Sapieha Palace Symposium

This paper stems from my ongoing project about art and ageing in 1960s America. During this period, the field of gerontology developed in America as a dynamic and progressive area of research, with new theoretical insights and terminology gaining traction within both clinical practice and popular culture. The art world was also undergoing seismic upheavals, both politically, with the emergence of the women’s movement and its engagement with wider social issues, and with respect to the development of new forms of art and art making. In this paper I ask how the theoretical, philosophical, and therapeutic languages of ageing might help us think about art and its histories and, conversely, what art might have to say about ageing. The language of ageing is entangled with those relating to questions of time, chronology, history, and the body – languages, that is, that have historically shaped the field of art history and feminist interventions in that field. My case study for this lecture will be the extraordinary self-portraits by the sixty-four year old artist May Wilson. Despite the ostensibly figurative register of the ‘Ridiculous Portrait’ series, I argue that they should be considered in terms of an intractable abstraction, and that they pose questions about the ultimate impossibility of ‘depicting’ one’s old age at all. 

Jo Applin is a specialist in modern and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on American and British art since 1945. She studied at the University of Essex and at University College London (UCL), where she was subsequently Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined the Courtauld in 2016, after eleven years teaching at the University of York. From 2018 to 2021 she was Head of the History of Art Department at the Courtauld. Applin is currently an elected member of the Courtauld’s Governing Board and Director of the Centre for American Art. Applin is the author of  Lee Lozano: Not Working (Yale University Press, 2018),  Alison Wilding (Lund Humphries, 2018), Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (Yale University Press, 2012) and Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room ‒ Phalli’s Field (Afterall and MIT Press, 2012). Her most recent book, Lee Lozano: Not Working, was awarded the Suzanne and James Mellor Book Prize from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. She is currently working on a book about art and ageing. Applin’s edited books include London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960–1980 (Penn State University Press, 2018), with Catherine Spencer and Amy Tobin, and Flesh (York Museums Trust, 2016). She has also co-edited special issues of Oxford Art Journal, Tate Papers and  Art Journal. In 2016 Applin co-curated Flesh, a major loan exhibition of over eighty works at York Art Gallery; artists included Francis Bacon, Lynda Benglis, Belinda de Bruyckere, Chardin, Sarah Lucas, Steve McQueen, Bruce Nauman, Rodin, Donald Rodney, Rubens and Jenny Saville. Applin is an editor of Oxford Art Journal, where from 2014 to 2020 she was Reviews Editor. She also sits on the editorial boards of Archives of American Art Journal and Tate Papers.

In this talk, I investigate the parallels drawn between sculptor Louise Nevelson’s advanced age and her use of wood as a material.  

Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Contemporary Art at Columbia University and Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. She is the author of four books, most recently Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale University Press, 2023).

Imagining Queer Ageing Futures: a study of LGBTQ ageing in Estonia, Poland and Sweden is a research project focusing on members of LGBTQ+ community who are over 50 years old. In this paper, I will present an analysis of the interviews conducted in 2024 in Estonia. What are the expectations and fears for the future and growing older of the 50+ LGBTQ+ people in Estonia? How do the older LGBTQ+ people relate to local LGBTQ+ movement and public representations? How much do perspectives on growing older relate to one’s gender in post-Soviet Estonia? What do they want to leave behind, and what would they like to carry to the future? What are the queer imaginaries of the future? What potential risks for the older LGBTQ+ community do the people foresee, and what solutions do they propose to these risks? The paper will perhaps raise more questions than it can offer answers to. The aim is to situate the discussion on visions of the future and ageing from the point of view of older gays, lesbians, bisexual, non-binary and trans people in Estonia.

Rebeka Põldsam is a Research Fellow in Ethnology at the University of Tartu. She is working for the research project Imagining Queer Ageing Futures in Estonia, Poland and Sweden that is conducted in collaboration with Södertörn University in Sweden and Civitas Collegium in Poland. In December 2023, Põldsam defended her doctoral dissertation ‘Why are we still abnormal?! History of discourses on non-normative sex-gender subjects in Estonia” at the University of Tartu. Alongside her academic research, Põldsam works as a curator, most recently co-curating the exhibition We Don’t Do This. Intimacy, Norms and Fantasies in Baltic Art together with Adomas Narkevičius and Inga Lace at MO Museum in Vilnius.

In this autoethnographic presentation I will explore the intersections of queer temporality and ageing queer men’s bodies as sites of both queer failure and impassioned sociality. Drawing on Jack Halberstam’s (2005 and 2011) concepts of ‘queer time’ and the ‘queer art of failure’, the presentation asks how queer ageing disrupts normative temporalities and challenges hegemonic cultural logics that stigmatise and desexualise older bodies. As queer men age, their bodies increasingly deviate from normative embodiments of pleasure, rendering them unrecognisable as sexual subjects within mainstream social frameworks. Yet, this ‘failure’ to conform to societal norms opens up subversive potential, allowing for alternative forms of embodiment, desire, and relationality. By foregrounding sexuality as a site of agency, the presentation also demonstrates how older queer men navigate shifting expectations around intimacy and pleasure. It argues that the desexualisation of queer bodies reflects broader societal discomfort with ageing, yet also highlights the resilience of fantasy and psychic life in reimagining desire. Through original poetry and personal reflection, the presentation theorises the methodological, ethical, and epistemological implications of researching one’s ageing body. It concludes that the visibility of ageing queer bodies can forge new narratives and relations to time and space, offering transformative ways to understand queer ageing as a site of both failure and radical intimacy.  

