Absence in art
Absence as Artistic Strategy in Contemporary Art
Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society
Date: June 11, 2025
Absence in Art
Absence as Artistic Strategy in Contemporary Art
Date:
June 11, 2025
Time:
10.00 - 17.00
While representation of presence forms the basis of most of the art historical canon, in this symposium we will focus on absence instead. We will study the absence of representation and the representation of absence. What happens when art erases, leaves out, or hides things? When it refuses to close a narrative arc, suggests a presence that is not there, or overrepresents something to the point of making it invisible?
During the symposium we will look at contemporary artworks that incorporate some form of absence as a key artistic strategy. These are not artworks that are about absence, i.e. only in terms of their meaning or context, but works in which absence is a fundamental aspect. Famous examples are Rachel Whiteread’s casts, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s theatre series, Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios, and Gillian Wearing’s Trauma.
Join us in Leiden on June 11 to hear nineteen art historians and artists present their research and discuss various examples of absence in art from the 1970s to the present.
The one-day symposium is organized by Stephanie Noach, Paula Harvey, Felipe Martinez Sevilhano and Laura Bertens, all affiliated with the Art History department of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The symposium is supported by LUCAS and takes place in the newly constructed Herta Mohr building in the city centre of Leiden (Witte Singel 27a).
Program
Herta Mohr rooms
0.18 and 0.20
9.30-9.45
Arrival and coffee
10.00-10.25
Room 0.20
Introduction
10.30-13.00
-
Panel 1. Absence and the Canon
Room 0.20
Christina Clausen
Ariane Noël de Tilly
Georgia Phillips-Amos
Helen Westgeest
Ana Mannarino
-
Panel 2. Absence and Conflict
Room 0.18
Olga Alter
Tom Eaton
Nesli Gül Durukan
Rob Zwijnenberg
Kitty Zijlmans
13.00-14.00
Lunch
14.00-16.30
-
Panel 3. Absence and Identity
Room 0.20
Frederico Câmara
Judith van IJken
Jessie Morgan
Janna Schoenberger
-
Panel 4. Absence and Erasure
Room 0.18
(the speakers in this panel will present online)
Deniz Johns
Brian Leahy
Rosita Mariella
Kendall Murphy
Foad Torshizi
16.30-17.00
Room 0.20
Closing words
Speakers and abstracts
Olga Alter
Absence as a Political Statement in Russian Art after February 24, 2022
Olga Alter is a researcher in art history and cultural heritage, currently serving as a research fellow at the University of Trento (Italy) since 2022. She studies mechanisms of depoliticization in art and artistic censorship in contemporary Russia. Previously, she co-authored a new UNESCO nomination on Russian Palladianism and has published articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics related to cultural heritage and contemporary art.
Frederico Câmara
The Empty Zoo: Animal Absence as Methodology in "Views of Paradise"
Frederico Câmara is an award-winning Brazilian artist whose artistic research practices are informed by his personal experiences of migration and travelling, as well as his fascination for Nature, Science, and sites of knowledge like museums, libraries, and archives. In his work, he revisits the role of the travelling artist and explorer, decolonising its historical antecedents with a contemporary approach to discovery, questioning the ideas of the familiar and the exotic, and promoting environmental awareness and sustainability. His artistic research outputs are in the form of photographic and video installations, archives, artist’s books, drawings, paintings, and text. His work has taken him around the world as a visiting professor at various universities; on research fellowships, artist residencies, and exhibitions. He is also a recipient of various prestigious awards. He is currently Assistant Professor of Art (Photography) at the Meadows School of the Arts of the Southern Methodist University (SMU).
Christina Clausen
Artistic Practices of Doing Loss: Art Theft and Stolen Identity in Palermo
Christina Clausen studied Art History and German Literature in Marburg, Padua, and Berlin, with a focus on the architectural history of the 18th and 19th centuries. From 2020 to 2023, she was a doctoral candidate in the research project "Architectures of Order" in Frankfurt/Darmstadt. During that time, she was part of the organizing team for a lecture series on "Built Order" and an international conference on architectural models, "Are you a model? On an Architectural Medium of Spatial Exploration". In 2023, she completed her dissertation on the reception of medieval architecture in the 19th-century (Title: Configurations of Knowledge. Comparative Studies on the Reception of the Middle Ages in Painting, Gardens, Preservation, and Museums in the 19th Century). Since January 2024, she has been a PostDoc at the Technical University of Darmstadt. In her current research project titled "Spaces of Absence. Artistic Compensation for Loss and the Curation of Damage," she explores artistic practices of doing loss in modernity.
