This symposium explores the possibilities and challenges of the digital age to the way we image identity. Hosted by the National Portrait Gallery and the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, in conjunction with the exhibition Present tense: An imagined grammar of portraiture in the digital age and the 17th Biennale of Sydney.

The keynote lectures are:

Thursday 15th July, 6pm:  Migration, law and the image: beyond the veil of ignorance – WJT Mitchell Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, University of Chicago.

Friday 16th July, 6pm: Who am I? What day is it? – David Elliott Independent curator and artistic director 17th Biennale of Sydney.

Saturday 17th July, 2pm: Rembrandt, or the portrait as encounter- Didier Maleuvre Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California.

Venue: National Portrait Gallery, King Edward Terrace (Canberra)

Cost/Bookings: $20 Friends, $25 Guests http://hrc.anu.edu.au/events/imaging-identity

Poster as pdf.

This symposium seeks to explore this potent and complex set of issues around the relationship between persons and images in the present.

•The possibilities of portraiture: what can a portrait reveal about past and present understandings of the human condition?
•Relations between images and persons: how are these understood at the interface between the humanities, social and natural sciences?
•Persons and place: how is this relationship figured visually across and within cultures, and in the precariousness of the present?
•Empathy and conflict: how do images function as sites of contestation or reciprocal understanding between persons?
•Art museums and their audiences: how are these relations being reconfigured in the digital era?
•Seeing and temporality: does digital mediation influence the way we regard other kinds of images?
•If there is such as thing as an image for our times what might it look like?

Symposium speakers include:

David Campbell, University of Durham
Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne
Helen Ennis, School of Art, Australian National University
Martyn Jolly, School of Art, Australian National University
Didier Maleuvre, University of California
David MacDougall, Australian National University
Ian Maclean, University of Western Australia
Anna Munster, Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, University of New South Wales
Elizabeth Rankin, Auckland University

For more detail visit the website: http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/IIS.php