Artūras Tereškinas is a sociologist, cultural critic, and writer. He teaches sociology at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, and is a chief researcher at Vytautas Kavolis Transdisciplinary Research Institute. Tereškinas is the author of two poetry collections and ten research monographs, including Men in the Economies of Disappointment: Between Good Life and Social Exclusion (2016), Pop Culture: Emotions, Bodies, Texts (2013), It’s a Man’s World: Men and Wounded Masculinities in Lithuania (2011), and Culture, Gender, Sexuality: Essays on Different Bodies (2007). In 2017, he published the novel Endless Summer: A Memoir of Love and Sex. Tereškinas is a pioneer of LGBT and queer studies in Lithuania in both scholarship and literary work.

Environmental and socially conscientious artists are increasingly incorporating biomaterials, DIY bioplastics, and recycled/upcycled synthetic plastics into their artworks as a means to mitigate the impact of their practice, only to have the artwork acquired by a collecting institution where energy and resource-intensive measures, such as rigid climate control and on-going conservation treatments, are undertaken to maintain art objects in a near static state. Museums as stewards for art objects abide by these strict environmental restrictions and conservation protocols to impede and conceal the natural degradation process of materials – but what if artists refused these measures and institutions embraced the terminal lifespan of art objects? 

The immaterial prototype Objects as Temporal Entities, conceived by the Synthetic Collective and the Centre for Sustainable Curating for the sustainable institution artist residency, foremost addresses the oft-incompatible friction between the sustainability aims of the visual art sector and the resource-intensive conservation and preservation measures implemented for art objects once they are acquired into a collection. Objects as Temporal Entities proposes that all materials degrade, albeit at different rates and in unexpected ways, prompting an exploration of low-impact strategies to perpetuate an art object without necessarily attending to the conservation or preservation of the original materials. Pulling from case studies and Objects as Temporal Entities, I will outline how existing conservation frameworks could support a shift in the prevailing practice of ‘care’ in collections.

Kim Kraczon is a conservator of modern materials and contemporary art specialising in sustainable practices in the art sector. Her area of expertise and primary focus in the field of sustainability is mitigating the environmental burden of materials and methods in conservation, art production, and exhibition-making. Kraczon is an advisor to the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), where she develops online resources and tools to facilitate an environmentally responsible art world. At Ki Culture, Kraczon is a materials specialist at the helm of the Materials Ki Book, an online sustainability guide for practitioners of cultural heritage. Kraczon is often at the forefront of research and discourse on a wide range of sustainability topics, participating in numerous working groups, symposiums, and panels internationally. As a researcher at the nexus between sustainability and cultural heritage, she regularly hosts workshops on sustainable strategies for museum professionals, gallery staff, and university students.

In this presentation I draw on the work of critical disability theorists Jessica A. Cooley, Tim Ingold, Elizabeth Guffey, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Alison Kafer. Crip materiality theory rethinks the material structures of art and architecture and their accompanying curatorial and conservation discourses, challenging the eugenic ideology of controlling and improving human nature, which requires art objects and architecture to maintain a level of fitness constructed on the basis of ableist, disability-discriminatory standards of ability, such as stability, strength and rationality. I will introduce what are so far the only practices of the theory of crip materiality in the Lithuanian contemporary art scene, as applied in Aikas Žado Laboratory, which question how we perceive ‘disability’ and help us imagine our identities, the shapes of bodies and art objects, and the processes of ageing in interesting and unconventional ways. 

Based on crip materiality methodologies, Aikas Žado Laboratory is a contemporary art facility based at the Žeimiai manor. Aikas Žado Laboratory is organised as an individual/collaborative work by artists Domas Noreika and Eglė Ambrasaitė, while also being a community work – part of the programme is managed, coordinated and conceptualised by the Aikas Žado Association. The main activities of the laboratory include practical experiments related to the management of cultural heritage objects, combining discoveries, methods, techniques and knowledge from the fields of contemporary art, science and culture. The main principles of the laboratory’s activities are illustrated by the way it applies conservation, prevention and restoration frameworks in the Žeimiai manor estate. Organising the collection of historical materials, material tests, scientific research on materials, special exhibitions and educational expeditions, it presents specific solutions and up-to-date methods, through which the manor house itself becomes a work of contemporary applied art, a compelling and unique example of heritage conservation.

Eglė Ambrasaitė  works at the intersection of interdisciplinary art as an artist, an independent curator and a researcher. She is based across multiple locations, including Žeimiai (Lithuania), Budapest (Hungary), Berlin (Germany), and New York (USA). She is the director of Aikas Žado Association and the curator of Aikas Žado Laboratory, a collectively-run, non-profit interdisciplinary art institution based in Žeimiai Manor House, Lithuania. Her current artistic and curatorial practices circulate around the themes of (crip) materialities, bodies/embodiments, love and healing. Her theoretic interests encapsulate gender, affect theories, critical disability studies and dark ecology.