A collaboration between Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art and City University London, The Politics of Visibility: Mediating the Global, Local and the In-between is a one-day conference that brings artists and academics together to examine the relationship between art, media, transnationalism and power.
Today, this relationship is marked by porosity, captured in myriad corrosions of borders, distinctions and forms. And in this space where art, media and transnationalism overlap comes a politics of representation in which dualisms – between the West and the Rest, cause and effect, remembering and forgetting – have proven bankrupt. It is a space in which hiding can be a strategy for being seen. This conference, then, sets out to explore what new dynamics emerge when art can no longer be considered outside the media; when transnationalism can no longer be thought of as apart from art.
The work of the renowned Chinese video artist Yang Fudong (showing at the Parasol Unit until 6 November 2011) is the conference's conceptual pretext, and will be explored in a keynote by Professor Chris Berry (Goldsmiths). Other speakers will include:
•    Philip Crang (Royal Holloway)
•    Marianne Franklin (Goldsmiths)
•    Anthony Gardner (Courtauld Institute of Art/University of Melbourne)
•    Rachel Garfield (University of Kent)
•    Janet Harbord (Queen Mary)
•    Alan Ingram (University College London)
•    Isaac Julien (Turner Prize nominee)
•    Shani Orgad (London School of Economics)
•    Juliet Steyn (City University London)