Collective disquiet: tangibility, transit, time
The event has been postponed and a new date is yet to be confirmed.
Collective disquiet: tangibility, transit, time
22 May 2025, 17:30 – 19:30
For this Research Seminar, we welcome Avigail Moss, for a talk on ‘Collective disquiet: tangibility, transit, time’.
This paper investigates how systems for the circulation of artworks and artifacts developed in tandem with strategies to mitigate their potential destruction from the First to the Second World Wars. By examining a range of collectivized models—public, private, and hybrid—the paper foregrounds the often-overlooked role that risk assessment played in exhibition logistics. It argues that intermediary mechanisms emerging during this period materially and politically conditioned the objects they aimed to safeguard. While situated within art historical discourses on circulation, the paper also engages broader conversations about non-governmental cooperation during times of crisis. It emphasizes the tangible, temporal, and infrastructural importance of these protective schemes and traces their impact on the stewardship of cultural property.
Image: ‘All that is left of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Exhibit’ (detail) from ‘Utterly Destroyed: In the British Section of the Brussels Exhibition’. Illustrated London News, 20 Aug. 1910, p. 284. The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842–2003.
Avigail Moss
Associate Lecturer in the History of Art
University of Kent’s Paris School of Arts and Culture
Avigail Moss is Associate Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Kent’s Paris School of Arts and Culture. She was recently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, where she conducted research for her monograph Peculiar Risks: Art and Insurance, 1780–1940 (in development). Her published work includes a co-edited special issue of the Oxford Art Journal, 'Art and the Actuarial Imagination' (2024). She is also co-editor of Painting – the Implicit Horizon, a volume on painting after Conceptual Art (with Kerstin Stakemeier, 2012). Her other writings have appeared in Kunst und Politik, caa.reviews, and Texte zur Kunst. She is Reviews Editor for Selva: A Journal of the History of Art.
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All
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