The UMPRUM Centre for Doctoral Studies is organising the international conference Thinking With Materials, which focuses on the materials of artworks — how they behave, transform, and how they are worked with. The conference will offer diverse historical, geographical, and methodological perspectives, local and regional traditions, overlooked voices, and forms of knowledge emerging from artistic and craft practices.
The two-day programme will feature keynote lectures by Prof. Milena Bartlová and Prof. Ann-Sophie Lehmann.
In a discipline as object-oriented as art history, the material from which its objects of study are made might seem an obvious starting point for research. Yet learning how to think about objects is inseparable from the discipline’s historiography, methodological approaches, and theoretical vocabularies, in which material itself has not always held as self-evident a place as one might expect. Or is this too sweeping a claim?
Thinking with Materials Across Histories and Practices turns to materials themselves as starting points for inquiry, asking what their properties, behaviors, and transformations can reveal that written sources alone may not. At the same time, the contributions gathered here complicate the idea that materials have simply been overlooked, tracing histories of material-oriented thinking through local and regional traditions, overlooked voices, and forms of knowledge rooted in making and craft.
Across six panels – Making as Knowing, The Nature of Materials, Rethinking Art-Historical Categories, Agency Between Art and Matter, Storied Matter, and Nature as Co-Artist – doctoral and early-career researchers will approach materials from diverse historical, geographical, and methodological perspectives. Moving between conservation and historiography, craft and artistic practice, and natural and manufactured materials, the papers consider material agency, processes of making, ecological entanglements, and the categories through which we have learned to describe objects.
Central to the conference will be keynote lectures by Prof. Ann-Sophie Lehmann (University of Groningen) and Prof. Milena Bartlová (UMPRUM, Prague).
For two days in Prague, we will think with and through materials. Tune in, hands on, cause we are living in a material world!
To participate online, please register in advance via Zoom: https://cesnet.zoom.us/meeting/register/agoTvcvlReagq5rlxNPudA
After you register, you will receive a confirmation email with instructions on how to join the meeting.
Conference programme