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Materiality and Intangibility: Contested Zones to Challenge Views

Conceptions of what museum and gallery collections can tell us will be challenged at an event to be held in the University of Leicester School of Museum Studies, internationally acclaimed for the world-class quality of its research.

Materiality and Intangibility: Contested Zones, organised and run by PhD students, will take place on Monday 14th and Tuesday 15th December, and seeks to attract doctoral students and early-career researchers of Museology and allied subject areas, as well as practising artists, musicians, writers and designers working with, or inspired by, museums and collections.

A spokesperson for the PhD committee organizing the event commented: "Museums and galleries are all about the material world; the preservation and display, presentation and interpretation of things to their audiences, which can include everything from everyday objects to works of art and human remains.

"Yet, often it is the 'intangible' elements - those things that may be hidden or left unsaid - from which we draw our meanings and understandings. A division is often made between the obvious (the 'material') and the less obvious (the 'intangible'), a division which we believe is controversial and which often prevents the full value of material culture from being understood."

Through a series of thought-provoking presentations, specially selected for their unique and creative approach to the theme, Materiality and Intangibility: Contested Zones will challenge this fixed division between the surface and the hidden.

Throughout the event, invited artists will be producing artworks in response to the theme of the Symposium and participants will be encouraged to interact and engage with presenters and artists. The event will provide an informal and supportive environment for creative thinking, as well as opportunities for debate and the shaping of new ideas through dialogue between the art and academic worlds.

The symposium will open with a welcome from Dr Richard Sandell, Head of the School of Museum Studies. Keynote speakers will include Dr Sandra Dudley, University of Leicester, who has researched and written extensively in the fields of material and visual culture, and Dr Kostas Arvanitis, University of Manchester, who is interested in the relation between museums, everyday life and digital media. Endnote speaker will be Emeritus Professor Sue Pearce, whose research interests have always focused on material culture, particularly on human relationships with the artifact world and the nature and process of collecting.

For further details and a booking form, please contact Amy Jane Barnes (ajb108@le.ac.uk).