New Perspectives on the Panorama
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT
Friday, March 30 and Saturday, March 31, 2007

Drawing on provocative new work on panoramas, this conference will rethink the orthodoxies that currently characterize approaches to traditional 360-degree panorama paintings and broader notions of the panoramic through an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars and artists working in a wide range of fields, including cultural geography, art history, literary studies, architecture, theater studies, film, photography, and the fine arts. Papers will explore the aesthetics of 360-degree painting from its inception in the eighteenth century to its resurgence in contemporary practice, its relationship to architecture and film, and its social and political contexts.

The program includes discussion sessions with curators and artists that draw upon the rich holdings of panorama-related material at the Yale Center for British Art and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

The keynote lecture on Friday at 5:30 will be given by renowned British filmmaker Patrick Keiller. Hailed as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge in British cinema, Keiller blends wit and intellect in his investigation of politics, landscape, and spectacle in films such as London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997). His most recent work Londres, Bombay is a moving-image reconstruction of Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus, as 30 high definition video projections of up to 20 minutes duration. As part of conference-related programming, we will screen London at 2pm on Saturday, January 27 in the Center’s Lecture Hall. Robinson in Space will be screened in 35mm at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, on Friday, March 30 at 2pm.

Speakers will include Denise Blake Oleksijczuk (Simon Fraser University, British Columbia), Gretchen Holtzapple Bender (University of Pittsburgh), Andreas Luescher (Bowling Green State University), Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (University of California-Berkeley), and Tom Gunning (University of Chicago). The program concludes Saturday at 5:30 with a conversation with London-based painter Timothy Hyman on “A Space for the Self,” led by Richard Maxwell (Yale University).

The symposium is free and open to the public; advance registration is required. For more information or to register, please email ycba.research@yale.edu or call 203-432-7192.