Situating Global Art

International Conference

InterArt International Research Training Group, FU Berlin

12–14 February 2015

“Situating Global Art” is a conference that aims to interrogate the notion of global art and its current transformation and adaptation in local forms of art practice, display, and artistic critique. The guiding question concerns the mutual constitutions of global art and locality, or the relation between situated, local art practices and the globalization of art.

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 globalart 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. 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. We would like 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, we are interested in the mechanisms, conflicts, and struggles that lead to new hegemonies and exclusions. In addition, we would like to ask how alternative articulations of the local, traditional, indigenous, or tribal become means of constituting site-specific versions of the global.

We would like to invite contributions that focus on particular art practices, festivals, or exhibitions, and on the ways in which they adopt, appropriate, transform, or reject the de-colonizing but also re-centralizing effects of a global art discourse.

Please submit your proposal including the title, an abstract (300 - 500 words) and a short bio before October 20, 2014 to: globalart@zedat.fu-berlin.de