A conversation with scholars Yvonne Low and Mary Roberts, and artist Simryn Gill, about the poetics and ethics of research.
Artists and art historians both trade in stories, facts and ideas. Underpinning the seeming solidity of these forms, however, is the slippery practice of research - the work of reading and looking, of collecting and organising, of listening and taking notes. In contrast to the standardised formats that characterise art and art history's public appearances (books, articles, artworks), research work is often deeply personal, beset by contingencies and ungovernable forces. Individual research practices - although not often seen or discussed out loud - have their own poetics and ethics.
In this event, artist Simryn Gill will join art historians Mary Roberts and Yvonne Low in conversation about the research practices that underpin their work, reflecting on the poetics and ethics that shape them, and the forms of knowledge that they expose and conceal.
This event is linked to Simryn Gill's 2024 Schaeffer Library Artist Residency. The Residency is made possible by a generous individual gift to the Power Institute.
More about the Schaeffer Library Art Program
More about Artist in Residence, Simryn Gill
People
Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill is an artist whose work spans photography, drawing, printing, object making and writing. Gill articulates the poetics of history, power and identity that striate the places and environments between which she lives and moves. With Tom Melick she runs Stolon Press, a small publisher of books and pamphlets in Sydney. In 2023 Gill's work was shown at MCA, Sydney; Barbican, London; Singapore Art Museum; Linnaen Society, London. Gill has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Singapore Biennale (2006), documenta (2007, 2012), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2022), Venice Biennale (2013) and Dhaka Art Summit (2018), Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024).
Yvonne Low
Yvonne Low is an art historian in Asian Art. She is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, teaching Art History and Curating in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate programs. She researches on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, with an interest in Chinese diasporic cultures, women’s history, and digital methods. As editorial committee to Southeast of Now Journal (NUS Press), Yvonne is committed to advancing scholarship in the region. She is currently an advisory committee member for The Flow of History (AWARE/Asia Art Archive), The Womanifesto Way Digital Anthology (Power Institute, DFAT, 4A) and co-developer of digital tool, Artists Trajectories Map.
Mary Roberts
Mary Roberts is Professor of Art History and Nineteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sydney. Her scholarship focuses on European Orientalist and modern Ottoman art, with particular interest in artistic exchanges, histories of collecting, and the various ways in which Orientalist images are mediated in paintings, travelogues, interiors, and news media. Her work lies at the intersection of modernism and Orientalism, and traces global networks that inform nineteenth-century European and Islamic art. Her books include: Istanbul Exchanges. Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (University of California Press, 2015), awarded AAANZ’s Best Book Prize, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke University Press, 2007) and four co-edited books: The Poetics and Politics of Place (Pera Museum, 2011) Edges of Empire (Blackwells, 2005), Orientalism’s Interlocutors (Duke, 2002) and Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (Power Publications, 2000). In 2023, she coedited a major translation project: Victor Marie De Launay et al., Ottoman Architecture: A Study Published for the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair (Gorgias, 2023). Her next book, Four Thresholds: Orientalist Interiors, Islamic Art, the Aesthetics of Global Modernities, is under contract with University of Chicago Press.
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