Appel à contribution : « Image and Ascent. Mountain Terrains in the History of Art », Londres, The Warburg Institute, 18-19 juin 2020, date limite le 1 décembre 2019

Organisers: Dr Joanne Anderson and Dr Carla Benzan

The organisers of the conference, Image and Ascent: Mountain Terrains in the History of Art, have announced an open call for papers to be presented at the conference taking place 18-19 June 2020 at the Warburg Institute.

That artworks are closely tied to the landscape in which they are produced is often taken for granted, and yet the recent ecological turn in the humanities has only begun to critically intervene in the methodology of writing art’s histories. The two-day conference, Image and Ascent, raises related questions, highlighting new research of an interdisciplinary nature on images of and images in mountainous terrains that are remote, dangerous, and difficult to navigate but equally focusing on those that engage with the mountains as places of residence, work, devotion as well as sites of artistic production and exchange. We welcome papers addressing a range of global and trans-historical case studies circa 1300-present day to attend to, rather than flatten, such terrains. In reference to the physical features of an area of land, the terrain raises the way in which human agents – artists, patrons, beholders, and scholars – must accommodate and respond to their natural environment. The conference therefore takes the position that such challenges prompt scholars and arts practitioners to productively confront crucial issues to the study of both nature and art, including embodied experience, movement, and temporal duration. As such, the conference brings recent interest in mountains across the humanities into important dialogue with the history of images and contributes to a broader enquiry into the role of images in understanding historical change across time and space.

The conference will include keynote addresses from Jason König (University of St. Andrews) and Christopher P. Heuer (University of Rochester).

Application Details
Proposals for 20-minute papers should comprise:

• 250-word abstract with working title
• 150-word biography

Papers can address, but are not limited to, the following topics related to mountain research:

• cultural transfer and acculturation
• iconographic transmission
• workshop practice and circulation
• artists’ travels and other itineraries
• ritual imagery and architecture + embodied experience
• art and scientific enquiry/exploration
• mountains as site of performance and ritual
• climate and landscape
• historical writings about sites and artworks
• historiography

Submissions should be emailed to: imageandascent@gmail.com

Deadline for submission: 1 December 2019

Selected participants will be notified in January 2020.

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