Day 2 of

Art and Populism

in collaboration with the University of Oxford

This event is now fully booked. Should you need any assistance with your booking, please email researchforum@courtauld.ac.uk.听

Amid intense instability in the art world 鈥 where protests, boycotts, and resignations have become commonplace 鈥 this two鈥慸ay event brings together leading artists, curators, critics and scholars to examine one of the most urgent political forces of our time: populism.

For over a decade, populism has dominated headlines and ignited debate across the political spectrum; few words give a more enticing, and murky, indication of the current, politically turbulent moment. Yet despite extensive analysis from the social political sciences 鈥 and the rapid rise of ‘populism studies’ 鈥 its impact on art, curating and cultural institutions remains unexplored. This event addresses that gap by convening an international group of leading thinkers, artists, critics and curators to consider how populism is reshaping the art world 鈥 and how the art world, in turn, is mobilising populism.

Moving beyond simple characterisations, speakers will approach populism as a contested tool, a mechanism of power, and a potential tool for radical democracy.听Discussions will range from how artists and curators navigate the fault lines between 鈥榚lite鈥 and 鈥榩opular鈥 culture, to how populism shapes cultural governance and engenders the aestheticisation of politics. Participants will also reflect on what implications populism has for the ways we work, organise and collaborate today.

On 11 June, a day-long symposium will be held at Wadham College, University of Oxford. The programme is available here: .

On 12 June, the project will culminate in an evening event, Towards an Aesthetics of the Left, hosted at the 天美传媒 Institute. The event will begin with a screening of a specially edited version of Comizi di non amore (Non-Love Meetings, 2004) by Francesco Vezzoli, created for Art and Populism. This work (originally: video installation, colour, sound, 63 min 50 sec; courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milan) reworks Pier Paolo Pasolini鈥檚 Love Meetings (1964) while satirising the long-running Italian dating programme Men and Women (1996鈥損resent). The film features Catherine Deneuve and Marianne Faithfull in leading roles, with a cameo appearance by Jeanne Moreau.

Following the screening, speakers from the symposium will take part in a roundtable discussion exploring the central questions of left aesthetics. Drawing on the ideas, debates, and reflections that emerge over the two days, the conversation will consider the possibilities and challenges of developing new forms of collective cultural and political praxis.

Participants across both days include Francesco Vezzoli, TJ Demos, Sarah James, Dean Kissick, Angela Dimitrakaki, Clive Nwonka, Lars Bang Larsen, Luce deLire, Anthony Gardner, Claire Fontaine, Ana Devi膰 (WHW), and the Otolith Group.

Find out more about day one at the University of Oxford, via:

Organised by Sofia Gotti, Lecturer in Curating at the 天美传媒, and Marko Ili膰, Associate Professor in Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford. This event is made possible with generous support from the John Fell Oxford University Press Research Fund, the Oxford University Centre for Visual Studies, Wadham College, Oxford, and the 天美传媒 Institute.

This event has passed.

12 Jun 2026

18:00 - 19:30

Vernon Square Campus, Lecture Theatre 2

This is the booking page for day two of the symposium, which takes place at our Vernon Square campus (WC1X 9EW).

Participants

Ana Devi膰

Ana Devi膰 is a curator, educator, and writer based in Zagreb. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Zadar, where her research focuses on antifascist and partisan art. She is a member of the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, founded in Zagreb in 1999 by Ivet 膯urlin, Ana Devi膰, Nata拧a Ili膰, Sabina Sabolovi膰, and Dejan Kr拧i膰. WHW has developed projects across diverse geographical and cultural contexts and at multiple institutional scales, from the artistic directorship of Kunsthalle Wien to the forthcoming edition of Skulptur Projekte M眉nster, drawing on queer-feminist, antifascist, and decolonial perspectives. From 2026, WHW will once again run the city-owned gallery space NovaNova in Zagreb.

