The University of Western Ontario welcomes researchers from around the world this weekend for NeoBaroque Revisited, an international and interdisciplinary conference on the Baroque. For a complete program, please visit the conference website.
NeoBaroque Revisited encompasses the work of experts from all relevant disciplines, organizations, media, arts and phenomena connected to Baroque study as a foundation for conference participants to examine the cultural period from its historic origins to the manifestations of Baroque which exists today in the contemporary world.
One of the most visible examples where Baroque characteristics exist today is the entertainment capital of the world: Las Vegas.
“Sin City is the perfect Baroque example because it’s the ideal combination of spectacle and technology used to fully impact the spectator in much the same way rhetoric was used in the first Baroque period,” says modern languages and literatures professor Juan Luis Suarez, who organized NeoBaroque Revisited. “Seeing and being seen are just as important as the spectacle itself, which is a characteristic that can be traced to Baroque times.”
The conference is organized by the Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) international research project, ‘The Hispanic Baroque: Complexity in the First Atlantic Culture,’ which is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through Western.
The project encompasses the efforts of a group of 35 researchers from universities in seven countries (Canada, Spain, Mexico, Australia, England, Bolivia and the United States) from multiple disciplines (literary studies, history, sociology, fine art, music and musicology, anthropology, geography, computer science, architecture and mathematics). Over the next seven years, the team will study the origin, evolution, transmission and effectiveness of the Baroque patterns of behaviour and representation in the Hispanic world.
For more information, visit the project’s website.
Concurrent to the conference, the exhibition ‘Barroco Nova: NeoBaroque Moves in Contemporary Art’ offers a complex yet surprisingly unified engagement with contemporary art projects that are linked according to their intense visuality and in their highly charged address to contemporary experience, whether through body, time or space, in the 21st century.
The official opening of the exhibition will be presented in three London venues on Friday, October 14 including:
- The McIntosh Gallery, The University of Western Ontario, 5-6:30 p.m.;
- Artlab, Western’s John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, Perth Drive, 6-7:30 p.m.;
- Museum London, 421 Ridout St. N., 7:30-10 p.m.
For more information, visit the exhibition website.
