Gesture: A three-day investigation

Tickets £8 - £25, can be bought via the Gesture website. This event is free to Oxford Music Faculty students and staff, and features presentations by musicologists Eric Clarke, Jonathan Cross, Alice Barron and Tim Coombes. To claim your free ticket, please email gestureox24@gmail.com, specifying which day(s) they wish to attend.

This conference aims to take the term ‘gesture’ to task – asking what it means across art forms to make, trace, think, or perform gestures. Notions of the ‘gestural’ are at the heart of expression, but the assumptions on which the agency of the gesture is based are often overlooked. Arguably, the gesture or gestural sits at a strange intersection between the material and immaterial. As such, it is open to historical, philosophical, aesthetic, affective, and descriptive interrogation. The conference focuses on work that deliberately deals across aesthetic and material forms, unpacking and investigating the contingencies and commitments of gesture.

The programme includes art historians, art practitioners, musicologists, musicians, choreographers, cultural theorists, and literary scholars.

This conference is in conjunction with an exhibition of work by Mark Rowan-Hull, at St John’s College, Oxford, and will feature a performance by the artist as part of the conference.

For the full schedule please visit: https://www.gestureconference.com/schedule 

If you have any questions, please get in touch at gestureox24@gmail.com.

We look forward to seeing some of you there!