Angela Dimitrakaki

Angela Dimitrakaki听is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. Angela’s academic research focuses on feminism and Marxism in art history and the humanities; art and curating in relation to labour, production and social reproduction; art institutions; globalisation, imperialism and colonialism; participatory and socially engaged art paradigms, film and photography; contemporary democracy, class politics, and antifascism. Angela’s authored monographs include听Feminism. Art. Capitalism, Pluto Press 2025 while she is also the co-editor of volumes such as Depression Era: A Collective Lens in the Age of Crisis, K8 2025, and听ECONOMY, Liverpool University Press 2015. She serves on the editorial board of听Third Text听and is a Corresponding Editor for Historical Materialism. She is presently the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to research how the idea of ‘family’ has functioned as metaphor in art and photography since the 1950s.

Anthony Gardner

Anthony Gardner is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford, where he is also Director of Graduate Studies at the Ruskin School of Art and a Fellow of The Queen鈥檚 College. His publications include Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013); Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015); Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda 膶ufer, MIT Press, 2015); and Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (with Charles Green, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist founded in 2004. After adopting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a 鈥渞eadymade artist鈥 and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often resembles the work of others. Working across neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art and life today. Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to fashion herself as a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation.Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist founded in 2004. After adopting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a 鈥渞eadymade artist鈥 and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often resembles the work of others. Working across neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art and life today. Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to fashion herself as a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation.

Clive Chijioke Nwonka

Clive Chijioke Nwonka is Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society within UCL鈥檚 Faculty of the Arts and Humanities, and Professor in Practice at the British Film Institute. Nwonka鈥檚 scholarship broadly centres on race and the humanities. He is the author of the books Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film (2023), Black Arsenal (2024) co-author of the book Race and Racism in the Creative and Cultural Industries (2026) and the forthcoming book Amalgamations of Black Visuality (2027). He is UCL Academic-in-Residence for the V&A East Museum.

Dean Kissick

Dean Kissick is a writer and a听contributing听editor of听Spike听Art Magazine. He has published cultural criticism in听贬补谤辫别谤鈥檚, 迟丑别听New York Times Magazine, and 迟丑别听Drift, and short fiction in听Civilization听and听Heavy Traffic. He has also given talks, read, and performed around the world. He lives in Paris and London, after a decade in New York.

Francesco Vezzoli

Francesco Vezzoli (b. Brescia, 1971) lives and works in Milan. One of the most successful Italian artists in the world today, his work can be described as a series of strong allegories about contemporary culture with a rich subtext of elaborate references involving video installations, petit-point embroideries, photography, live performances, media experiments and -most recently- classical sculpture. Vezzoli has exhibited widely in major museums and biennials internationally. His latest major exhibitions, 鈥淰ITA DVLCIS: fear and desire in the Roman Empire鈥 at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome and 鈥淢useums of Tears鈥 at Museo Correr in Venice, allowed him to relate his recent artworks, respectively, to Roman archaeological masterpieces and Italian historical paintings.

Lars Bang Larsen

Lars Bang Larsen is a writer, curator, and art historian. He has researched the histories of art and politics as they have played out in exhibition-making and between craft, technology and countercultures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lars鈥檚 PhD was on psychedelic concepts in neo-avant-garde art (2011), and he has (co-)curated exhibitions such as documenta: Politik und Kunst (2021) and Chronoplasticity (2019/20). His books include The Model (2010), Networks (2015) and Arte y Norma (2016). He has been affiliated with institutions such as Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Haute 脡cole d鈥橝rt et de Design 鈥 Gen猫ve, and the Bienal de S茫o Paulo.

Luce deLire

Luce deLire is a ship with eight sails and lies by the quay. She holds a PhD in philosophy and teaches and publishes on the metaphysics of infinity, political philosophy, art and culture, and trans and queer themes. She is currently preparing two books: Spinoza on Sex, Gender and Sexuality and EUPHORIA: A Treatise on Capitalism鈥檚 Techno Tyrants (Notably the BABY) and Hospitable Trans Lesbian Utopias. Her most recent publication is 鈥淐ritique Is Over, Morality Is Dead and Surreal Utopias Are Where It鈥檚 At鈥 (e-flux journal). For more information, see and Instagram: @luce_delire.

