Visual Research Program

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A program about new ways of conducting and sharing research on contemporary art and visual culture, between the University and the Museum.

Visions forum, 15-17 August 2024.

The VRP is a three-year collaborative partnership between the MCA Australia and the Power Institute which aims to explore and showcase new ways of conducting research on contemporary art and visual culture.

Announced in June 2023, the VRP is the product of conversations between MCA Australia’s Suzanne Cotter and Lara Strongman, and Power Director Mark Ledbury, and represents a reunion of two organisations that have a shared history.

The VRP will involve discrete research projects focused on the science and technology of vision, the visual culture of the Pacific region, and the concept of custodianship. The research projects will bring together experts from within the Museum and the University, and will produce a range of outputs for different audiences: public events, publications and digital offerings.

Events

Past

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Visions

15 August 2024, 10:00AM
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
This event has ended.

A forum on the contemporary art, science and politics of seeing.

Photograph of David Getsy
David J. Getsy

Unnatural relations: Queer abstraction and the intercourse of forms in contemporary art

13 December 2024, 5:30PM
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
This event has ended.

A lecture by David Getsy, one of the US's foremost thinkers of the relationships between art, performance and queer studies.

People

Photograph of David Getsy
David J. Getsy

David J. Getsy writes to recover the queer and transgender capacities that have been lost or suppressed in histories of art and performance. His areas of research and teaching span modern and contemporary art and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on queer and transgender histories and methods. He has published eight books, including Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (Chicago 2022; winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award in 2023); Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015; reissued in paperback 2023); and the widely-read anthology of artists’ writings Queer (MIT 2016; multiple reprintings).  

Getsy is the inaugural Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. He studied at Oberlin College (B.A. Hons, 1995) and Northwestern University (M.A., Ph.D., 2002). His fellowships and awards include those from the Dedalus Foundation, the Terra Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Clark Art Institute, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Getty Foundation, Dartmouth College, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Kress Foundation. In 2023, he received a university-wide Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities from the University of Virginia. He previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2005 to 2021 and was, from 2011 onwards, the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History and, since 2022, Professor Emeritus.