TAHITI 4 will be held at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki on 14 –15 October 2011 on the theme of Empiria in Art History. Keynote speakers are Professor David Gaimster, Director of the Hunterian Museum and Art
Gallery at the University of Glasgow, and Docent Jari Pakkanen, Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at Royal
Holloway University of London.
TAHITI 4 - Empiria in Art History (pdf)
TAHITI 4 program
The national conferences of art historians in Finland are named after an association founded in the 1960s under the name of TAHITI, an acronym from the Finnish TAideHIstoria TIeteenä (art history as a branch of scholarship). This was a society of young researchers who met to discuss theoretical and methodological issues. During the 1980s and 1990s, national conferences of art historians were arranged by Eidos, the association of students of art history at the University of Helsinki.
In 2007, the Society for Art History in Finland revived this tradition by holding the two-day TAHITI1 conference in association with the departments of art history of the universities of Helsinki and Turku and the KEHYS Community Relations and Development section of the Finnish National Gallery . The theme of the conference was art-historical thinking and it included over 30 speakers with papers reflecting the diversity and richness of art-historical research. The subjects extended from the study of relics to models of analysis in art history and from contemporary art to the role of museums as situational media. The keynote speaker was Silke Walther of Germany, whose paper was entitled "The Great Chain of Meaning: Franz Theodor Kugler (1808 –1858) and the Art Historical Survey Book in Germany".
TAHITI 2 was held in November 2008 in association with the National Museum of Finland and the Department of Art History at the University of Helsinki. Its theme was the language and concepts of art history. This one-day seminar had eleven speakers. The keynote speaker was Maria Görts, who presented the paper "Depicted with Honesty: Some Remarks on a Category of Concepts in Art Criticism and Art History in the Early 20th Century".
TAHITI 3 was organized in March 2010 in Turku in cooperation with the departments of art history of the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University. The theme on this occasion was “Theory, History and Practices of Memory”. There were eleven speakers at this one-day seminar. The keynote speaker was Professor emeritus Stephen Bann (University of Bristol), on the subject: "History as Dream Work: the French Troubadour Painters Fleury Richard and Pierre Revoil".
The TAHITI conferences offer a broad-based forum for scholarly discussion and the presentation of topical research projects.