Plenary Speakers

The International Conference on the Arts in Society will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.
Mireille Astore
David Elliott
Merilyn Fairskye
Djon Mundine

Garden Conversation Sessions

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations - unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.


The Speakers


Mireille Astore
Mireille Astore is an artist, a writer and adjunct lecturer at the Sydney College of the Arts, the Visual Arts Faculty of the University of Sydney. She has a PhD in Contemporary Arts and her artworks have been shown in such venues as the Tate Modern, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 8th Sharjah Biennial, 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, and Home Works IV – Beirut. In 2003 she won the National Photographic Purchase Award and she is featured in the Thames and Hudson Publication New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century.

Of Mireille Astore’s Tampa artwork, it was said: “Just as Benjamin noted the contextual aesthetic consequences of the circulation of photographic images through newspapers and magazines, Astore’s combination of photography with sculpture and performance, circulated via her website, rewrites both photography and the spatial and interpretive dynamics of this installation work.” Peter Hutchings, Eyeline issue 54, Winter 2004.



David Elliott
david-elliott-by-kelliotsmlDavid Elliott is a curator, writer, broadcaster and museum director primarily concerned with modern and contemporary art. Elliott was Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England from 1976–96, Director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden from 1996–2001, the founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan from 2001–06 and in 2007, the first Director of Istanbul Modern, Turkey. From 1998–2004, he was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) and in 2008, he was the Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor of Art History at Humboldt University, Berlin.

Elliott is a cultural historian whose main interests concern contemporary art, Russian avant-garde and the visual cultures of central and eastern Europe, Asia and the non-western world from the late nineteenth century. Beginning in the early 1980s, he formulated a series of pioneering exhibitions in one of the first programs to integrate non-western culture with contemporary art. He has published a large number of books, articles and catalogues on these subjects and has curated many exhibitions. He has also written extensively about the present-day role and function of museums and contemporary art.

Exhibitions he has conceived or worked on include: ‘Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930–1945’ (1995); ‘Wounds: between democracy and redemption in contemporary art’ (1998); ‘After the Wall: art and culture in post-Communist Europe’ (1999); ‘Organising Freedom: Nordic art of the ’90s’ (2000); ‘Young Video Artists’ Initiative’ (2002); ‘Absences’ (2002); ‘Happiness: a survival guide for art and life’ (2003); ‘Africa Remix: contemporary art of a continent’ (2004); ‘Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Where is Our Place?’ (2004); ‘Follow Me! Chinese Art at the Threshold of the New Millennium’ (2005); ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto’ (2005); ‘Tokyo-Berlin/Berlin-Tokyo’ (2005); ‘Bill Viola: Hatsu-Yume [First Dream]’ (2006); ‘From Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic’ (2007); ‘Time Present, Time Past: Highlights from 20 Years of the International Istanbul Biennial’ (2007); and ‘The Quick and the Dead: Rites of passage in art, spirit and life’ (2009).



Merilyn Fairskye
Merilyn Fairskye is an artist and academic whose work is exhibited in art galleries, public spaces, electronic arts and film festivals within Australia and internationally and is represented in numerous Australian and international public collections. She has undertaken artist residencies in the USA, Italy, France and Australia and has been the recipient of many Australia Council and Australian Film Commission grants, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. From 2007-2009 she was Associate Dean, Research at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She is currently on sabbatical and on her return will teach in the Photomedia Studio at SCA.

Her recent works have engaged with the mapping of bodies, identities and terrains in uncontrolled technological environments such as the Pine Gap Defence facility (Connected, 2003-4), the transitory domain of the international airport (Stati d’Animo, 2005-2007), and bodies of water (Aqua 2007-).

Her current work, a series of still photographs and video works, uses material she shot in Crimea, Kiev and Chernobyl,Ukraine, in 2009-2010. It engages with a near-cataclysmic event – the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, and the resonances of its after-life within and outside of post-Soviet Ukraine. The work explores what remains unresolved and unfinished. In 2009 she exhibited the first of these works - Fieldwork I (three-channel video) and Fieldwork II (single-channel video) at Stills Gallery, Sydney.

Her work has recently featured in two ABC documentaries – The Art Life and the making of My Favourite Australian. Exhibitions she has recently participated in include My Favourite Australian, at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2009); Figuring Landscapes: moving image work from the UK and Australia at multiple venues including Tate Modern, London; Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney; ArtSway, New Forest; Chapter Arts, Cardiff; Brighton Cinemateque; FACT, Liverpool, UK (2008-2009); Discovering the Other at the National Palace Museum, Taipei; 24th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Kassel, Germany (2007); The Arrival, Two Rooms, Auckland NZ (2006); Interesting Times - Focus on Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005) and 33rd International Film Festival Rotterdam, (2005). Her works can be seen on: www.stillsgallery.com.au and www.plusandminus.net.



Djon Mundine
Djon Mundine is a curator and art historian, originally from the Northern Rivers area of NSW. He is currently Indigenous Curator, Contemporary Art at Campbelltown Arts Centre. Mundine is well known as the concept curator of the permanent Aboriginal Memorial installation at the National Gallery of Australia and was awarded an OAM in 1993. Previous positions have included: Senior Curator, Gallery of Aboriginal Australia, National Museum of Australia, Senior Curator of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Programs, MCA, and Art Adviser for the Ramingining Community of Central Arnhem Land.