Enfilade

From ArtHist.net and the Seminar on Collecting and Display website:

The Mutability of Collections: Transformation, Contextualisation, and Re-interpretation
Online and in-person, Birkbeck College, London, 7 July 2023

Registration due by 7 June 2023

This one-day conference concentrates on the ways in which objects in collections are added, exchanged or disposed of, translated and transformed. Items can be moved to new surroundings and different decorative settings, resulting in altered contexts of display, meaning, and significance. This conference thus aims to explore the various issues underlying the mutability of collections:
• the ways in which intentionality, taste, and the periodically fluctuating finances of collectors influenced the composition and display of a collection, sometimes more than once within a collection’s biography
• the ways in which fashion may have directed a collector towards particular groups of objects, as well as their alteration according to the taste of the time
• the ways in which collections may be reinterpreted and take on new meanings according to the spaces in which they were displayed
• the different associations and meanings given to individual objects through their changing representations, displays, or associations

Conference Fees
Regular booking fee (including lunch and tea & coffee), £42
Student booking fee, £25
Conference dinner on Friday evening (to be paid on the evening), £30
Zoom participation only, £15

Booking information is available here, or email collectingdisplay@gmail.com in case of difficulties.

P R O G R A M M E

9.00. Introduction

9.15. Morning Session
• Laura Moretti — Object History and Museum Display: The Adventurous Life of the Berlin Adorante
• Vincent Pham — Vernacular Veneration: Lord Chesterfield’s Library Portraits and Their afterlives
• Lara Pitteloud — From a Private to an Imperial Cabinet: The Various Re-interpretations of the Comte de Baudoin’s Collection
• Emily Monty — Prints and Books in the Dutch Fagel Collection: Continuity and Disjuncture in the London Market around 1800
• Ludovica Scalzo — Collections on Display in the Braccio Nuovo: A New Interpretation

12.45  Lunch Break

13.30  Afternoon Session
• Hannah McIsaac — Dutch Botanical Gardens: Visual Representation and the Impermanence of Collections
• Michal Mencfel — The Pulawian Relics of Unhappy Lovers, or the Poetics of Framing
• Solmaz Kive — Framing the Other: Decorative Art at the South Kensington Museum
• Maria Silina — Re-making Soviet Collections: Knowledge Production and Border Divisions, via Zoom
• Renata Komiƈ Marn — ‘Sammlung Attems’: The Identity of the Collection in Its Changing Contexts

16.40  Closing Discussion