Nesli Gül Durukan
Archival Gaps and the ‘Absent’ as Subject
Dr. Nesli Gül Durukan is an Amsterdam-based independent researcher, curator, and art writer. Her work focuses on the intersection of contemporary art, archives and memory, artistic identity in migration and diaspora, institutional critique and transcultural art history. Durukan holds a PhD in Art and Design from Yıldız Technical University, where her research examined the use of archives and memory in contemporary art institutions in Turkey. She has been a guest researcher at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow at the International Institute of Social History, Van Abbemuseum and the Netherlands Institute in Turkey. Durukan has curated exhibitions at Framer Framed (Amsterdam), Space Debris Art (Istanbul), and Sazmanab Center for Contemporary Art (Tehran). Her writing has appeared in Sanat Dünyamız, Metropolis M, Archives and Records and other international publications. She currently researches dialogical practices in art museums and the contribution of contemporary artists from Turkey to the Dutch art ecosystem.
Tom Eaton
Jeremy Deller’s We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016)
Dr Tom Eaton graduated in History of Art at the University of Glasgow and later undertook a doctoral research project in innovative museum learning experience at the Museum Studies school at the University of Leicester. Tom currently works as a freelance curator and exhibition designer, and as an editor for the Museum & Society journal and the Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester. Tom is currently writing an article that explores performance as a medium for meta-historiographic commentary in the museum and the gallery, which draws upon a collaboration with English Heritage that has made experimental use of performance and short film. Tom’s research interests include the tradition of the artist-as-historian, archival art, film as a critical medium for the representation of the past, and many other topics relating to creative visual and narratorial uses of historical collections and archives.
Judith van IJken
Mijn Mensen, a familial family portrait
Judith van IJken is a visual artist and researcher based in the Netherlands. Her work centers on photographic portraiture, which she investigates both practically and conceptually through a method of ‘visual thinking’—combining a conceptual approach with the social engagement of documentary photography. She explores how photographic images, especially portraits, shape contemporary ideas of identity. Van IJken graduated cum laude from the Photography department at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and completed a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her work has been widely exhibited in the Netherlands and abroad. In recent years, her practice has expanded to include writing and performative presentations as part of her artistic research. She is currently a senior lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague and is completing her artistic doctoral research, The Situative Portrait, at PhDArts, Leiden University.
Deniz Johns
Held at a Distance: Absence, Violence, and Materiality in the Art of Mona Hatoum
Deniz Johns is a Lecturer in Film Practice at Lancaster University, specialising in critical film and video within Experimental and Expanded Cinema. A key area of her research focuses on the political aesthetics of experimental film—British Structural/Materialist film in particular—and its relationship to Marxist political and aesthetic theory. A significant outcome of this inquiry has been featured in The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema (2024). As an artist-filmmaker, Johns has been working with 16mm film, digital video, and live performance since 2009, with her work exhibited at prestigious national and international venues. Her recent projects explore and interrogate the negation of imagery as a radical strategy for politicising aesthetics, further expanding the discourse on film and politics by examining how the absence, distortion, or deconstruction of imagery can subvert conventional modes of perception, disrupt hegemonic visual cultures, and open new spaces for critical engagement and radical spectatorship.
Brian Leahy
Christopher D’Arcangelo’s Anarchic Absence
Brian T. Leahy is Assistant Professor of Art History at Montana State University Billings in the United States. He received a PhD from Northwestern University in 2024, and his research has been supported by numerous fellowships including a Dedalus Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, and the Morgan-Menil Research Fellowship. His writing has appeared in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in Print, and multiple museum catalogs, and with presses including Yale University Press and Manchester University Press. His current book project, For Immediate Release: Contemporary Art and Exhibition Media, asks how artists in the Americas and Europe evaded, manipulated, or contested the expectations of art world publicity after 1970.
