Dr Verónica Tello

Senior Lecturer, Contemporary Art History
Chief Investigator, Australian Research Council, Parallel Structures (2021-2025)
School of Art & Design, University of New South Wales
Paddington Campus
Office F216H
Email: v.tello [at] unsw.edu.au

PhD, Art History, University of Melbourne, 2014

Research

Verónica Tello’s research encompasses Latin American and global art historiography, with a particular focus on queer methodologies and the art and archives of the diaspora. She is the author of Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (Radical Aesthetics Radical Art series, Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2016) and the editor of Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place, and History (2023, Discipline and Third Text Publications), featuring contributions from Dylan AT Miner, Walter D Mignolo, Zoe Butt, Carla Macchiavello, and many others. Currently, she is developing a monograph titled Shonky Exports: An Archive of Neoliberalism; A History of Contemporary Art, which focuses on the global circulation of Chilean experimental art and writing from the late 1970s to the present. Her art historical writings have appeared in scholarly journals such as Third Text, Memory Studies, Contemporaneity, and the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, for which she serves as editor-in-chief. In 2024, she edited the special issue "Liquid Time; Liquify Art History" for Index Journal, focussing on approaches to re-staging archives and histories of art and exhibitions across Brazil, Chile, Venice, Australia, Malaysia, and Fiji.

Tello’s writing as an art critic has been featured in magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Afterall Online, and Memo Review, for which she is a contributing editor. As an extension of her art historical work, since 2021, she has led the curatorial research project Parallel Structures to critically engage with discourses about diversity and inclusion in Anglo-Australian art museums. The project tests the method of para-institutionality, or curating alongside the museum, to advance structural change in collaboration with the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) and diasporic and Indigenous researchers and curators.

Tello's research has been supported by various residencies, fellowships and grants from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Rhodes University, Social Practice CUNY (City University New York), the Frankfurter Kunstvereiin, the Banff Curatorial Institute, the Australian Research Council, Creative Australia, Create NSW, the Bundanon Trust and UNSW. She has been invited to deliver talks at Skulptur Projekte Münster, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Afterall's Exhibition Histories Masters, Central Saint Martins College in London, the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, and UQ Art Museum. 

Recent publications, including art criticism:

“Liquid Time: Editor’s Introduction,” Index Journal, Special Issue, Liquid Time; Liquify Art History, edited by V. Tello, 2024.

“Archie Moore, kith and kin,” Memo Review, 2024.

“The Destructive Character Sees Nothing Permanent. But For This Reason, She Sees Ways Everywhere,” Claudia Nicholson: Let It Burn, catalog essay, UTS Gallery, Sydney 2024

“What to See During the 2024 Biennale of Sydney,” review, Frieze, April 2024, online.

Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place and History, edited volume (Third Text and Discipline: London and Melbourne, 2023)

Parallel Structures, exhibition, Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), October 17, 2023-March 17, 2024

“Cecilia Vicuña: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes,” review, Artforum 62, no. 1 (September 2022): 220–21.

“ANDER: Cultural resistance in El Trolley and Matucana 19″ review, Artforum 2022, online.

“A Partial History of South-South Art Criticism: Juan Dávila’s Collaborations Art & Text and Chilean Art workers during the Pinochet dictatorship, 1981-1990”, with Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia. Third Text, vol 35, issue 6, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2021.2019954 .

“How to Appear? Writing Art History in Australia after 1973,” in Performance, Refugee, Representations, eds. C. Wake, S. Little and S. Suliman (London and New York: Routledge, 2022). Open access version here

Teaching

Tello has taught courses in modern and contemporary art history, including “Avant-Garde and Postmodern Art” and “Art and Revolution” at the University of Melbourne. In recent years at UNSW, she has developed art history courses such as "Australian Art (1804-present)" and “Global Contemporary Art.” Additionally, she leads the Honours-level “Research Methods” course for fine arts students working on a thesis. She regularly supervises and chairs panels for graduate students in the School of Art & Design, focusing on a range of topics, including diasporic, decolonial, trans, and queer curatorial and artistic methodologies in Australian, Asian, and Latin American contexts. See below for details on graduate supervision.