Dr Verónica Tello
Senior Lecturer
PhD, Art History/Visual Culture, University of Melbourne, 2014
Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA)
School of Art & Design
Senior Lecturer, Histories of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture
I am a historian predominantly focusing on transnational politics and archives of art and visual culture and curating in/out of the Pacific, Chile, Australia and Latin America. I’m interested in understanding how global capital and class structure the historiography of art and the politics of epistemology and how memory can activate cultural, social, and political change.
I have developed two books: Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (Radical Aesthetics Radical Art series, Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2016), focuses on the protracted ‘global refugee crisis' from the 1990s to the present across Australia, the UK and the Americas. It analyses how contemporary artists archive, activate and counter-memorialise contested migratory histories in contexts marked by intensified border politics. While national landscapes brim with monuments, 'counter-memorial aesthetics' opens up numerous tactics to understand the various ways that often invisible and/or erased migratory histories pass through us and have the potential to reshape us, time and again. My second book, Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place, and History (2023, Discipline and Third Text Publications), develops a moving conceptual vocabulary of the aesthetics, politics, economies, histories and potentialities of the Global Souths in collaboration with artists, writers and curators such as Dylan AT Miner, Carla Macchiavello, James Nguyen, Zoe Butt, Salote Tawale, Rolando López, Jennifer Biddle, Ruth Simbao, Rachel O'Reilly, Walter Mignolo, and many others.
I am currently developing a monograph on the international exhibition history of Chilean experimental art (including but not limited to the escena de avandaza) during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). This project focuses on how certain art exhibitions archived early forms of neoliberalism and its resistance within Chile and the then-emergent “global contemporary” art world. The project maps eccentricity, refusal, and the strike as counter-neoliberal strategies that gave way to an alternate, if not also shadowy, notion of being contemporary.
In addition, with Salote Tawale and Ien Ang, I am leading the Australian Research Council Linkage project focussed on how collections and archives can catalyse epistemological experiments and equity (or structural change) within Australian regional art museums. The project, entitled Parallel, is developed in partnership with Murray Albury Museum of Art (MAMA) and embraces the potential of the ‘parallel’ or the ‘para’ as a way of being adjacent to, beyond or distinct from the structural formations that are typically the case in Australian art institutions.
I am the Editor in Chief of the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, published by Taylor & Francis and the Sydney editor of Memo Review.
Recent publications:
E-mail
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
2021-2024: Australian Research Council, Linkage, Australian Regional Art Museums, Resettlement and Structural Change, with Ien Ang (Western Sydney Uni) and Salote Tawale (USyd) and Murray Art Museum Albury.
2020: Australia Council for Arts - Individual and Group Project funding, Australian Exhibition Histories: Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile after 1973 (1986)
2019-2021: PLuS Alliance Research Fellowship, Latin American Art Networks
2015-2018: UNSW Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Decolonial Futures and Contemporary Art
2015: Bundanon Trust Writer’s Residency, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art
My Research Supervision
PhD
June Miskell (art history/theory) - Archipealogic thinking and Filipinx contemporary art (with Mina Roces and Astrid Lorange)
Teresa Hunter-Hicks (art theory/history) – Labour, Collaboration and Collectivity in Australian and North American Poster Collectives (1968-1991) (with Diana Baker Smith)
Angela Goddard (curatorial, practice-led research) - World Making Strategies and Curatorial Support Structures in Australia (with Felicity Fenner and Lizzie Muller)
Jade Muratore (practice-led research) - Queer histories and para-fiction (with Diana Baker Smith, Rochelle Haley and Grant Stevens)
Anabelle Lacroix (curatorial, practice-led research) - Insomniac aesthetics, desynchrony and the museum (with Caleb Kelly)
Completed
Aneshka Mora (art theory/history) – Decolonialisation and Institutional Critique in Contemporary Australian Art (with Bianca Hester)
James Nguyen (practice-led research) – Making Chó bò*: Troubling Việtspeak: Collaborating, translating, and archiving with family in Australian contemporary art (with Jennifer Biddle), 2021.
Meredith Birrell (art theory/history) –The Fugitive Self: Posthuman subjectivity in the Essay-Films of The Otolith Group, Hito Steyerl and Ursula Biemann, 2020.
MFA
Lisa Myeonjoo (with Diana Baker Smith)
Evgenia (Jenny) Anagnostopoulou, Untitled (topic: curatorial experiments and the global souths) (with Diana Baker Smith)
Completed
Lu Forsberg, Counter-Surveillance, Extractivism and Eco-Aesthetics (with Diana Baker Smith). 2022
Amber Hammad, Speculative History and Critique of Gender in/out of Pakistan (joint with Diana Baker Smith). 2022
Elena Gomez, Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt: Gender, Labour and Inter-generationality in Marxist-feminist poetics, (joint with Astrid Lorange). 2019
Amy Prcevich, Experiments with temporality of 'office work' (with Diana Baker Smith)
HONOURS (ART HISTORY/THEORY)
Completed
Nicola Marshall, Gossip as Archival Method in Post-War Lebanese Contemporary Art, 2020
June Miskell, Embodied Knowledge And Collective Survival: Dance And Community In The Work Of Bhenji Ra, 2019.
Evgenia Anagnostopoulos, Crisis and The Curatorial: Tracing Emergent Forms Of Institutional Activity in Athens, 2018.
Melissa Mills, Performing and Contesting the Archive in Sites of Crisis, 2018.
Aneshka Mora, Indigenous and Migrant Solidarity in Contemporary Australian Art, 2017.
Hannah Waters, Visualising Necropolitics: Renzo Martens' Enjoy Poverty and Abbas Kiarostami's ABC Africa, 2017.
My Teaching
I convene the following courses within the Bachelor of Fine Art - across art history/theory, curatorial and studio:
- Australian Art, 1st year level (Art History/Theory)
- Global Contemporary Art, 3rd-year level (Art History/Theory) and Masters of Curating and Cultural Leadership
- Contemporary Art and Research Methods, 4th year/Honours level (Studio and Theory)