鶹madou

Dr Verónica Tello

Dr Verónica Tello

Senior Lecturer

Tello holds a BA (Honours), Art History, and a PhD, Art History, from the University of Melbourne.

Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA)
School of Art & Design

Senior Lecturer, Contemporary Art History
Chief Investigator, Australian Research Council,Parallel Structures(2021-2025)
School of Art & Design, University of New South Wales
Paddington Campus
Office F216H
Email: v.tello [at] unsw.edu.au

PhD, Art History, University of Melbourne, 2014

Research

Verónica Tello’s research encompasses Latin American and global art historiography, with a particular focus on queer methodologies and the art and archives of the diaspora. She is the author of (Radical Aesthetics Radical Art series, Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2016) and the editor of (2023, Discipline and Third Text Publications), featuring contributions from Srdjan Jovanic Weiss,Dylan AT Miner, Walter D Mignolo, Zoe Butt, Carla Macchiavello, and many others. Currently, she is developing a monograph titled An Archive of Neoliberalism: A History of Contemporary Art, which focuses on the global circulation of Chilean conceptual art during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and its experimental modelling of neoliberalism. Through seven years of archival research, the book traces the circulation of these art commodity objects produced within Pinochet’s crucible across the last fifty years - across biennials and, more recently, museum and private collections. By doing so, an art history of the relations between neoliberalism and post-1970s art emerges. Tello's writing has appeared in scholarly journals such as Third Text, Memory Studies, Contemporaneity, and the for which she serves as editor-in-chief. In 2024, she edited the special issue "Liquid Time; Liquify Art History" for Index Journal,focusing on approaches to re-staging archives and histories of art and exhibitions across Brazil, Chile, Venice, Australia, Malaysia, and Fiji.

Tello’s writing as an art critic has been featured in magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Afterall Online, and , for which she is a contributing editor. As an extension of her art historical work, since 2021, she has led the curatorial research project to critically engage with discourses about diversity and inclusion in Anglo-Australian art museums. The project tests the method of para-institutionality, or curating alongside the museum, to advance structural change in collaboration withand diasporic and Indigenous researchers and curators.

Tello's research has been supported by various residencies, fellowships and grants from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Rhodes University, Social Practice CUNY (City University New York), the Frankfurter Kunstvereiin, the Banff Curatorial Institute, the Australian Research Council, Creative Australia, Create NSW, the Bundanon Trust and 鶹madou.She has been invited to deliver talks at SkulpturProjekte Münster, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Afterall's Exhibition Histories Masters, Central Saint Martins College in London, the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, and

Teaching

Tello has taught courses in modern and contemporary art history, including “Avant-Garde and Postmodern Art” and “Art and Revolution” at the University of Melbourne. In recent years at 鶹madou, she has developed art history courses such as "Australian Art (1804-present)" and “Global Contemporary Art.” Additionally, she leads the Honours-level “Research Methods” course for students working on a thesis. She regularly supervises and chairs panels for graduate students in the School of Art & Design, focusing on a range of topics, including diasporic, decolonial, trans, and queer curatorial and artistic methodologies in Australian, Asian, and Latin American contexts. See below for details on graduate supervision.

Select Publications:

2024, Tello, ed, Special Issue, "Editor's Introduction: Liquid Time.",Index Journal

2024, Tello, catalog essay, “The Destructive Character Sees Nothing Permanent. But For This Reason, She Sees Ways Everywhere,” , UTS Gallery, Sydney.

2023, Tello, edited book, with contributions from Walter Mignolo, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dylan AT Miner, et al.(Third Text and Discipline: London and Melbourne, 2023)

2023, Tello, essay, 'What We Inhereted',Memo Magazine, `1 (Summer): 66-69, https://www.memoreview.net/magazine/issue-1/what-we-inherited

2022, Tello, essay,'Counter-memory and and–and: Aesthetics and temporalities for living together',Memory Studies, Issue 2, April pp. 390 - 401 12, Anthologised in:Counter-Monuments, Memory Practices in Public Spaces,eds., Maria Engelskirchen, Ursula Frohne, Corinna Kühn, and Marianne Wagner, in press, 2025, transcript verlag,https://cup.columbia.edu/book/counter-monuments/9783837670844

2022, Tello and Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia,essay andatlas,'Southern Atlas: Art Criticism in/out of Chile and Australia during the Pinochet Regime',Third Text Online.

2021, Tello, catalog essay,Juan Dávila, Self-Portrait as Ingre's Violin (1984),Queer Readings of the Monash University Collection,Ratliff M; Parker FE,(ed.),Monash University Museum of Art.

