The Elusive “Global”: Potential Histories of Art and Media
Vortrag und Workshop „The Elusive “Global”: Potential Histories of Art and Media”
Vortrag: Donnerstag, 9. Januar 2025 | 18-20 Uhr (c.t.) | Campus, HGA 30
Workshop: Freitag, 10. Januar 2025 | 9-17 Uhr (c.t.) | UNI 105, Raum EG 015
Um Anmeldung für den Workshop wird gebeten bis zum Montag, den 6. Januar 2025, per Mail an: das-dokumentarische@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Nach Anmeldung wird vorbereitendes Lektürematerial versandt.
Am 9. und 10. Januar 2025 findet der interdisziplinäre Workshop „The Elusive Global: Potential Histories of Art and Media“ des GRK 2132 „Das Dokumentarische. Exzess und Entzug“ statt. Organisiert von Ying Sze Pek und Anne Hemkendreis, beginnt der Workshop am Donnerstag, den 9. Januar 2025, mit dem Abendvortrag „When words make worlds – a potential art history across and between languages“ von Prof. Dr. Monica Juneja. Am darauffolgenden Freitag, den 10. Januar 2025, werden die im Vortrag aufgekommenen Fragen im Austausch mit weiteren Expert:innen transkultureller und postkolonialer Forschung – Prof. Dr. Susanne Leeb, Dr. Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Dr. Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen und Prof. Dr. Tahani Nadim – vertieft und um weiterführende Perspektiven bereichert.
Event Description
The Elusive “Global”: Potential Histories of Art and Media
In this workshop, we take stock of current postcolonial and decolonial approaches in modern/contemporary art history and visual studies, and in adjacent media studies discourses. We are interested to explore these methodologies—including the rubrics of transculturation and postmigration—from a situated perspective as researchers working in academia and art- and exhibition practice in Germany.
In our work on art, culture, and media, we operate today in an intellectual setting where calls to decolonialize and provincialize, to unlearn and relearn, are de rigueur. Looking to the field of art history and criticism in the 1990s and 2000s, where discourses have since evolved and terms shifted, we observe that much has been gained: no longer mainly interested in questions of globalization, we explore processes of transculturation; the centering of diversity and inclusion has made way for critical cosmopolitanism. Critical and self-critical perspectives in provenance research, exhibition practice, and in the organization of teaching and faculties at the university have been imperative.
Yet, calls for decolonization and emphases on inclusion are not always accompanied by critical change or political engagement. Misdirected, tokenistic gestures and the instrumentalization of minoritarian positions reflect the absence of attention to historical, structural, and invisible relations of power. Still we cannot accept that the histories marked by colonial violence we have received are irrevocable—we regard it as crucial to develop potential histories and practices from non-Eurocentric and socially just perspectives.
During the workshop, we consider what has been gained with the establishing of postcolonial approaches in art history and visual studies, and media cultural studies. To what extent “are” we “more” international, decolonial, and transcultural today? Have circumstances in fact fundamentally shifted in the academy and museum practice—with the possibilities of arts and cultural funding? And, finally: what roles, alongside art, can digitization play with regard to memory culture and colonial archives? Our workshop discusses these questions with a focus on developments in Germany, while also attending to international comparisons.
Workshop-Beschreibung
Das umstrittene Globale: Potenzielle Geschichten von Kunst und Medien
In diesem Workshop ziehen wir Bilanz zu aktuellen postkolonialen und dekolonialen Ansätzen in der modernen/zeitgenössischen Kunstgeschichte und den Bildwissenschaften sowie in angrenzenden Diskursen der Medienwissenschaft. Wir möchten diese Methodologien – einschließlich analytischer Kategorien wie Transkulturationund Postmigration – aus einer situierten Perspektive untersuchen, indem wir unsere Rolle als Forschende in der Wissenschaft sowie in der Kunst- und Ausstellungspraxis in Deutschland reflektieren.
