Call for proposals: Steve McQueen: “I want the burden”. 14th Annual Contemporary Directors Symposium, University of Sussex, online, provisional date: Friday 24 September 2021
Working across a range of formats, from video art and gallery installations to Hollywood to BBC1 with his recent Small Axe pentalogy, Steve McQueen’s prodigious output has been marked by formal ambition and political urgency, engaging most notably, but not exclusively, with black experience in racialised settings. This symposium interrogates his body of work, its political, aesthetic and institutional dimensions, and the interfaces between them.
Proposed papers are especially welcome on, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Blackness
- The body and haptic images
- Class
- Funding, commissioning, production
- Intertextuality
- London
- Masculinity
- Memory and memorialisation
- Music
- Pain
- Popular genre/s
Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent to Thomas Austin (t.r.austin@sussex.ac.uk) by 20 April 2021.
