surveillance become more pervasive and privacy norms continue to be dissolved, grappling with notions of bordering mechanisms becomes imperative. This paper reveals how Central American performance artists disrupt static notions of bordering systems and migrant status, serving to underscore imperative lessons in a moment where definitions of citizen and migrant are made further unstable by

attacks on birth-right citizenship and the brutality of ICE agents in cities across the United States. Looking to artists and communities most marginalized by bordered experiences, this paper credits Central American performance and gesture with unveiling the ambiguous border.

On a narrow beige wall at the 2015 Armory Show, ninety small black urns were evenly spaced across nine shelves—ten on each shelf. On adjacent walls painted scarlet red, over one hundred memorializing prints in gold frames hung Salon-style, overwhelming the space and the viewer. These prints do not memorialize human losses, nor do the urns hold human remains. Rather, this body of work by Brandon Ballengée indexes species loss during the current geological era of the Holocene (or the Sixth Mass Extinction).

To create the works in this elegiac series, titled Frameworks of Absence (2006–present), Ballengée first carves the image of an extinct animal’s body out of a print that is contemporaneous with the species’ loss. He then performs a ceremonial “cremation” of the

excised image, which acts as a representative of the disappeared species as a whole, and places the ashes into a small urn. The excavated print is placed into a backless frame, allowing the viewer to see through the object to the gallery wall on which it hangs. The resulting prints thus abstractly represent the unrepresentable: they archive the absence of species through their disappearance from historical prints and through the haunting shadows they cast on gallery walls.

I will consider the solicitation of eco-grief, the politics of mourning, and the veiled institutional critiques that are folded into the Frameworks of Absence and its methods of operation. As I will demonstrate, this series registers biodiversity losses through iconoclastic excisions from existing prints, conducted in service of two principal aims: prompting productive processes of grieving and mourning, and critiquing the value systems of modern museums, all

with the intention that viewers will be inclined to experience an emotional response to immense ecological loss and use the transformational process of mourning to propel future conservation

endeavors.

Object Lessons and An Autobiography of Miss Wish, two projects by Nina Berman (the second with Kimberly Stevens), both address how sexual violence and human trafficking affect survivors, with an emphasis on how the aftermath, and specifically Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder disrupts and fragments memory and changes the way one moves in the world. Both works, albeit in different ways, also seek to reconstruct fragments of survivors’ narratives to build something like a new narrative post-violence. The communication and representation of sexual abuse are processes that involve a complex translation of embodied experience. Whether victims of these crimes share their experiences within the constraints defined by the legal rules of evidence, or in alternative forums, survivors must navigate frameworks of visibility which constrain how testimonies might be received. Most photojournalistic documentation of human trafficking and gender-based violence defaults to envision this kind of violence as spectacle. Photojournalistic methods search an image that captures violence as one moment of intense, visually striking, and unambiguous victimization. What is left out in these narratives is the aftermath: the quieter, and more difficult to capture moments in which violence lingers, is dragged through from the past into the present—the way survivors carry the weight of spectacular moments of violence.  As Ariella Azoulay suggests, the differential principle organizes vision and citizenship in ways that create a distance between the spectator and the subject, positioning victims of violence as outside the social contract— and this has been essential to the logics of photojournalistic documentation of gender-based violence. By refusing this distance, both Object Lessons and Miss Wish capture a more holistic image of both sexual violence and of the survivors. These projects allow the trauma of survivors to be more fully witnessed in ways that foster human connection: presenting their suffering not as isolated or distant, but as deeply intertwined with the viewer’s own social world.