This year’s conference theme is “For Better or Worse: Crossing the Line.” The world we live in is filled with visible and invisible lines—directing us, connecting us, and dividing us. We create them, negotiate them, erase them, replace them, and, of course, cross them both accidentally and deliberately every day of our lives. We cross streets to visit our neighbors but sometimes also to confront them. We cross class, ethnic, religious, and gender lines in ways that expand and enrich our social fabric but sometimes also risking tearing it. We cross national lines to see the world and learn about new cultures but also to conquer other civilizations, imposing our own cultural values upon them. And meanwhile, nature itself ignores all our artificially imposed boundaries—storms, heat waves, fires, viruses, and species move and cross these lines at will—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

The conference is accompanied by the Crossing the Line Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. The exhibition showcases the work of the artists displaced by turbulent historical events including the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict. It features the work of 6 immigrant artists currently residing in the USA, prints from a group of students and professors from the Wroclaw Art Academy in Poland, and photographs created by the Mykolaiv Young Photographer’s group (MYPH) from Mykolaiv, Ukraine.

Sergey Melnitchenko will give a talk entitled “Art is Keeping Us Alive in this War.” Melnitchenko was born in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, (located just 60 miles NW of Kherson) in 1991. He began taking photographs in 2009 and in 2018 founded the MYPH, a school for
conceptual and art photography. He is also a member of the Ukrainian Photo Alternative (UPHA). Melnitchenko is a winner of multiple Ukrainian and international competitions, including Berlin’s Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award in 2017. In 2020, he was nominated for Amsterdam’s prestigious Foam Paul Huf Award that recognizes generational talent demonstrating a personal visual language and style. Melnitchenko’s work has appeared in over 70 publications, and he has published nine books of photography.

The full conference runs from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 14 and 9:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Nov. 15, and will feature keynote speaker Sonia Nazario. See here for the full conference schedule.

In-person and virtual attendance is free. Registration is required for livestream attendance. Register here. Virtual sessions will be livestreamed but not recorded.