Aktuell bewegen wir uns in einem intellektuellen Klima, in dem Forderungen nach Dekolonialisierung und Provinzialisierung, nach Neu-Perspektivierung und Methodenkritik, zum festen Bestandteil kunst-, kultur- und medienwissenschaftlichen Arbeitens geworden sind. Wenn wir auf die Diskurse in der Wissenschaft, der Kunstkritik und der Ausstellungspraxis der 1990er und 2000er Jahre zurückblicken, sehen wir, dass sich viele Methoden innerhalb einzelner Fachdisziplinen weiterentwickelt haben; Begrifflichkeiten beginnen, sich zu verschieben. Die Kunstkritik und -geschichte in den 2020er Jahren interessiert sich nunmehr nicht nur für Fragen der Globalisierung, sondern für Transkulturalität. Nicht allein Diversität und Inklusion stehen im Zentrum, sondern die Forderung nach einer kritischen Weltoffenheit, die auch nach einer selbstkritischen Haltung, u. a. im Bereich der Provenienzforschung, der Ausstellungspraktiken sowie der universitären Lehre und Organisation, verlangt.
Forderungen nach Dekolonialisierung und Praktiken der Inklusion werden allerdings nicht immer von einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung oder politischem Engagement begleitet. Fehlgeleitete, repräsentative Gesten und die Instrumentalisierung minorisierter Positionen spiegeln oft die mangelnde Aufmerksamkeit gegenüber historischen, strukturellen und unsichtbaren Machtverhältnissen wider. Jedoch weigern wir uns, die von kolonialer Gewalt geprägten Geschichten als unabänderlich zu betrachten; wir glauben an die Möglichkeit, potenzielle Geschichten und Praktiken aus nicht-eurozentrischen, gerechteren Perspektiven entwickeln zu können.
Im Workshop werden wir diskutieren, was durch die Etablierung postkolonialer Ansätze in den Kunst-, Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften erreicht wurde. Inwiefern sind wir heute internationaler, dekolonialer und transkultureller? Hat sich etwas grundlegend in der akademischen und musealen Arbeit – und in den Möglichkeiten der Förderungen von Kunst und Kultur – verändert? Und schließlich: Welche Rollen können neben der Kunst auch die Digitalisierung im Hinblick auf Erinnerungskultur und koloniale Archive spielen? Unser Workshop widmet sich diesen Fragen mit einem Schwerpunkt auf Entwicklungen in Deutschland, bezieht jedoch auch internationale Vergleiche ein.
Programm
Donnerstag, 9.1.2024, Campus (HGA 30)
18-20h (c.t.): Keynote: Monica Juneja: „When words make worlds – a potential art history across and between languages“ (Moderation Annette Urban)
Freitag, 10.1.2024, Universitätsstraße 105 (EG 015)
9.15-10.30h: Ying Pek und Anne Hemkendreis: Willkommen und Einführung; Nachbesprechung des Vortrags und Besprechung mit Monica Juneja
10.30-10.45h: Kaffeepause
10.45-12.30h: „Leaving Art History? Contemporary Art and Material Practices“ – Susanne Leeb und Sebastián Eduardo Dávila
12.30-13.30: Mittagspause
13.30-15.00h: „Archive Interventions“ – Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen
15.00-15.15h: Kaffeepause
15.15-16.45h: „Activating archives: a postcolonial perspective on re-collection“ – Tahani Nadim
16.45-17.00h: Wrap-Up
Abstracts
When words make worlds – a potential art history across and between languages
Monica Juneja
When does a word help us to navigate the world? Words – or the conceptual language we use – are both indicators and factors of historical change. They are formed out of the materiality of social, economic, and political transformations. At the same time, the interpretation of these, which our scientific language furnishes, shapes the behavior of historical actors as they make worlds. How does art history today seeking to write a narrative that connects regions and cultures negotiate the gap between the languages of its sources and the prevailing language of scholarly discourse that enables communication in a global context? The answers provided by postcolonial and, more recently, decolonial scholarship to this question – my talk will argue – have left several blind spots. Drawing on an example from art historical research, my talk analyzes the formation of concepts and their world-making power through the lens of transculturation. As concepts travel and engage with different languages and practices, they produce new resonances, though these are not entirely friction-free. They nonetheless offer a new optic to navigate a different world that they participate in shaping. The authority our conceptual language acquires in the process can secure a potential art history from the twin traps of Eurocentric claims to universalism and indigenous nativism.
Leaving Art History? Contemporary Art and Material Practices
Susanne Leeb und Sebastián Eduardo Dávila
Since the turn to the World Art paradigm, the discipline of art history seems to follow an integrationist approach. Art practices have been increasingly accomodated into its canon, even though many artistic “objects” greatly differ from—formerly—western concepts of art. Our lecture presents case studies where contemporary artworks, or rather material practices, challenge art historical genealogies, which become highly disputable as a result. It responds to the need to explore new genealogies in an attempt to understand the material dimensions of art making against its subsumption under a unitary notion of contemporary art.