2020, Tello, essay, 'What is contemporary about institutional critique?',Third Text,34,pp. 635 - 649

2018, Tello, chapter, 'Aesthetic Autonomy at the Border: Notes on Necro-Art', inLushetich N(ed.),The Aesthetics of Necropolitics,Rowman and Littlefield,London and New York

2016, Tello, book,Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art,Bloomsbury,London and New York: Focus on , Hito Steyerl, Dinh Q Lé, Isaac Julien, and Rosemary Laing.

Select Art Criticism

2024, Tello, review, “Archie Moore, Memo Review

2024, Tello, micro-reviews, "Frieze.

2022, Tello, review,Memo Review.

2022, Tello, review.Artforum, October 2022

2022,“ Tello, review,review, Artforum 62, no. 1 (September 2022): 220–21.

2022, Tello, review,Artforum 2022

  • Books | 2023
    Tello V; Macchiavello C; Mignolo W; Miner DAT; López R; Hernandez E; O'Reilly R; Simbao R; Biddle J; Frank C; Butt Z; Nguyen J; Tawale S; Tshilumba Mukendi J-S; Mitropoulos A; Jovanović Weiss S; Katherine C; do Campo F, 2023, Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place, and History, Tello V, (ed.), Third Text Publications and Discipline, London and Melbourne,
    Books | 2016
    Tello V, 2016, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art, Bloomsbury, London and New York,
  • Book Chapters | 2023
    Hernández EA; López R; O'Reilly R; Macchiavello C; Tello V, 2023, 'Contracts (and Colonial Law) I: Exploitation and Order without Progress', in Tello V (ed.), Future Souths Dialogues on Art, Place, and History, Third Text Publications and Discipline, London, and Melbourne/Narrm, pp. 110 - 121,
    Book Chapters | 2023
    Miner DAT; Tello V; Tshilumba Mukendi J-S; Simbao R; Biddle J; Mignolo WD, 2023, 'Contemporaneities: Aanikoobijiganag (AncestorsDescendants) and Decolonised Time', in Tello V (ed.), Future Souths Dialogues on Art, Place, and History, Third Text Publications and Discipline, London, and Melbourne/Narrm, pp. 191 - 207,
    Book Chapters | 2023
    Simbao R; Macchiavella C; Tshilumba Mukendi J-S; Tello V, 2023, 'Global Art: Stepping Nimbly with Strategic Southernness', in Tello V (ed.), Future Souths Dialogues on Art, Place, and History, Third Text Publications and Discipline, London and Melbourne/Narrm, pp. 170 - 185,
    Book Chapters | 2023
    Tello V; Frank C; Nguyen J; Tawale S, 2023, 'Futures: Or, Weak Histories', in Tello V (ed.), Future Souths Dialogues on Art, Place, and History, Third Text Publications and Discipline, London and Melbourne/Narrm, pp. 34 - 61,
    Book Chapters | 2023
    Tello V, 2023, 'Former West/Future Souths', in Tello V (ed.), Future Souths Dialogues on Art, Place, and History, Third Text Publications and Discipline, London and Melbourne/Narrm, pp. 12 - 33,
    Book Chapters | 2023
    Tello V, 2023, 'How to Appear? Writing art history in Australia after 1973', in Wake C; Suliman S; Little S (ed.), Performance, Refugees, Resistance, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 138 - 154,
    Book Chapters | 2023
    Tello V, 2023, 'Una mirada sobre afuera/A View from the Outside: Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile', in Macchiavello C; San Martin F; Solimano P (ed.), Dismantling the Nation State: Notes on Contemporary Art and Culture in Chile, Amherst College Press, Massachusetts,
    Book Chapters | 2019
    Tello V, 2019, 'Is Contemporary Art Postdevelopmental? A Study of 'Art as NGO'', in Morreo Boada C; Klein E (ed.), Postdevelopmental Practice, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 306 - 320,
    Book Chapters | 2019
    Tello V, 2019, 'The Speculative Collectivity of the Global Transnational, Or, Social Practice and the International Division of Labour', in Eckersall P; Grehan H (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 151 - 155,
    Book Chapters | 2018
    Tello V, 2018, 'Aesthetic Autonomy at the Border: Notes on Necro-Art', in Lushetich N (ed.), The Aesthetics of Necropolitics, Rowman and Littlefield, London and New York, pp. 55 - 55,
    Book Chapters | 2017
    Tello V; Campus in Camps , 2017, 'Collective Dictionary: Political', in Hlavajova M; Sheikh S (ed.), Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 656 - 656
    Book Chapters | 2013
    Tello V, 2013, 'Automated Drawing: Gosia Wlodarczak', in Rattemeyer C (ed.), Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon, London, pp. 332 - 334
