Verónica Tello
Senior Lecturer, Contemporary Art History and Theory
I am a Chilean-Australian art historian and writer. My research predominantly focuses on the transnational politics and archives in/out of the Pacific, Latin America and Australia.
I completed my PhD (art history) at the University of Melbourne in 2013. My PhD was the basis of my first book, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (Radical Aesthetics Radical Art series, Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2016). The book takes as its historical focus the protracted ‘global refugee crisis' from the 1990s to the present, across Australia, the UK and the Americas. It analyses how, within contexts marked by intensified border politics, contemporary artists have been grappling with how to represent, archive or abstract contested migratory histories. Within national landscapes brimming with monuments, 'counter-memorial aesthetics' opens up numerous tactics to understand the various ways that often invisible and/or erased migratory histories pass through us, and have the potential to reshape us, time and again.
My second book, Future South: 8 Dialogues on Art and History is forthcoming (March, 2023) with Discipline and Third Text Publications. Through 8 dialogues, the book develops a moving conceptual vocabulary of the aesthetics, politics, histories and potentialities of the Global South in collaboration with artists, writers and curators such as: Salote Tawale, Rolando López, James Nguyen Walter Mignolo, Dylan AT Miner, Zoe Butt, Jennifer Biddle, Ruth Simbao, Rachel O'Reilly, Carla Macchiavello and many others. (The project began in 2017 as an online dialogical project, futuresouths.org, and is substantially developed for the book).
I am currently developing a monograph on the exhibition history of Art in Chile: An Audiovisual Documentation (1986), curated by Juan Dávlia and Nelly Richard, and the associated catalogue/book Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile after 1973 (1986), published by Art & Text, authored by Richard and translated by Dávila and Paul Foss.
In addition, with Salote Tawale and Ien Ang, I am currently working on an ARC Linkage project focussed on how collections and archives can catalyse epistemological experiments and equity (or, structural change) within Australian regional art museums. The project, entitled Parallel, is developed in partnership with Murray Albury Museum of Art (MAMA) and embraces the potential of the ‘parallel’ or the ‘para’ as a way of being adjacent to, beyond or distinct from the structural formations that are typically the case in Australian art institutions.
From 2023-2027 I will be the Editor in Chief of the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, published by Taylor & Francis. I am currently Sydney editor of Memo Review.
More info: https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-veronica-tello
I am a Chilean-Australian art historian and writer. My research predominantly focuses on the transnational politics and archives in/out of the Pacific, Latin America and Australia.
I completed my PhD (art history) at the University of Melbourne in 2013. My PhD was the basis of my first book, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (Radical Aesthetics Radical Art series, Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2016). The book takes as its historical focus the protracted ‘global refugee crisis' from the 1990s to the present, across Australia, the UK and the Americas. It analyses how, within contexts marked by intensified border politics, contemporary artists have been grappling with how to represent, archive or abstract contested migratory histories. Within national landscapes brimming with monuments, 'counter-memorial aesthetics' opens up numerous tactics to understand the various ways that often invisible and/or erased migratory histories pass through us, and have the potential to reshape us, time and again.
My second book, Future South: 8 Dialogues on Art and History is forthcoming (March, 2023) with Discipline and Third Text Publications. Through 8 dialogues, the book develops a moving conceptual vocabulary of the aesthetics, politics, histories and potentialities of the Global South in collaboration with artists, writers and curators such as: Salote Tawale, Rolando López, James Nguyen Walter Mignolo, Dylan AT Miner, Zoe Butt, Jennifer Biddle, Ruth Simbao, Rachel O'Reilly, Carla Macchiavello and many others. (The project began in 2017 as an online dialogical project, futuresouths.org, and is substantially developed for the book).
I am currently developing a monograph on the exhibition history of Art in Chile: An Audiovisual Documentation (1986), curated by Juan Dávlia and Nelly Richard, and the associated catalogue/book Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile after 1973 (1986), published by Art & Text, authored by Richard and translated by Dávila and Paul Foss.
In addition, with Salote Tawale and Ien Ang, I am currently working on an ARC Linkage project focussed on how collections and archives can catalyse epistemological experiments and equity (or, structural change) within Australian regional art museums. The project, entitled Parallel, is developed in partnership with Murray Albury Museum of Art (MAMA) and embraces the potential of the ‘parallel’ or the ‘para’ as a way of being adjacent to, beyond or distinct from the structural formations that are typically the case in Australian art institutions.
From 2023-2027 I will be the Editor in Chief of the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, published by Taylor & Francis. I am currently Sydney editor of Memo Review.
More info: https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-veronica-tello
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Books by Verónica Tello
Publication date: October 20, 2016
Abstract:
Restrictive border protection policies directed toward managing the flow of refugees coming into neoliberal democracies (and out of failing nation-states) are a defining feature of contemporary politics. In this book, Verónica Tello analyses how contemporary artists--such as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green--negotiate their diverse subject positions while addressing and taking part in the production of images associated with refugee experiences and histories. Tello argues that their practices, which manifest across a range of contexts including Cuba, the United States, Australia and Europe, represent an emergent, global paradigm of contemporary art, 'counter-memorial aesthetics'.
Counter-memorial aesthetics, Tello argues, is characterized by its conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers and voices of many times and places, generating an experimental, non-teleological approach to the construction of contemporary history, which also takes into account the complex, disorienting spatial affects of globalization. Spanning performance art, experimental 'history painting', aftermath photography and video installation, counter-memorial aesthetics bring to the fore, Tello argues, how contemporary refugee flows and related traumatic events critically challenge and conflict with many existing, tired if not also stubborn notions of national identity, borders, history and memory.
