Verónica Tello

Modern and Contemporary; Global and Diasporic
PhD, University of Melbourne, 2014

Verónica Tello’s research encompasses global and Latin American art history, with a focus on diasporic and queer methodologies. Currently, she is working on a monograph that tracks the border-crossing circulation of Chilean conceptualism during the Cold War and the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), based on extensive archival research in Santiago, New York, Vancouver, Sydney, London, and Paris. Tello's current book project is an expansion of her 2023 edited volume, Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place, and History (Third Text Publications, London),  a polyphonic examination of the production, dissemination, and boundaries of contemporary discourse, as interpreted from the global south. Future Souths brings together critical voices from Indigenous, diasporic, and minor scholars, artists, and designers, including Walter D. Mignolo, Carla Macchiavello, Salote Tawale, Dylan AT Miner, and Zoe Butt. 

Tello’s research has received support in the form of various residencies, fellowships, and grants from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, King’s College, London, Rhodes University, South Africa, CUNY Graduate Center, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Banff Curatorial Institute, and the Australian Research Council. 

Her scholarly essays appear in Third Text, Memory Studies, and Contemporaneity, and her art criticism is in Artforum, Frieze, Afterall, and Memo Review (where she is a contributing editor). Since 2021, she has led the research project Parallel Structures to advance knowledge on structural change in art museums in collaboration with emerging curators from the global south. 

Tello has presented lectures and seminars for academic and general audiences for the Skulptur Projekte Münster, Afterall Research Centre, University of Arts London, King’s College, London, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane, Power Institute, University of Sydney, and Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago. 

• “American Conceptualism,” an undergraduate art history seminar that adopts a trans-hemispheric perspective on the history of Conceptual art and conceptualism across New York, Santiago, Chile, Buenos Aires, and Rosario. 

Professor Tello is developing a lecture course on contemporary art to be delivered in the spring semester of 2026 and a graduate seminar for the fall semester of 2026.

2024, Liquid Time: Editor’s Introduction,” Index Journal, Special Issue, edited by V. Tello, 2024 https://www.index-journal.org/issues/liquid-time/liquid-time. Special issue on re-staging as a method for exhibition and art historiographies, including Tello’s translation of Juan José Santos’s essay on his exhibition Ander (2022) and the Chilean underground cultural and night scene (1983-88).

2023, Tello, ed,  Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place and History (Third Text, London, 2023).

2022, Tello, "Counter-memory and and–and: Aesthetics and temporalities for living together," Memory Studies, Issue 2, April pp. 390 - 401 12,  Anthologized 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.

2020, Tello, essay, "What is contemporary about institutional critique? A Study of The Silent University (2012-)" Third Text, 34, pp. 635 - 649.

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.