Conference 2018

The 8th International Conference Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art took place in Moscow on 2–6 October 2018. It was organised by Lomonosov Moscow State University and St Petersburg State University. The State Tretyakov Gallery became the conference's Moscow partner museum for the first time, while the State Hermitage Museum, its longstanding partner in St Petersburg, also contributed to the event.

Borders and Horizons

The conference theme, “Borders and Horizons”, invited participants to approach art history not as a succession of closed periods and schools but as a field of crossings: between cultures and regions, genres and media, inherited traditions and new ways of seeing and describing works of art. The discussions considered how the discipline's boundaries evolve, where established knowledge meets the still unknown, and how museum work, research, and conservation extend the horizons of art-historical inquiry.

A broad chronology, from the ancient world to the present, was brought together with art theory and the study of artistic space. The programme comprised fourteen sections, including a two-day special session, “Challenges in Displaying Modern and Contemporary Art Collections”. Museum professionals and scholars examined international display practices, exhibition design, collecting policies, and ways of presenting the contested histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art.

Conference programme overview

The conference in figures

The final statistics record more than 300 participants from 28 countries. Across five days, the conference hosted 264 papers and 55 poster presentations; the sessions amounted to more than 100 hours and attracted more than 1,000 visitors. The abstract collection contained 926 pages of abstracts, while the complete bibliographic volume, including its preliminary matter, ran to 938 pages.

Emblem and publications

Francisco Infante-Arana's Dynamic Spiral. Increasing Energy of Red Space (1964), from the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery, was chosen as the conference emblem. Its image offered a particularly apt visual counterpart to the themes of boundaries, movement, and expanding horizons.

Papers arising from the 8th conference were published in two issues of Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art: Volume 9 (2019) and Volume 10 (2020).