    Book Chapters | 2013
    Tello V, 2013, 'Post-photography: Maria Kontis', in Rattemeyer C (ed.), Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon, London, pp. 154 - 156
    Book Chapters | 2013
    Tello V, 2013, 'Tracing the Past: Richard Lewer', in Rattemeyer C (ed.), Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon, London, pp. 178 - 180
    Book Chapters | 2011
    Tello V, 2011, 'Timing History: Li Songsong', in Schwabsky B (ed.), Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting, pp. 186 - 190
  • Edited Books | 2023
    Little S; Suliman S; Wake C; Szörényi A; Khorana S; Gholami Z; Perea S; Papastergiadis N; Tello V; Giannacopoulos M, (eds.), 2023, Performance, Resistance and Refugees, Routledge, London,
    Edited Books | 2020
    Baker Smith D; Blackmore K, (ed.), 2020, Barbara Cleveland: Thinking Business, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Goulburn,
  • Journal articles | 2023
    Tello V, 2023, 'Old/New: The Anti-Gatekeeping Method', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 23, pp. 1 - 3,
    Journal articles | 2022
    Tello V; Valenzuela-Valdivia S, 2022, 'A Partial History of South-South Art Criticism: Juan Dávila's collaborations with Art & Text and Chilean art workers during the Pinochet regime (1981-1990)', Third Text, 35, pp. 709 - 731,
    Journal articles | 2022
    Tello V; Valenzuela-Valdivia S, 2022, 'Southern Atlas: Art Criticism in/out of Chile and Australia during the Pinochet Regime', Third Text Online,
    Journal articles | 2022
    Tello V, 2022, 'An Unhomely Feeling', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 22, pp. 147 - 150,
    Journal articles | 2022
    Tello V, 2022, 'Counter-memory and and–and: Aesthetics and temporalities for living together', Memory Studies, 17, pp. 390 - 401,
    Journal articles | 2020
    Tello V, 2020, 'What is contemporary about institutional critique?', Third Text, 34, pp. 635 - 649,
    Journal articles | 2016
    Tello V; Fisher L, 2016, 'The Fiction of Aftermath: Public Art, Public Imagination and the Aesthetics of Anthropogenic Crisis', Australian Humanities Review, 60, pp. 1 - 20,
    Journal articles | 2016
    Tello V, 2016, 'Performing Crisis: Critical Solidarity in/with the Silent University', Broadsheet, 45, pp. 31 - 34
    Journal articles | 2014
    Tello V, 2014, 'Counter-Memory, Heterochronia, and 'History Painting' (After Géricault): Dierk Schmidt's SIEV-X - On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics', Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 3, pp. 21 - 37,
    Journal articles | 2014
    Tello V, 2014, 'The Aesthetics and Politics of Aftermath Photography: Rosemary Laing's welcome to Australia (2004)', Third Text: third world perspectives on contemporary art and culture, 28, pp. 553 - 560,
    Journal articles | 2012
    Tello V, 2012, 'Review: Rhetorical Gestures: The 18th Biennale of Sydney', Afterall (Online),
    Journal articles | 2011
    Tello V, 2011, 'Between Counter-memory and Paranoia: Dierk Schmidt's triptych: Xenophobe, Freedom and Untitled (Louvre) (2001/2002)', Tijdschrift Kunstlicht, 32, pp. 16 - 23
    Journal articles | 2010
    Tello V, 2010, 'Review: The Division of the Earth', Afterall (Online),
  • Other | 2024
    Tello V, 2024, What We Inherited, Memo,
  • Media | 2017
    Tello V; Tawale S, 2017, Culture Connect, Murray Albury Museum of Art

Selected Grants

2021-2025 Australian Research Council: Lead Researcher Parallel Structures: Experiments with Diversity and Curating Beside the Museum. In partnership with the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), Distinguished Professor Ien Ang (Western Sydney University) and artist Salote Tawale (University of Sydney). Project website: . This project analyses diversification strategies within the context of Anglo-Australian art museums in collaboration with emerging and independent curators of colour.

2023 Parallel Structures, 鶹madou Art & Design, for exhibition see

2023 An Archive of Neoliberalism; A History of Contemporary Art (1973-)鶹madou, Sabbatical Research Grant.

2022-2021 An Archive of Neoliberalism; A History of Contemporary Art (1973-)鶹madou Art & Design, faculty research development grant.