Ana Mannarino
Uninhabited Spaces in Waltercio Caldas’ Velázquez Book
Ana Mannarino is a professor and researcher in the Graduate Program in Visual Arts (PPGAV) and the Department of History and Theory of Art at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), where she has been teaching since 2014. Currently on a research leave, she is developing the project “Arts visuels et mots dans l'art brésilien et ses dialogues internationaux : livres d'artiste, poèmes spatiaux et relations texte-image” at Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle, funded by CNPq. Her work focuses on modern and contemporary Brazilian art, particularly the intersection of language and visuality. Her doctoral thesis, which examined the role of text in the works of artists Mira Schendel and Waltercio Caldas, will be published as a book titled “Palavras no espaço: escrita e visualidade na obra de Mira Schendel e Waltercio Caldas” in 2025 (Ed. Pinakotheke). She has contributed articles to academic journals such as Écriture et Image, Modos: Revista de História da Arte, and others, advancing critical dialogues on word-image relations in art. She is a CAA-Getty International Program alumna, having presented papers at the CAA (College Art Association) International Conference for several years. She is also a member of CBHA (Comitê Brasileiro de História da Arte) and CEEI (Centre d’Étdudes de l’Écriture et de l’Image).
Rosita Mariella
What’s Left Unsaid: Reading Through the Voids of the Archive and the Curriculum Vitae
Rosita Mariella is an art historian based in Madrid and a predoctoral researcher at the Department of Art History and Theory at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her recent activities include a research residency at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2024) and being awarded the AMCA First Prize for Young Art Criticism (2023) in Madrid. With extensive experience in the art market, she has collaborated with galleries and collections in London and developed expertise in digital content management and cultural communication for platforms dedicated to art fairs.
Jessie Morgan
Faceless Citizens in Robert Frank’s The Americans (1960)
Jessie Morgan is the University Lecturer in American Literature and Culture and chair of North American Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands, where she teaches courses in American literary history, identity, and climate survivance. Her first book, Girl in Black and White: the story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement (Norton 2019) considered the role of photography and race in abolition. Prior to her academic career, Jessie worked as a magazine photographer. She is originally from Monroe, Louisiana.
Kendall Murphy
Framing the Void: David Hammons’ Reinterpretation of Matta-Clark’s Day’s End
Kendall Murphy is a master’s student in art history at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on site-specific artwork that transforms public perception of the city. She leads a course on “Site-Specific Contemporary Art” and has published in student journals. Additionally, she holds a bachelor's degree in art history and global studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara and has held several positions within museums and galleries. She currently works as an archival assistant at Harvard Business School.
Ariane Noël de Tilly
Making Space for Those Who Have Been Left Out: Iván Argote’s Public Interventions
Ariane Noël de Tilly is Professor of Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her research interests include contemporary artists’ archival interventions; socially engaged art; feminist art; and the challenges of preserving and exhibiting contemporary art. She holds a doctorate from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam), and was a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada from 2011 to 2013. In December 2022, she was a Visiting Professor at the École des arts of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Dr. Noël de Tilly is a contributing author to several edited volumes including Authenticity in Transition: Changing Practices in Art Making and Conservation, and her work has been published in the journals ASAP, Plastik, ArtMatters: International Journal for Technical Art History, and exPosition.
Georgia Phillips-Amos
Centering Absence: Sophie Calle at the Isabella Stewart Gardner
Georgia Phillips-Amos is a British-American writer, editor and PhD candidate in Art History at Concordia University, in Montreal. Her writing has appeared in RACAR, The Drama Review, The Journal of Latin American Studies, Artforum, Frieze, and The Village Voice. She is currently co-editing a special issue of RACAR on the theme of Canadian National Parks as contested landscapes. She holds a Master’s in Latin American Studies from the University of Utrecht, and a Bachelor’s in Anthropology and Art History form the University College of Utrecht.
