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2023 ASGO Symposium: The Ways We Attach Ourselves: Affect, Agency, and Emotion in the Visual Arts
September 15, 2023 @ 5:30 pm - September 16, 2023 @ 4:00 pm
UNC’s Art Students Graduate Organization (ASGO) is excited to welcome you to the 9th annual ASGO symposium. This year’s symposium will center on questions of affect, agency, and emotion in the visual arts. We are interested in the power of art to evoke intense emotions and bodily sensations influenced by social, cultural, and historical factors. This approach explores how art can transform emotions, challenge interpretations, and provoke new perspectives, examining the aesthetic strategies artists employ to evoke affective responses in viewers.
While the conference is free to attend, space is limited. Please register in advance in the ASGO Symposium RSVP Form
Conference Agenda
All events will take place in the Art & Space lounge of the Ackland Art Museum
Friday, September 15
5:30 pm, Keynote: Dr. Elina Gertsman (Case Western University), “Wrathful Rites: Emotion and Agency in the Hileq and Bileq Haggadah,” followed by a Q&A and Reception
Saturday, September 16
9:00 am, Breakfast
9:30 am, Opening Remarks
Panel A – Seeing, Touching, Smelling: Affect and Bodily Sensation
Daniel Kuzinez (Hunter College), “The Crown without a Head: Disembodied Presence and the Olfactory”
Hannah Williams (University of North Carolina), “Miraculous Microcosms: Affective Piety and the Importance of Small Scale in European Devotional Micro-Sculpture, c.1400-1550”
Panel B – The Affective Gaze and the Power of Looking
Usha Rhan (Yale University), “Gazing from Afar: Recognition of the divine within the Shri Mahalaxmi darshan livestream”
Mekayla May (University of Maryland), “A Swinging Stage: Roman Oscilla in the House of Fortune in Pompeii as Displays of Social Responsibility”
12:00-1:00 pm, Break for Lunch
Panel C – Affective Responses and the Transmission of Trauma
Christian Daichi Carlson (University of Virginia), “(Re)situating the Body Traumatic: Affective Potentials in Bunny Rogers’s Columbine Library”
Clara Jeanne Reed (New York University), “Beyond the Between: Queer Fantasies and Gendered Realities in Berni Searle and Zanele Muholi’s Self-Portraits”
3:15 Questions Forum
3:45 Closing Remarks