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Call for papers

Annual conference of The Nordic Society of Aesthetics, 28-30 May 2015

Aesthetics, Contemporaneity, Art

 

Recent theoretical developments claim that the general condition of our everyday life and artistic production today is one of contemporaneity, where the urgent question of being with time, or being genuinely ‘contemporary’, is a matter of understanding a coexistence of different temporalities and various ‘ways of being in relation to time’. Thus, in recent decades we have seen a worldwide shift from modernity and postmodernity to contemporaneity, perhaps most evident in the fact that “contemporary art” has substituted “modern art” as descriptor of the art of our historical present. Advances in communication technologies – in short, the internet – in particular have produced an extreme spatial and temporal compression, which alters the ways in which we experience places, events, and time as everything happens as if contemporaneously.

With this conference we want to explore the aesthetics of our contemporary time, this condition of contemporaneity, and its relations to art and aesthetics more generally. We propose to analyze and discuss how contemporaneity affects our experience of time, aesthetic sensibility, the everyday, and our conception of contemporary art.

 

Topics of interest might include, but are not limited to:

  • Contemporary art in general
  • Aesthetics and the everyday in contemporary society
  • Specific art practices
  • Image-circulation
  • Aesthetics between modernity and/or postmodernity and contemporaneity
  • The very concept of contemporaneity
  • World art, world literature, world music
  • Post-history
  • Globalization/mondialisation
  • Cosmopolitanism and sensus communis
  • The role(s) of media/technology in the production of contemporaneity

 

Keynote speakers:  Thierry de Duve (New York), Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann (Uppsala), David Joselit (CUNY), and Dan Karlholm (Södertörn)

 

Conference venue: Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark.

 

Paper proposals of no more than 200 words should be sent before 15 February 2015 to nsae2015@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance or not by 15 March 2015.

 

PhD students are strongly encouraged to submit a proposal.

 

Participation without paper is welcome as well – however we kindly ask that you register via the above e-mail address before 1 April 2015.

 

Conference fee: 550 DKK/PhD Students 300 DKK

(includes one year membership of The Nordic Society of Aesthetics and one year subscription to The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics – members who have paid the 2015 fee will have their conference fee reduced by 300 DKK/150 DKK).

Conference dinner: 300 DKK/PhD Students 200 DKK.

  

The Organizers:

Morten Kyndrup, Jacob Lund, Thomas Bjørnsten, Birgitte Stougaard, Lotte Philipsen, and Lea Muldtofte Olsen.

 

Please circulate this CfP in your network. A downloadable pdf-version of the call will be available

For a printable version of the Call for Papers, see here