Gendering the Art Histories of Ibero-America and the Iberian Peninsula

Contexts – Narratives – Practices

This conference aims at taking up discourses on the positions of women artists that have been developed in Ibero-America and on the Iberian Peninsula by a profound interweaving of post-/decolonial and feminist approaches. Not only the general conditions for women creating art in Spain, Portugal and the Ibero-American countries – for example in connection with the history of academies – will be examined more closely. We will also focus on the question of when and from which analytical perspectives women artists and their works became the subject of art historical research and how female artists reacted in their works to the structural circumstances.

An initial thought of the conference is that although women artists could not simply act outside the existing power systems based on gender difference, they could reflect on them in their work and thereby at least implicitly challenge them. To what extent do/did women artists use the reality constituting character of art creation – understood as social practice – in a strategic form? How did this lead at least to partial shifts within the established hegemonic discourses?

How do these problem constellations interact with questions of coloniality, taking into account that both the Iberian Peninsula and Ibero-American countries share a position of cultural periphery although they are at the same time separated by the colonial wound? Does the overlapping of various regimes of subalternity – as women and as peripheral artists – originate specific strategies of empowerment, such as women artists’ networks and transatlantic cultural alliances?

The conference will take place on 5th/6th October 2022, at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg, Germany, within the framework of the Annual Meeting of the Carl Justi Association.

More information:

• Call for papers
• Program
• Dossier (abstracts and CVs)

Organising Committee:

• Amrei Buchholz (Akademie der Künste Berlin)
• Alicia Fuentes Vega (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
• Julia Kloss-Weber (Universität Hamburg)

Cooperating Institutions:

• Asociación Carl Justi
• Universität Hamburg
• Universidad Complutense de Madrid
• Sponsored by the Geschwister Dr. Meyer Stiftung
• Research Project "Imaginaries of/in Spain in the Contemporary Age" (Call: Jóvenes Doctores UCM/CAM, PR65/19-22421)