Archive Interventions
Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen
Academic writers (e.g. Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe), poets (e.g. M. NourbeSe Philip, Layli Long Soldier) and visual artists (e.g. Sung Tieu, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński) intervene directly into the documents of the historical archive, with the aim to “sense it more”, “to really see”, to take “revenge”. They redact, cut out, “kill” the instruments of colonial oppression, text and image. I want to highlight the affective urgency of these interventions, not in opposition to but also not identical with an analytical interest. Archival violences here are felt ‘personally’, they demand a ‘personal’ response. These interventions, I believe, are less oriented towards institutional change, but rather take seriously the immediate effects of the material. What can be learned from the way artists and scholars inscribe themselves ‘personally’ into the text for post-colonial or de-colonial studies? I will present examples and discuss mostly visual strategies.
Activating archives: a postcolonial perspective on re-collection
Tahani Nadim
In my talk I would like to discuss some of the theoretical and practical questions that postcolonial perspectives pose to the archive – both as an epistemic arrangement and an institution central to national statecraft. I shall illustrate these questions with reference to my work in and with the archives at the Women’s Art Library in London and the natural history museum in Berlin as well as through examples of artistic productions that activate archives differently. Here, I’m particularly interested in examining the relations between silence and excess, dispossession and knowledge, and culture of remembrance and memory cultures that constitute both, the colonial situation and the archive. Lastly, I’d like to situate this discussion in the current political conjuncture that is marked by a furious disavowal of postcolonial perspectives and the specific forms of the “global”.
Bios
Monica Juneja is Senior Professor of Art History at the University of Heidelberg, and Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Shiv Nadar University, India. Her latest book Can Art History be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery (De Gruyter, 2023), received the Opus Magnum award of the Volkswagen Foundation. She is also the recipient of the prestigious Meyer-Struckmann Prize awarded for excellence in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the 2024 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award of the CAA.
Monica Juneja edits the Series Visual and Media Histories (Routledge), is on the editorial boards of Ding, Materialität, Geschichte (E.J. Brill), Ästhetische Praxis (E.J. Brill), History of Humanities (University of Chicago Press), and co-editor of Journal of Transcultural Studies.
Susanne Leeb hat Kunstgeschichte, Philosophie und Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität zu Köln studiert. Nach dem Studium hatte sie diverse Projektassistenzen am Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Köln inne und war von 1999-2001 Redakteurin der Zeitschrift Texte zur Kunst. Sie wurde im Rahmen des Graduiertenkollegs “Repräsentation-Rhetorik-Wissen” an der Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder mit einer Doktorarbeit zu “Die Kunst der Anderen. Weltkunst und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne” promoviert. Seit 2007 hat sie als Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am SFB “Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste” an der Freien Universität gearbeitet und wurde nach einer Vertretungsprofessur an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg auf die Laurenz-Assistenzprofessur am Kunsthistorischen Seminar der Universität Basel berufen. Seit 2014 ist sie Professorin für Zeitgenössische Kunst an der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. Dort leitet sie neben ihrer Professur zusammen mit Erich Hörl das Leuphana Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture and Society. Sie leitet zudem den Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. Jüngste Buchpublikation: Museums, Transculturality and the Nation State. Case Studies from a Global Context, Bielefeld 2022 (Mitherausgeberin).
Sebastián Eduardo Dávila is a Research Associate at Leuphana University (Lüneburg). His current research focuses on the relation between syncretism and contemporary art throughout the Americas, and his dissertation deals with art practices from postwar Guatemala with a focus on materiality. His publications include questions of materiality, topography, Indigeneity, and violence. He studied art history and film studies in Jena, Berlin, and Mexico City, and formed part of the research training group “Cultures of Critique” at the Leuphana University (Lüneburg). He is currently a fellow at the research network “Cambridge Visual Culture”.
Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on migrant and diasporic writing and art, queer and postcolonial archives, and reparative practices after Eve Sedgwick. She is currently working on an archive based manuscript about the placements of South Korean children with West German families from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Tahani Nadim is a research professor at the Ruhr University Bochum and the College for Social Sciences and Humanities. Her work has focused on the culture and politics of museum and data collections, the histories of natural history and its infrastructures, and institutional inheritances. More recently, she is engaging with memory cultures and their relationship to statecraft and the political economy of nature conservation