Some readers might be interested in this Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (NSW) Conference:

Art and the real: Documentary, Ethnography, Enactment

12-14 July 2007
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney Australia
Presented by AGNSW and Artspace Sydney

With keynote speakers: Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art, The City University of New York, and Anne Rorimer, Chicago based independent scholar and freelance curator and author of New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (Thames & Hudson, 2001).

In the last decade or so, it has been witnessed an escalation of artistic production drawn to ethnographic protocols, and documentary media and methods. Artists framed in this way include: Lisa Roberts, Sharon Lockhart, Kutlug Ataman, Nan Goldin, Atelier von Lieshout, Mark Dion and Gillian Wearing, amongst many others. This conference aims to critically interrogate this current situation and art which combines the human sciences and documentary means, as well as art that attempts to intervene in social or cultural situations. The precedents for the latter form of art might include situationism and neo-concretism.

The conference would provide the opportunity to critically examine both historical precedents and contemporary incarnations of both the ethnographic turn in contemporary art and the forms of art practice characterised as either interventionist or participatory.