Sarah Edith James

Sarah Edith James is Professor of Visual Culture at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her monographs include Art & the Ends of Capitalism: Practising Politics (forthcoming, Manchester University Press); Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 2022); and Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain (Yale University Press, 2013). She is founding editor of the book series Tomorrow鈥檚 Art School. Its first volume, Against Imperialism: Imagining a Post-Capitalist World (Sternberg/MIT, forthcoming 2027), is co-edited with Vera Mey. Her current research project, Art in an Age of Disaster, Adventures in Unworlding, explores Cold War and contemporary disasters through the lens of art and its chronopolitical journeys. For more than twenty years, she has written regularly for Art Monthly.

T. J. Demos

T. J. Demos is Professor and Chair in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes on contemporary art, social movement aesthetics, global politics, and political ecology, and is the author of numerous books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013); and Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg Press, 2023). He is currently working on a new book for MIT Press, provisionally titled Art After Justice: Contemporary Artists Respond to Environmental Violence.

The Otolith Group

The Otolith Group was founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. The collective has researched and produced densely textured moving-image works, installations, photographs, murals, and performances that frequently reference the trajectories of the Non-Aligned Movement and the transnational legacies of the global majority and its diasporas. Their works have been commissioned and presented by museums, galleries, biennials, and foundations worldwide.

As curators and theorists, The Otolith Collective operates as an NPO engaged in the conception, creation, and convening of platforms that make public the ongoing research informing its wider practice. Central to this work is a preoccupation with shifting the decolonial form of the essayistic toward an untimely institution, informed by a conception of temporality unbound by the political formations that determine the contemporary. From this aesthetico-political process emerges a practice of platforming that draws attention to the urgency of the present in all its provincial, provisional, prospective, and planetary dimensions.

Moderators

Klara Kemp-Welch

Klara Kemp-Welch is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Head of Research Degrees (2025鈥28) at the 天美传媒 Institute. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art from Eastern Europe. She was educated at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and University College London. She is the author of Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule, 1956鈥1989 (I.B. Tauris, 2014) and Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965鈥1981 (MIT Press, 2019), and co-editor, with Beata Hock and Jonathan Owen, of A Reader in East-Central European Modernism, 1918鈥1956 (天美传媒 Books Online, 2019). She is currently completing a monograph titled Free Movement? Documenting Migration and Mobility in Eastern Europe.

Sarah Wilson

Sarah Wilson is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the 天美传媒 Institute, University of London.听She co-curated听Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900鈥1968听(Royal Academy, London, 2002) and published听The Visual World of French Theory, vol. 1: Figurations听(2010; French edition, 2018) and听Picasso, Marx and Socialist Realism in France (2013). She received the international AICA Prize for Art Criticism in 2015. In 2011, she launched the MA special option 鈥淕lobal Conceptualism: The Last Avant-Garde or a New Beginnings?,鈥 and supervises research on conceptual and post-conceptual art from the Cold War period to the present. She gave a keynote lecture on 鈥楥rowds Power and the Rape of the Masses鈥 at the University of Vienna in 2017 and published听 on 鈥楥rowds and Power鈥 focussing on artists Marcyn Dudek and听听Eva Axelrad for the AICA Congress, Berlin, 2019

Diva Gujral

Diva Gujral鈥檚听research focuses on lens-based media in postcolonial India in dialogue with the country’s transnational political coordinates.听She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art and an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow in the History of Art at Queen鈥檚 College at the University of Oxford. There, she has begun a new project on Indian contemporary art and its historiographical interventions into how the early postcolonial state is archived and memorialised. Prior to this she was a Fellow in Twentieth-Century Indian and Global Imperial History at the LSE, and she completed her PhD at UCL.

Convenors

Marko Ili膰

Marko Ili膰 is an Associate Professor in Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford. His first book, A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, was published by the MIT Press in 2021. Alongside Sofia Gotti, he is currently working on a project that examines the intersections between art and populism.

Sofia Gotti

Sofia Gotti is an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art with a focus on South America. Her work broadly examines the intersections of radical politics, art, and popular culture. has worked on exhibitions at institutions of varying scales, and in commercial galleries internationally. In 2024 she was part of the curatorial team of Stranieri Ovunque 鈥 Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. She currently co-leads the MA Curating at the 天美传媒 Institute and previously was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her first monograph Pop Countercultures is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.

Claire Fontaine, Left & Right, 2023, Pescia Fiorentina. Courtesy the artist and Hypermaremma, photo credit Daniele Molajoli

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Citations