The graduate students of the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal

Nehru University, are organising an interdisciplinary conference on the theme

of Cracks & Crossovers, exploring their presence and reflection in visual

culture, performances and media practices. The theme responds to the

urgency of living in a time when systemic limits become visible through cracks.

It asks how we register the differences between categories such as crisis,

fragment and fracture. Do these terms signal a definitive rupture or an ongoing

change? Or do our times demand a new perspective that allows the cracks to

speak? Taking a cue from The Cracked Mirror (2012), the conference seeks to

explore the many perspectives that are refracted through the mirror's shards.

Across plural and asymmetric histories, artistic and cultural practices are

understood as a complex process marked by discontinuities. In dismantling

grand narratives, scholars and practitioners have adopted devices that

highlight hybrid voices and alternative viewpoints emerging from unequal

societies. Diana Taylor (2003) distinguishes between archive and repertoire,

where a rupture/ trauma is embodied through reenactments. Tapati Guha

Thakurta (2004) reveals how fractures in meanings are exposed, when

artefacts transition through time frames. Reconfigured within the digital realm,

images not only represent but arise as consequences of algorithmic codes,

symbols and ideologies (Boundary Images, 2023). Alongside these crossovers

as a negotiation between what is broken and what is built, we ask: what slow

transformations unfold within the fissures? What lies in the cracks?

We are interested in cracks as epistemic breaks that challenge totalising

narratives and open up alternative ways of knowing. This call for papers and

practice-based presentations invites interdisciplinary contributions that

explore the aesthetics of cracks and ruptures across historical and

contemporary contexts within visual histories, performance traditions and

cinematic and media practices, including but not limited to:

1.Bodies on the Margins

2.Space, Place & Liminal Geographies

3.Waste & Ecology

4.Affect, Conflict & Hate Culture

5.Everyday Aesthetics

6. Law & Censorship

7.Colour & Abstraction in Artistic Practices

8.Creative Labour & Artistic Crossovers

9.Performance of Trauma & Collective Memories

10.Site-specificity & Museumisation

11.Networks, Interfaces and Media Ecologies

12. Intermediality, Platforms and Reception Studies

Submission Guidelines:

1.Please complete the submission form:

https://forms.gle/368HtnevYcYZM3G3A

2.Submission deadline: August 22, 2026

3.Apply with Title, Abstract (250 - 350 words) & Keywords

4.For practice-based presentation, kindly upload

images/audio/visual with a brief description in a pdf format not

exceeding 10MBs

5.Conference is open to Master’s & PhD students and early career

researchers

6.The conference will be conducted in hybrid mode, with both

online and ofline presentations

7.Incomplete applications and AI generated abstracts will not be

entertained

Notification of acceptance will be sent on 15 September. Full papers

(up to 2000 words), along with presentations, are to be submitted

by 10 October. Participants will be allotted 15 minutes to present.