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 A History of Contemporary Art and Neoliberalism After 1973,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 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 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 withthe Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA)and 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, editor, with contributions from Walter Mignolo, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dylan AT Miner, et al. (Third Text and Discipline: London and Melbourne, 2023),http://www.thirdtext.org/future-souths
2023, Tello, essay, ""Memo Magazine, 1 (Summer): 66-69
2022, Tello, essay, ","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, (2012-)"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.
2014,Tello, Third Text,28(6), 555–562.
E-mail
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
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:
A History of Contemporary Art and Neoliberalism After 1973:Through seven years of archival research, the book analyzes the global circulation of Chilean art and curating developed within the crucible of Pinochet's Chile (1973-90),often described as the "petri dish" of neoliberalism. As the world became integrated and networked through neoliberalism's economic system and philosophy, Chilean artists and curators--including those exiled during the Pinochet dictatorship--responded by forging a discrete exhibition circuit. They were tracking how art was becoming global, and used technologies of reproduction, spanning video, photography, slides, and the body, to record its unfolding. The book analyses post-1973 practices to narrate a novel history of global art and neoliberalism.
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)
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)
Completed
Teresa Hunter-Hicks (art theory/history)–Labour,Collaboration and Collectivity inAustralian and North American Poster Collectives (1968-1991) (with Diana Baker Smith)
Anabelle Lacroix (curatorial, practice-led research) - Insomniac aesthetics, desynchrony and the museum (with Caleb Kelly)
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, Kinship and Diasporic Art (with Diana Baker Smith)
Completed
Evgenia (Jenny) Anagnostopoulou, Untitled (topic: curatorial experiments and the global souths) (with Diana Baker Smith)
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)