CALL FOR CONFERENCE PAPERS: LONDON VIDEO ARTS: ‘An Oppositional Practice.’ Perspectives on Video: Art, Activism, Networks, Technology, then and now

Conference and Exhibition, February 26 – 28, 2027
Marylebone Campus, University of Westminster and Ambika P3, London

MIRAJ, in partnership with @luxmovingimage, invites abstracts for a conference celebrating the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the London Video Arts' formation.

Founded in 1976, London Video Arts formed part of the emergence of a heterogeneous network of artists and activists keen to explore video for its potential as an art form as well as a vehicle for community and radical expression.

How might current artists, curators and scholars learn from the strategies and collective practices developed at LVA and the wider culture of video collectives and exchange that burgeoned internationally from the 1970s? LVA’s own history was never confined to London: its members carried the work into Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff and Dundee, and into dialogue with video communities in New York, Toronto, Paris and Amsterdam. What can tracing these regional and international networks tell us about how oppositional media cultures take root and travel? Where do we see comparable collective, activist or community-based video practices at work today, in the UK and beyond? And what might contemporary artists and activists working with moving image, many operating in a landscape of platforms, algorithms and networked distribution rather than broadcast, recognise of their own concerns in LVA’s early experiments with autonomy, access and collective authorship?

We invite 20 minute papers and pre-constituted panels with a maximum of 4 speakers to debate these questions and reflect on the LVA's legacy. Deadline for submission 2 November 2026.