Building on the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, this book offers a useful concept of 'counter-memory' for the twenty-first century. It shows how counter-memorial aesthetics is not only central to the nexus of contemporary art and refugee histories but also how it can offer a way of being critically present with many other, often interrelated, global crises in the contemporary era.
http://bloomsbury.com/us/counter-memorial-aesthetics-9781474252737/
Book Chapters by Verónica Tello
Refereed Journal Articles by Verónica Tello
This article returns to several archives across Australia and Chile to trace the simultaneous developments of southern thinking, and asks what can be learned about the co-production of epistemologies across two distinct Pacific locations. The almost instant anachronism of art criticism, especially that on the margins, has meant that Art & Text’s and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series’s history of supporting Chilean art writing during the dictatorship has not been effectively transmitted into the present. It is, by now, pretty much unknown or forgotten in both Australia and Chile − and elsewhere − awaiting the attention of a younger generation of art workers hoping to connect to these fragmented histories.
Verónica Tello y Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia
Third Text, 28.6 (December, 2014), 555-562
Free download for those without access to Third Text:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/65x3pFdkmTNRu4ZkQbj9/full
Or
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775#.VbMVRjWzq-0
Non-Refereed Journal Articles and Reviews by Verónica Tello
Conference Presentations by Verónica Tello
Speakers include:
Zanny Begg (Art & Design, UNSW); Ruth Balint (History, UNSW); Rose Butler (Sociology, UNSW); Jennifer Hyndman (Human Geography, York University. Canada); Stephanie Hemelryk-Donald (Film, Media, Asian Studies, UNSW); Belinda Liddell (Psychiatry, UNSW); Jane McAdam (Law, UNSW); Violeta Moreno-Lax (Law, Queen Mary University, London); James Nguyen and Verónica Tello (both Art & Design, UNSW); Sharon Pickering (Criminology, Monash University); Suvendrini Perera (Cultural Studies, Curtin University) and Joseph Pugliese (Cultural Studies, Macquarie University); Eileen Pittaway (Social Sciences, UNSW); Claudia Tazreiter (Sociology, UNSW); Dan Tyler (Norwegian Refugee Council); David Sanderson (Built Environment, UNSW); and Caroline Wake (Theatre and Performance, UNSW)
Edited Exhibition Catalogues by Verónica Tello
Talks by Verónica Tello
Papers by Verónica Tello
Publication date: October 20, 2016
Abstract:
Restrictive border protection policies directed toward managing the flow of refugees coming into neoliberal democracies (and out of failing nation-states) are a defining feature of contemporary politics. In this book, Verónica Tello analyses how contemporary artists--such as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green--negotiate their diverse subject positions while addressing and taking part in the production of images associated with refugee experiences and histories. Tello argues that their practices, which manifest across a range of contexts including Cuba, the United States, Australia and Europe, represent an emergent, global paradigm of contemporary art, 'counter-memorial aesthetics'.
Counter-memorial aesthetics, Tello argues, is characterized by its conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers and voices of many times and places, generating an experimental, non-teleological approach to the construction of contemporary history, which also takes into account the complex, disorienting spatial affects of globalization. Spanning performance art, experimental 'history painting', aftermath photography and video installation, counter-memorial aesthetics bring to the fore, Tello argues, how contemporary refugee flows and related traumatic events critically challenge and conflict with many existing, tired if not also stubborn notions of national identity, borders, history and memory.
Building on the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, this book offers a useful concept of 'counter-memory' for the twenty-first century. It shows how counter-memorial aesthetics is not only central to the nexus of contemporary art and refugee histories but also how it can offer a way of being critically present with many other, often interrelated, global crises in the contemporary era.
http://bloomsbury.com/us/counter-memorial-aesthetics-9781474252737/
This article returns to several archives across Australia and Chile to trace the simultaneous developments of southern thinking, and asks what can be learned about the co-production of epistemologies across two distinct Pacific locations. The almost instant anachronism of art criticism, especially that on the margins, has meant that Art & Text’s and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series’s history of supporting Chilean art writing during the dictatorship has not been effectively transmitted into the present. It is, by now, pretty much unknown or forgotten in both Australia and Chile − and elsewhere − awaiting the attention of a younger generation of art workers hoping to connect to these fragmented histories.
Verónica Tello y Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia
Third Text, 28.6 (December, 2014), 555-562
Free download for those without access to Third Text:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/65x3pFdkmTNRu4ZkQbj9/full
Or
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775#.VbMVRjWzq-0
Speakers include:
Zanny Begg (Art & Design, UNSW); Ruth Balint (History, UNSW); Rose Butler (Sociology, UNSW); Jennifer Hyndman (Human Geography, York University. Canada); Stephanie Hemelryk-Donald (Film, Media, Asian Studies, UNSW); Belinda Liddell (Psychiatry, UNSW); Jane McAdam (Law, UNSW); Violeta Moreno-Lax (Law, Queen Mary University, London); James Nguyen and Verónica Tello (both Art & Design, UNSW); Sharon Pickering (Criminology, Monash University); Suvendrini Perera (Cultural Studies, Curtin University) and Joseph Pugliese (Cultural Studies, Macquarie University); Eileen Pittaway (Social Sciences, UNSW); Claudia Tazreiter (Sociology, UNSW); Dan Tyler (Norwegian Refugee Council); David Sanderson (Built Environment, UNSW); and Caroline Wake (Theatre and Performance, UNSW)