November 15, 10am-18.30pm

Room G7, Bridgeford Street Building

Open to all, free admission

The Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester and the Collège International de Philosophie are pleased to announce a one-day interdisciplinary conference focusing on the representation of social classes in contemporary art and visual culture. The notion of “class” defines as much factual economic conditions as social representations. As such, the possibility of interpreting societal conflicts, psychological traits and personal taste via this category rests, at least in part, on shared images and imaginaries. From the nineteenth century through to the 1970s, painters, filmmakers, photographers and cartoonists created powerful portrayals of social classes, revealing recurrent motifs and strong symbols of identity. Visualising Class seeks to explore how contemporary visual artists have engaged with the issue of class at a time when staggering inequalities are ubiquitous, but the notion of class has virtually lost the political dimension that used to inform it. The conference invites scholars from various disciplines to examine figures and icons that have emerged over the past forty years in order to problematise the vanishing, persistence or mutation of classes.

Programme

10-10.15am

Welcome speech and opening remarks.
Jacopo Galimberti (University of Manchester)

10.15am-12.30am
Session I. Women, Migrant Workers and the Limits of Intersectionality

Chair: Nicholas Thoburn (University of Manchester)
Angela Dimitrakaki (University of Edinburgh) – Women, Work and the Class Relation: A Note on the Political Imaginary of Feminist Art History Today

Klara Kemp-Welch (The Courtauld
Institute of Art) – Visualising ‘Skill’: Contemporary Art and Labour Migration in the EU
Marina Vishmidt (Goldsmiths) – Between Equal Rights, Seeing Decide? Class and Other Struggles in the Image Field.

12.30pm-1.30pm Lunch

1.30pm-3.45pm
Session II. The People, the Bourgeois and the Mask
Chair: Jacopo Galimberti (University of Manchester)

Julian Stallabrass (The Courtauld Institute of Art) – The Image of the People in Street Art?
Stefan Jonsson (Linköping University) – Masked Collectivities: Imaging Protest between Representation and Performativity
Jörg Probst (Independent Scholar) – After the Middle Class? The German Wutbürger and the Iconology of the Bourgeoisie.

3. 45pm-4.15pm Coffee break

4.15pm-6.30pm

Session III. Rethinking Class and its Materiality.
Chair: Elisa Pieri (University of Manchester).
Nicholas Thoburn (University of Manchester) – Materialising Class at Robin Hood Gardens
Danielle Child (Manchester School of Art) – Unattractive Materials: Contemporary British Art and the Visibility of Class Jérôme Bazin (Université Paris-Est Créteil) – The Constant Heterogeneity of the Working Class.

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