Janna Schoenberger
Bas Jan Ader’s Absence: Between Tragedy and Comedy
Janna Schoenberger is a core faculty member at Amsterdam University College, where she teaches modern and contemporary art. Dr. Schoenberger completed her PhD in Art History at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. Her doctoral dissertation, Ludic Conceptualism: Art and Play in the Netherlands, 1959 to 1975, is the first extensive study of art in the Netherlands in the 1960s and ‘70s. Dr. Schoenberger’s research in this area began while translating Dutch documents for the exhibition In and Out of Amsterdam, 1960 – 1975 (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009). She has held fellowships at the Rijksmuseum and Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Her book on Robert Jasper Grootveld, Waiting for the Witchdoctor: Robert Jasper Grootveld’s Scrapbook and the Dutch Counterculture, was published in 2020.
Foad Torshizi
Failing when failing is all you can: Art as “sous rature” in Homayoun Sirizi’s Keep Right
Foad Torshizi is an Associate Professor of Art History at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research focuses on global contemporary art, contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, postcolonial theory, ethics of readership, theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism, and the politics of translation. His publications appear in academic journals in the US and Iran, including Grey Room (MIT), ARTMargins (MIT), Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Duke), and Herfeh: Honarmand (in Persian). He is currently completing a manuscript, Unreadings: Contemporary Iranian Art and Art History’s Monolingualism.
Helen Westgeest
The Dependence of Absence on Presence
Helen Westgeest is Associate Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art History and Photography Theory at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Her PhD research explored the interest of several American, French, German and Japanese artists in Zen Buddhism in the 1950s, in which early experiments in performance art played an important role. Subsequently, the focus of her research gradually shifted to intercultural research of contemporary art and theory of photography/video art. Her current research zooms in on the role and nature of photography and video in mixed media works of art, while she also engages in comparative research into media in contemporary art. Her most recent book Slow Painting: Contemplation and Critique in the Digital Age (published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2020) focuses on socio-critical painting (including painting-like photographs and video art) in contemporary art. In various respects, this book is a sequel to Video Art Theory: A Comparative Approach (2016) and Photography Theory in Historical Perspective (2011, co-authored by Hilde Van Gelder). In May 2025, her next book Skin Color and Whiteness in Contemporary Art will be published by Routledge.
Kitty Zijlmans
The Tangibility of Absence in Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s video installation ‘The Specter of Ancestors Becoming’
Kitty Zijlmans studied art history at Leiden University and was Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory/World Art Studies at Leiden University from 2000-2021. In 2010 she was appointed a member of the KNAW, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her interests lie in the fields of contemporary art, art theory and methodology, with a strong interest in the current intercultural debate on inclusion and decolonization of art and education. She often collaborates and exchanges with artists in the field of artistic research. Recent publications: Kitty Zijlmans and Helen Westgeest (eds.), Mix & Stir. New Outlooks on Contemporary Art from Global Perspectives. Amsterdam, Valiz 2021; ‘The Geopolitics of Reclaiming the Body in the Precariousness of Life: Contemporary Women’s Global Art Practices’, in Basia Sliwinska (ed.), Transnational Visual Activism for Women’s Reproductive Rights. My Body, My Choice. New York/London: Routledge 2024 , pp.76-87.
Robert Zwijnenberg
The Celebration of Absence
Robert Zwijnenberg is emeritus professor of Art and Science Interactions at Leiden University and lives in The Netherlands (r.zwijnenberg@hum.leidenuniv.nl). In his research, Zwijnenberg focuses on the question whether and how art - from its own artistic specificity - can be relevant and urgent for important societal challenges. With the possibilities offered by the artistic register, such as inconsistencies, paradoxes, ambiguities or uncertainties, an artist can explore different and sometimes opposing directions in a single work on issues that are of existential significance to us. A work of art can thus give us an experience that is characterized by ambiguity, complexity, disruption, unrest and imbalance and thereby add something to our understanding of what life is, without ever providing a definitive insight. Zwijnenberg also conducts research into the role of bioart in the academic and public debates on the ethical, social, political, legal and cultural implications of biotechnological innovations.
Registration
The symposium is open to everyone and attendance is free. Registration is required and a limited number of seats is available. If you choose online participation you will receive an email with links to the livestream at a later moment.