Dr Verónica Tello

Senior Lecturer, Histories of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture

I am a historian predominantly focusing on transnational politics and archives of art and visual culture and curating in/out of the Pacific, Chile, Australia and Latin America. I’m interested in understanding how global capital and class structure the historiography of art and the politics of epistemology and how memory can activate cultural, social, and political change. 

I have developed two books: Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (Radical Aesthetics Radical Art series, Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2016), focuses on the protracted ‘global refugee crisis' from the 1990s to the present across Australia, the UK and the Americas. It analyses how contemporary artists archive, activate and counter-memorialise contested migratory histories in contexts marked by intensified border politics. While national landscapes brim with monuments, 'counter-memorial aesthetics' opens up numerous tactics to understand the various ways that often invisible and/or erased migratory histories pass through us and have the potential to reshape us, time and again. My second book, Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place, and History (2023, Discipline and Third Text Publications), develops a moving conceptual vocabulary of the aesthetics, politics, economies, histories and potentialities of the Global Souths in collaboration with artists, writers and curators such as Dylan AT Miner, Carla Macchiavello, James Nguyen, Zoe Butt, Salote Tawale, Rolando López, Jennifer Biddle, Ruth Simbao, Rachel O'Reilly, Walter Mignolo, and many others.

I am currently developing a monograph on the international exhibition history of Chilean contemporary art during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). This project focuses on how certain exhibitions archived early forms of neoliberalism and its resistance within Chile and the then-emergent “global contemporary” art world. The project maps eccentricity, refusal, and the strike as counter-neoliberal strategies that gave way to an alternate, if not also shadowy, notion of being contemporary. 

In addition, with Salote Tawale and Ien Ang, I am leading the Australian Research Council Linkage project focussed on how collections and archives can catalyse epistemological experiments and equity (or structural change) within Australian regional art museums. The project, entitled Parallel, is developed in partnership with Murray Albury Museum of Art (MAMA) and embraces the potential of the ‘parallel’ or the ‘para’ as a way of being adjacent to, beyond or distinct from the structural formations that are typically the case in Australian art institutions.

I am the Editor in Chief of the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, published by Taylor & Francis and the Sydney editor of Memo Review.

Recent publications: