Dr Verónica Tello

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 Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (Radical Aesthetics Radical Art series, Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2016) and the editor of Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place, and History (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 Memo Review, for which she is a contributing editor. As an extension of her art historical work, since 2021, she has led the curatorial research project Parallel Structures 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 with the 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 UNSW. She has been invited to deliver talks at Skulptur Projekte 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 UQ Art Museum. 

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 UNSW, 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." Liquid Time; Liquify Art History, Index Journal

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

2023, Tello, editor,  Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place and History 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, "What We Inhereted," Memo Magazine, 1 (Summer): 66-69

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 and atlas, "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? A Study of The Silent University (2012-)" Third Text, 34, pp. 635 - 649

2018, Tello, chapter, 'Aesthetic Autonomy at the Border: Notes on Necro-Art', in Lushetich 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 Tania Bruguera, Hito Steyerl, Dinh Q Lé, Dierk Schmidt, Isaac Julien, and Rosemary Laing. 

2014, Tello, "The Aesthetics and Politics of Aftermath Photography: Rosemary Laing’s welcome to Australia (2004)." Third Text, 28(6), 555–562.