Dr Verónica Tello

Senior Lecturer, Contemporary Art History and Theory 

I am a Chilean-Australian art historian and writer. My research predominantly focuses on the transnational politics and archives in/out of the Pacific, Latin America and Australia.

I completed my PhD (art history) at the University of Melbourne in 2013. My PhD was the basis of my first book, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (Radical Aesthetics Radical Art series, Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2016). The book takes as its historical focus the protracted ‘global refugee crisis' from the 1990s to the present, across Australia, the UK and the Americas. It analyses how, within contexts marked by intensified border politics, contemporary artists have been grappling with how to represent, archive or abstract contested migratory histories. Within national landscapes brimming 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: 8 Dialogues on Art and History is forthcoming (June, 2023) with Discipline and Third Text Publications. Through 8 dialogues, the book develops a moving conceptual vocabulary of the aesthetics, politics, histories and potentialities of the Global Souths in collaboration with artists, writers and curators such as: Walter Mignolo, Dylan AT Miner, Salote Tawale, Rolando López, James Nguyen, Zoe Butt, Jennifer Biddle, Ruth Simbao, Rachel O'Reilly, Carla Macchiavello Cornejo and many others. (The project began in 2017 as an online dialogical project, futuresouths.org, and is substantially developed for the book). 

I am currently developing a monograph on the exhibition history of Art in Chile: An Audiovisual Documentation (1986), curated by Juan Dávlia and Nelly Richard, and the associated book Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile after 1973 (1986), published by Art & Text, authored by Richard and translated by Dávila and Paul Foss. 

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.

From 2023-2027 I will be the Editor in Chief of the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, published by Taylor & Francis. I am the Sydney editor of Memo Review.

Recent publications: 

"ANDER: Cultural Resistance in El Trolley and Matucana 19", Artforum International, 2022. Available here

"Vivienne Binns", Artforum International, 2022. Available here

"Screwball", Memo Review, 2022. Available here.

"From Impulse to Action, A Park is Not a Forest", Memo Review, 2022. Available here.

(with Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia),  "Southern Atlas: Art Criticism in/out of Chile and Australia during the Pinochet Regime", Third Text Online, 2022. Available here.

(with Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia), "A Partial History of South–South Art Criticism: Juan Dávila’s Collaborations with Art & Text and Chilean Art Workers during the Pinochet Dictatorship, 1981–1990", Third Text, 2022 . Available here.

"Juan Dávila, Self-Portrait as Ingre’s Violin (1984)", Queer Readings of the Monash University Collection, 2021. Available here.

"I, You, We, Together: For Juan, Paul and Paul", Barbara Cleveland: Thinking Business, Eds Diana Baker Smith and Kate Blackmore, Goulburn, 2020. Available here.

"What is Contemporary about Institutional Critique?", Third Text, 2020. Available here.

with Diana Baker Smith, Opening Night (The Order of Arrangements) (2020), Know My Name, National Gallery of Australia. Details here.