During the past 50 years, contemporary art practices, theories and criticism have engaged deeply with the many postnational challenges to national sovereignties yet the nation state and nationalisms are as strong and influential as ever.
New approaches are needed that seek out the transnational, lateral contacts and resonances between artists and across borders that now proliferate and better understand the relationship between these apparent antinomies that increasingly shape the emerging post-Western world. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the Postnational Art Histories Program will examine intersections between Indigenous, migrant, diasporic, postcolonial, global and transcultural studies within a world of nation states.
Program Coordinators: Professor Ian McLean, Professor Charles Green and Professor Claire Roberts
Projects
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What is Postnational Art History?
Edited by Charles Green and Ian McLean, designed by Beaziyt Worcou, and conceived as part of a colloquium of art historians convened at the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre – the Yolgnu art centre in Yirrkala, situated in north-east Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Top End – this book aims to tease out and better understand the transnational resonances and connections between artists across cultures and borders that increasingly shape the emerging post-Western world
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2020-2023 ARC Discovery 'Abbey Art Centre: London,1946-56'
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2021-2023 ARC SRI 'The war at home: art describes Australia’s turbulent present'
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Double Nation by Ian McLean
In this major new account Ian McLean traces the history of Australian art, from colonial art practice to the search for a national art in the twentieth century.
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The image is not nothing (Concrete Archives)
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TERRY SMITH | Marking Places, Cross-Hatching Worlds: The Yirrkala Panels
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Heart of Artness | Podcast series
A journey into the cross-cultural currents that animate Aboriginal art in Australia
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Black Palestinian Solidarity - Conference 2019
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Imants Tillers Seminar
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Yirrkala Workshop 2019
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The Aboriginal Memorial 30th Anniversary Lecture
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The Aboriginal Memorial 30th Anniversary Symposium
Banner Image: Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Deep Rock, 2011, oil on linen, 172 x 172 cms. Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales