Wednesday, 9 September Welcome Remarks - Cátia Rijo, Founder, DesignLab4U, and Assistant Professor, Education School of Lisbon, Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Keynote Presentation - Marie Sierra, Deputy Dean, Faculty of Art and Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Professor Marie Sierra is the deputy dean at UNSW Sydney, Faculty of Art and Design. She researches nature as a social construct and addresses these concerns as a practicing artist and as an arts writer. Examining issues around consumption of both goods and natural resources such as water, she has held numerous solo and group exhibitions within Australia and overseas. She has been the head of two of Australia’s leading art and design schools (University of New South Wales and University of Tasmania), and has been awarded three Australia Research Council Grants, an Australian Office of Learning and Teaching grant, and five Australia Council Grants. *This is a pre-recorded virtual plenary session. The link to the plenary will be sent on the first day of the conference to registered participants. Keynote Presentation - Kim Beil, Associate Director, ITALIC, Stanford University, Stanford, United States Kim Beil is a writer and educator based in the San Francisco Bay area. She is the associate director of ITALIC, an interdisciplinary arts program at Stanford University, where she also teaches courses on the history of photography and modern and contemporary art. Her writing has appeared in Afterimage, Art in America, Artforum, and Photograph magazines, among other publications. Her book, Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography, was released in June by Stanford University Press. She thinks of Instagram as research and you can find her @kebeil. *This is a pre-recorded virtual plenary session. The link to the plenary will be sent on the first day of the conference to registered participants. Keynote Presentation - Rhana Devenport, Director, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia Rhana Devenport ONZM is director of Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, and she was previously director of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2013-2018) and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre (2006-2013), both in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Devenport is a curator, writer, and cultural producer whose career spans art museums, biennales, and arts festivals. Her curatorial interest include contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific, time-based media, and social practice. In 2017 Devenport was curator for the New Zealand Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia for ‘Lisa Reihana: Emissaries'. She has curated projects with Lee Mingwei, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Yin Xiuzhen, Song Dong, Nalini Malani, Fiona Pardington, and Nam June Paik. From 1994 to 2004, she was senior project officer, Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery. In 2018 she was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. *This is a pre-recorded virtual plenary session. The link to the plenary will be sent on the first day of the conference to registered participants. PARALLEL SESSIONS Wednesday, 9 September PARALLEL SESSIONS Social Ties Inside the Prize: Negotiating the Dynamics of Personal and Collective Identities in the National Photographic Portrait Prize Penelope Grist, Curator - Exhibitions, Collection and Exhibitions, National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Australian Capital Territory, Australia Tara James, Exhibitions Project Coordinator , Exhibitions , National Portrait Gallery of Australia , Australian Capital Territory, Australia In this paper we examine the role of a gallery in the interplay of intention, subjectivity, and identity within the image-culture of a photographic prize. For 13 years, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia (the Gallery) has run the National Photographic Portrait Prize (the Prize). The Prize intends to reflect ‘the distinctive vision of Australia's aspiring and professional portrait photographers and the unique nature of their subjects.’ Now attracting almost 3000 entries annually, each exhibition shows between 45 and 50 individually selected finalists. As a judge / curator and the coordinator / artist-liaison for the Prize, we offer an insiders’ perspective on the practical realities of working with powerful, personal image- making around identity in a national institutional context. Based on data, observation and experience we isolate the practice that allows a dynamic, transformational and reflective image-culture to emerge. Photographic portraiture is intimate, personal and specific. In the context of a national institution, viewers read the exhibition of finalists’ works as a cohesive statement about Australian identity and experience. This intersection of subjectivity and an assembled or imagined collective reality defines the Prize. In practice, awareness of this interplay manifests in a strong democratic ethos, opening up discussion about subjectivity, and consciously building trust and an artistic community around the Prize. The Prize has tested traditional genre boundaries, and reflected shifting perspectives on artist-subject power relationships and the value of authentic storytelling. Grounding our practice in the realities of the images’ human dynamic has shaped this distinct role for the Gallery. The Image in Society Extending "The Role of Narrative in Public Painting of the Trecento," proposed by Hans Belting in 1985, to Diminutive Imagery: The Politics of Medieval Diminutive Imagery Grace Burnet, Retired senior lecturer, Education, University of Kent (retired), Kent, United Kingdom Hans Belting's analysis of the new role of narrative explores the shift from isomorphic narrative, in which a textual story is reproduced visually, to an instrumental form often monumental in scale, and featuring an allegorical message. He discusses the outcome of Good and Bad Government, illustrated by Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the walls of the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (1338-39), and demonstrates the efficacy of the Dominican creed by reference to the frescoes of the walls of the Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, painted by Andrea Bonaiuto between 1366-67. This paper accepts Belting's thesis, but extends its applicability to diminutive imagery painted at a similar time by other Sienese and Florentine artists. I contend that the development from isomorphic to instrumental imagery was concomitant with considerable political, social, and religious change, and that alongside grand-scale allegorical paintings, small-scale stories offered contemporary interpretations to old stories often assigning new meanings to them by imaginatively juxtaposing earlier images. Methodologically, I explore this proposal by taking features which characterised monumental instrumental narrative--empiricism, causality, and emotionality, and arguing that these elements may also be identified in two narrative pieces: The Carmelite Altarpiece by Pietro Lorenzetti, commissioned in 1329, and The Altarpiece of the Blessed Agostino Novello (ca. 1324-28) painted by Simone Martini. The Image in Society How are Images Used for Visual Argumentation? Prof. Andreas Schelske, Professor, Jade University of Applied Sciences This paper shows how images convince through visual argumentation. Images are used to argue without logic, and without possibility of negation. Moreover, no culture has elaborated its images as a language or systematically defined them within grammar as countable vocabulary. For this reason, it is astonishing that social knowledge communication through images is based on optically arranged data that, in human interpretation, stabilizes a visual form without any logic. Images have initiated the pictorial turn in the communication of the global network society and thus replaced the linguistic turn. Despite the global flood of images, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical analysis of how syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic codes of optically recognizable images are used as visual arguments for scientific, political, economic and cultural decisions. The study offers answers to how images convince as visual argumentation in socio-cultural contexts. Images are used to generate insights whose visually communicative arguments are used, for example, in photography, archaeological aerial photography, computer tomography, art and art history. The analysis works out which pictorial arguments are used, and which sign theory or semiotics they follow. It also shows which arguments virtual reality uses, and how virtual reality argues about the illusion of architectural signs. The content of the study shows the social acquisition of knowledge through visual argumentation. In particular, the emotional, aesthetic and creative persuasiveness of images is examined with regard to their visual argumentation. The Image in Society One Thing Leads to Another: Connecting Themes Within the Genre of Family Photography Mr. Roddy Mac Innes, Associate Professor, School of Art and Art History, University of Denver, Colorado, United States The discovery of an album of family photographs taken by a North Dakota woman (Nina Weiste) in 1917 triggered a search that became deeply personal. They created a lens through which I could examine how family memories are constructed and reinforced, and they allowed me to extend that understanding to my own experience. The first phase of the project, published in 2017, (book) explored common themes existing within family photographs, principally the intersection of the North