“Situating Global Art” interrogates the relations between an increasing globalization of the art discourse and the situatedness of its practices.

Since the early 1990s, the term “global art” has been established to call attention to poly-centered, plural, and transnational art worlds under postcolonial conditions. Yet, the process of globalizing art may also be criticized for producing its own hegemonic and exclusive effects.

The InterArt International Research Training Group, based at Freie Universität Berlin, is organizing a conference dealing with the term “global art.” The conference will be held February 12 to 14, 2015. Researchers from Germany and abroad will be discussing the characteristics of global topics in local art forms, exhibition practices, and art criticism. The focus will be on the relationship between situated, local art and the processes of globalization of art. The event is open to the public, and admission is free.

Since the late 1980s, the term “global art” has come to replace both the notions of “modern art” and “world art” when referring to the visibility of today’s art worlds. The discursive shift to global art was accompanied by the emergence of new types of art museums and a proliferation of art events in global cities such as Abu Dhabi, Istanbul, Beijing, or Moscow. In these new kinds of events and institutions, curators and artists seek to break away from the old binaries that have for so long defined the art world: distinctions between modern art and traditional artifact, between the Western center and the Non-Western periphery, or between historical art periods and ahistorical cultural legacies. « Transcending these dichotomies, the term global art has been established to call attention to poly-centered, plural, and transnational art worlds under postcolonial conditions, » says Sarah Dornhof, a postdoctoral researcher at the InterArt International Research Training Group at Freie Universität. Yet this process of globalizing art can also be criticized for producing its own hegemonic and exclusive effects. A global conception of art leads to a reconfiguration of the global as well as the local, and therefore to new normativities and power relations.

From this ambiguous point of departure, the « Situating Global Art » conference proposes to focus on recent art practices that are connected to the global art discourse while at the same time queering or resisting the new hegemonic narratives produced by that discourse. They aim to scrutinize the dynamics that unfold between the institutionalization of global art in specific sites on the one hand and local art practices on the other. More precisely, they are interested in the mechanisms, conflicts, and struggles that lead to new hegemonies and exclusions. In addition, they would like to ask how alternative articulations of the local, traditional, indigenous, or tribal become means of constituting site-specific versions of the global.

 

 

PROGRAMME:

Thursday, February 12

10:00 – 10:30 – Introduction SARAH DORNHOF

10:30 – 12:30   Panel I – Queering Artistic Practice

ISABEL SELIGER (BERLIN):
The Art of Globalization/The Globalization of Art:
Creating Transnational, Interethnic, and Cross-Gender
Identities in the 3D Work of Miao Xiaochun

RONIT MILANO (BEER-SHEVA):
Globalization, Colonialism and Takashi Murakami

BIRGIT HOPFENER (BERLIN):
Qiu Zhijie’s Concept of Total Art.
A Case Study of Transculturally Situating Discourses of Integrated Art Practice

Discussion

12:30 – 14:00    Lunch

14:00 – 15:00    Panel II – Engaging with Institutions

VOON POW BARTLETT (LONDON):
‘Harmonious Society’ and ‘There is nothing new under the Sun’

FELIX VOGEL (FRIBOURG):
Global Art since the 1960s seen from Bahia

15:00 – 15:15    Coffee

15:15 – 16:45

JELLE BOUWHUIS (AMSTERDAM):
How Far How Near. Or:
Where to Locate Global Art within a Modern Art Museum

JEAN BORGATTI (BENIN/BOSTON):
Why Global? Why Now?
African Art at the Fitchburg Art Museum

Discussion

Break

18:00                  Keynote:

ABDELLAH KARROUM (MATHAF, ARAB MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, DOHA):
Generation 00: The Artist as Citizen

 

Friday, February 13

9:00 – 9:30       Coffee

9:30 – 11:00      Panel III – Urban Interventions

GÜRSOY DOGTA? (MUNICH):
The 13th Istanbul Biennale and the Squatters’ Movement of Gezi Park in an Ideological Competition for the Practice of Radical Democracy

BIRGIT MERSMANN (BREMEN):
Lacing Places.
Situative Practices and Sociopolitical Strategies in Korean Urban Art Projects

Discussion

11:00 – 11:30    Coffee

11:30 – 13:00    Panel IV – Media as Translation

ANTIGONI MEMOU (LONDON):
Global Photography:
Notes on the ‘Documentary Turn’ in Contemporary Art

KATJA GLASER (SIEGEN):
The ‘Place to be’ for Street Art Nowadays no longer is the Street, it’s the Internet

Discussion

13:00 – 14:30    Lunch

14:30 – 15:30    Panel V – Ethics of Art Mediation

TONI HILDEBRANDT (BERN):
Situating the Withdrawal of Tradition:
Jalal Toufic’s rejection of Pasolini’s Southern Answer

CLAUDIA MARION STEMBERGER (MONTRÉAL):
On the Pedagogy of Global Art Histories

15:30 – 15:45    Coffee

15:45 – 17:15

INSA VERBECK (KASSEL):
Improving, Representing, and Imagining –
Documenta’s changing Relations to the World

BARBARA LUTZ (HILDESHEIM):
Curating Transculturality.
documenta 12 and the ‘Migration of Form’

Discussion

Break

18:00                  Keynote:

ANNETTE BHAGWATI (HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT, BERLIN) On Centers, Nodes and Trajectories:
Changing Topologies in Transcultural Curating

 

Saturday, February 14

9:30 – 10:00     Coffee

10:00 – 12:00   Panel VI – Politics of Labelling

MATEUSZ KAPUSTKA (ZURICH):
East feeds West:
The Curse of Different Temporalities

JANNA-MIRL REDMANN (GENEVA):
Boycotting the Global –
52 Weeks of Artist Protest

DAVID FROHNAPFEL (BERLIN):
Disobedient Museality:
Atiz Rezistans and the Politics of Artistic Poverty Tourism in Port-au-Prince

Discussion

12:00 – 13:30    Lunch

13:30 – 14:30    Panel VII – Contesting Narratives

ORIANNA CACCHIONE (SAN DIEGO):
To Wash a Book and to Burn the Beard –
Conceptualizing Art History as a Readymade in Huang Yong Ping’s Artworks

GEORGE FLAHERTY (AUSTIN):
Destroying Art of the Americas Amid a Global Turn

14:30 – 14:45    Coffee

14:45 – 16:15

ANDREW WEINER (NEW YORK):
The Scrim, the Pistol, and the Lectern:
Dis-situating the Global Contemporary

JACOB BIRKEN (KARLSRUHE):
When Transfers become Entanglements.
Contradictory Sites of Artistic production & Reception in a Globalized World

Discussion

Closing Remarks

 

 

Contact: globalart@zedat.fu-berlin.de

Venue: Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, Knaackstr. 97, Berlin Prenzlauer Berg (Kulturbrauerei)

Concept and Organization:

Sarah Dornhof (FREE UNIVERSITY BERLIN)
Birgit Hopfener (FREE UNIVERSITY BERLIN)
Barbara Lutz (UNIVERSITY OF HILDESHEIM)
Nanne Buurman (FREE UNIVERSITY BERLIN)

 

http://situating-global-art.org/#test