Dr Brian Castriota

Brian is Lecturer in Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media at University College London (2023–). Alongside his appointment at UCL, Brian is Time-Based Media Conservator at the National Galleries Scotland (2017–) and Freelance Conservator for Time-Based Media and Contemporary Art at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2018–). He served as Supervising Conservator with Harvard Art Museums’ Archaeological Exploration of Sardis from 2018 to 2023 and has worked on various excavations in Turkey, Italy, and Egypt since 2011.

Brian has published numerous articles and chapters on conservation theory and practice. These have examined how ideas from post-structuralism, queer theory, and agential realism rework sedimented practices of conservation, particularly in relation to contemporary art, its musealisation, and its documentation for conservation purposes. His current research-practice considers how agential realism and other new materialist, post-humanist, post-qualitative theories and methodologies transform how we understand conservation as both a field of inquiry and a practice of care, as well as the diverse forms that it might take. 

He completed graduate-level training in conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University (2014), he was a Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Time-Based Media Conservation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2014–2016), and he received a PhD in History of Art from the University of Glasgow (2019).

He is Assistant Coordinator of ICOM-CC’s Theory, History, and Ethics of Conservation Working Group, a Committee Member of ICON’s Contemporary Art Group, and he served as Programme Chair/Asst. Programme Chair of AIC’s Electronic Media Group from 2020 to 2022. 

Visit Brian’s RPS Profile for the most up to date information.

Research

Brian’s scholarship has largely focused on problematising and reimagining notions of artwork identity, authenticity, ontology, and representation for conservation purposes by situating theories and practices of contemporary art conservation in wider philosophical discourses and tracing their lineages. More recently he has drawn upon agential realist thinking to dislodge the assumptions in conservation theory and practice that the boundaries and significances of conservation objects precede conservation research or inquiry, and that knowledge about heritage is acquired through epistemic distance. By instead taking indeterminacy, intra-dependence, and entanglement as starting points, his research examines the generative ways post-qualitative, post-humanist, and non-Western methodologies and epistemologies aerate sedimented practices of musealisation and conservation largely predicated on logics of capture, domination, and control. 

His current research explores attunement as an embodied methodology for conservation practices, grounded in relationality, intra-dependence, and affective responsiveness. It critiques dominant conservation frameworks rooted in settler colonial and capitalist logics that prioritise extraction, certainty, and possession, and explores how caring for artworks-as-cultural-heritage—and as emergent, indeterminate parts of the world—requires attentiveness and responsiveness to the ethical, political, and affective dimensions of artworks and their extended material-discursive ecologies.  

Specialisms
Conservation of time-based media, contemporary art, and archaeological materials; agential realist, new materialist, post-humanist, and post-qualitative approaches to conservation; fragment, loss, and absence

Selected Publications

Castriota, B. 2023. “The Enfolding Object of Conservation: Artwork Identity, Authenticity, and Documentation.” In Conservation of Contemporary Art: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice, eds. R. van de Vall and V. van Saaze. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 
   
Castriota, B. and C. Walsh. 2023. “In the Shadow of the State: Collecting Performance at IMMA and Institutions of Care in the Irish Context.” In Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, eds. H. Hölling, J. P. Feldman and E. Magnin, 147–168. London: Routledge. 
 
Castriota, B. 2021. “Instantiation, Actualization, and Absence: The Continuation and Safeguarding of Katie Paterson’s Future Library (2014-2114).” Journal of the American Institute of Conservation, Volume 60, Issue 2–3: 145–60. 
 
Castriota, B. 2021. “Variants of Concern: Authenticity, Conservation, and the Type-Token Distinction.” Studies in Conservation, Volume 67, Issue 1–2: 72–83. DOI: 10.1080/00393630.2021.1974237
 
Castriota, B. 2021. “Object Trouble: Constructing and Performing Artwork Identity in the Museum.” ArtMatters International Journal for Technical Art History, Special Issue 1: 12-22.

Teaching and Supervision

HART0159 - Examining and Analysing Artworks
HART0192 - Conserving Complexity
HART0186 - Studio Practice: Conservation of Time-Based Media

Contact

Office: Room 314, UCL East – Marshgate
Office hours: Thursdays 2:30 – 3:30pm [in person]. Term-time only. 
Email: b.castriota@ucl.ac.uk