2019 Creative Australia, Individual Project Grant for initial archival history on the book An Archive of Neoliberalism: A History of Contemporary Art (1973-)

2019 PLuS Alliance Research Fellowship (alliance between 鶹madou, Kings College and Arizona State University), for travel and development of research on diasporic art historiography.

2015-2018 Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, University of New South Wales

Current projects include:

An Archive of Neoliberalism; A History of Contemporary Art:Through seven years of archival research, the book analyses the circulation of Chilean art and archives from 1973 to the present. It analyzes how they registered early forms of neoliberalism in Pinochet's Chile and the then-emergent “global contemporary” art world.

Parallel Structures:With Salote Tawale and Ien Ang, Tello leads the Australian Research Council Linkageproject on how collections and archives can catalyzeepistemological experiments andequity (or structural change)within Australian regional art museums. The project, entitledis developed in partnership with Murray Albury Museum of Art (MAMA) andembraces the potential of the ‘parallel’ or the ‘para’ as a way of being adjacent to, beyond or distinct from the structural formations that are typically the case in Australian art institutions. Project collaborators are:Evgenia Anagnostopoulou, Kelly Dezart-Smith, Sebastian Henry-Jones, Ruha Fifita, Lana Nguyen and Tian Zhang

Tello is the Editor in Chief of thepublished by Taylor & Francis and the Sydney editor of.

My Research Supervision

PhD

June Miskell (art history/theory) - Archipealogic thinking and Filipinx contemporary art (with Mina Roces and Astrid Lorange)

Teresa Hunter-Hicks (art theory/history)–Labour,Collaboration and Collectivity inAustralian and North American Poster Collectives (1968-1991) (with Diana Baker Smith)

Angela Goddard(curatorial, practice-led research) - World Making Strategies and Curatorial Support Structures in Australia (with Felicity Fenner and Lizzie Muller)

Jade Muratore (practice-led research) - Queer histories and para-fiction (with Diana Baker Smith, Rochelle Haley and Grant Stevens)

Anabelle Lacroix (curatorial, practice-led research) - Insomniac aesthetics, desynchrony and the museum (with Caleb Kelly)

Completed

Aneshka Mora (art theory/history)–Decolonialisation and Institutional Critique in Contemporary Australian Art (with Bianca Hester)

James Nguyen (practice-led research)–MakingChó bò*: Troubling Việtspeak:Collaborating, translating, and archiving with family inAustralian contemporary art(with Jennifer Biddle), 2021.

Meredith Birrell (art theory/history)–The Fugitive Self: Posthuman subjectivity in the Essay-Films of The Otolith Group, Hito Steyerl and Ursula Biemann, 2020.

MFA

Lisa Myeonjoo (with Diana Baker Smith)

Evgenia (Jenny) Anagnostopoulou, Untitled (topic: curatorial experiments and the global souths) (with Diana Baker Smith)

Completed

Lu Forsberg, Counter-Surveillance, Extractivism and Eco-Aesthetics(with Diana Baker Smith). 2022

Amber Hammad, Speculative History and Critique of Gender in/out of Pakistan(joint with Diana Baker Smith). 2022

Elena Gomez,Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt: Gender, Labour and Inter-generationality in Marxist-feminist poetics, (joint with Astrid Lorange). 2019

AmyPrcevich, Experiments with temporality of 'office work' (with Diana Baker Smith)

HONOURS (ART HISTORY/THEORY)

Completed

Nicola Marshall, Gossip as Archival Method in Post-War Lebanese Contemporary Art, 2020

June Miskell,EmbodiedKnowledge And Collective Survival: Dance And Community In The Work Of BhenjiRa, 2019.

EvgeniaAnagnostopoulos,Crisis and The Curatorial: Tracing Emergent Forms Of Institutional Activity in Athens,2018.

Melissa Mills,Performing and Contesting the Archive in Sites of Crisis, 2018.

Aneshka Mora,Indigenous and Migrant Solidarity in Contemporary Australian Art, 2017.

Hannah Waters,Visualising Necropolitics: Renzo Martens' Enjoy Poverty and Abbas Kiarostami's ABC Africa,2017.

My Teaching

Tello convenes the following courses within the Bachelor of Fine Art and Bachelor of Art across art history/theory, curatorial and studio:

  • Australian Art,1st year level (Art History/Theory)
  • Global Contemporary Art,3rd-year level (Art History/Theory) and Masters of Curating and Cultural Leadership
  • Research Methods,4th year/Honours level (Studio and Theory)