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In recent years, art historians and contemporary artists have cast a critical eye on issues of mobility, exchange, and encounter between people and things across time and place. Questioning how people, objects, ideas, and aesthetics move through the world is crucial for understanding how art and material cultures form, define, and redefine identities and—often uneven—social relationships. Recent projects that address these issues range from contemporary art practices, such as Dig Where Your Stand in the 57^th Carnegie International (Koyo Kouoh in collaboration with University of Pittsburgh graduate students) to historiographic interventions, symposia, and publications like Objects in Motion: Art & Material Culture Across Colonial North America (Wendy Bellion and Mónica Domínguez Torres). In its ninth edition Contemporaneity will extend these discourses and address how objects, aesthetics, people, and ideas move across cultures and boundaries into places deemed new, foreign, strange, or remote. It will also address the aftermath of such movement. We seek papers that ask how objects and artistic practices facilitate, encounter, and negotiate multiple identities and relationships, acting on both their culture of origin and their new sites of reception simultaneously. How does the act of movement produce contact zones between two or more cultures? How do art and objects provide and/or expose different modes of encounter between people, places, and cultures?

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Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture

Edition 8: "Yesterday's Contemporaneity: Finding Temporality in the Past"

Call for Artistic Submissions

Due: 4/30/2018

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UPDATE: DEADLINE EXTENDED- The deadline for submissions is now October 26, 2018.

Volume 8 seeks to publish examinations of contemporaneity across a wider variety of historical contexts. The aim is to uncover how cultures throughout the global past have negotiated temporalities, modernities, and historicisms, to come to terms with what it means to be present in their own moment. How can both history and modernity be visualized, contextualized, or conceptualized to create a sense of contemporaneity? How have institutions created temporalities for the cultures they study, and how can a historical object or space shape perceptions of a culture’s identity or agency? What is at stake in defining a work of art’s place in time?

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The editorial board is proud to present the newest issue of Contemporaneity. The thematic volume "Boundless: Art and Identification Across Borders," collects articles, curatorial statements, artist statements and interviews, and book and exhibition reviews about identity and borders.

Now accepting applications to publish artwork in edition 6: "Boundless: Art and Identification across Borders."

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The deadline for submissions has been extended to November 30, 2016.

For Edition 6, Contemporaneity seeks submissions that deal with the complexity of art and identification in time and space. Submissions that deal with the effect of borders on national and regional identities are particularly welcome; we also encourage historical scrutiny and theoretical analysis on borders and race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and other categories of identification. How have different identities experienced border or boundary crossings differently? What borders have been erected to insulate normative identities and how have the arts served to reify or challenge these essentialist categories of identity? How has the articulation of concepts of identity evolved and inflected past and present discussions of particular identities? 

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The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2016

For Edition 6, Contemporaneity seeks submissions that deal with the complexity of art and identification in time and space. Submissions that deal with the effect of borders on national and regional identities are particularly welcome; we also encourage historical scrutiny and theoretical analysis on borders and race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and other categories of identification. How have different identities experienced border or boundary crossings differently? What borders have been erected to insulate normative identities and how have the arts served to reify or challenge these essentialist categories of identity? How has the articulation of concepts of identity evolved and inflected past and present discussions of particular identities? 

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Help Contemporaneity grow by supporting our EngagePitt fundraising campaign! With five years under our belt, we are ready and excited to professionalize and raise the profile of Contemporaneity. With your support, we can raise $6,000 to fund the next three journal editions.

CONTEMPORANEITY 5: CALL FOR CRITICAL REVIEWS

Contemporaneity invites submissions for critical reviews of art exhibitions and catalogues, film screenings, and books for its 5th edition (Autumn 2016). 

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Extended Deadline announcement for Issue 5

The deadline for submissions is approaching soon. We are seeking scholarship across epochs and disciplines.

See Call for Paper for details

Who is contemporary?
What is contemporary?
When is contemporary?

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture

Issue 4 deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2014

Click through for the Call for Participation.