Keynote Biographies

TERRY SMITH

TERRY SMITH, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School.

In 2010 he was named the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate, and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). During 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2007-8 the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Research Centre, Raleigh-Durham, and in 2014 Clark Fellow at the Clark Institute, Williamstown. From 1994-2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney.

In the 1970s he was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, New York, 2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2015), The Contemporary Composition (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), and One And Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). He is editor of many others including Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity (with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, 2008). A foundation board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a board member of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and of the Biennial Foundation, New York. See www.terryesmith.net/web/

MARIAN PASTOR ROCES

Marian Pastor Roces writes on clothing, cities, international art events, museums, and violent strains of the politics of identity. The independent curator and social critic works from a Cultural Studies background to describe structures of power. In the essay “Crystal Palace Exhibitions” in the anthology Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture (MIT Press 2005), Roces observes the embedded-ness of the biennale form in 19th century imperial culture. She has sustained this critique in, among other papers, “Biennales and Biology,” Power Lecture, Power Institute, University of Sydney (2005); and an essay on curators and barbarians in the anthology In Flux: Contemporary Art in Asia, (New Delhi 2013).

Recipient of a grant from the Prince Claus Fund to convene an international conference on “The Politics of Beauty,” and from Singapore’s Earl Lu Gallery and the National Arts Council to co-curate an inquiry into scientific truth, in “Science Fictions,” Roces maintains an interest in the destructive potential of received bodies of knowledge. The same interest undergirds her work as Principal of the Philippine corporation TAO INC, which builds museums and assists urban planners.

In 2018, Roces’ book Wounded Wa-O will be released. It narrates what she describes as ethnocide perpetrated by groups of Christian settlers in the island of Mindanao against Muslims who were thus displaced from their homelands.