Annual Conference of the DFG Research Unit 1703 Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art. Comparative Perspectives on Historical Contexts and Contemporary Constellations

Organized by Project Area C "From the Invention of »World Art« to the Decentralization of Modernism in cooperation with the DFG Research Projects Landscape, Canon and Intermediality in Chinese Painting of the 1930s and 1940s and Animated Realities Radical performative strategies of participation and re-animation as representational critique

Venues: Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut Koserstraße 20, 14195 Berlin, Hörsaal B (Lecture Hall) Museen Dahlem, Lansstraße 8, 14195 Berlin Großer Vortragssaal (Large Auditorium)

Recent debates in art history have addressed the need to rethink the discipline’s Euro-centric premises. Furthermore, increasing transcultural entanglements in contemporary art have engendered methodological questions. This conference aims to address the historical formation of these debates.

Since the late nineteenth century, the conceptual and disciplinary frames of reference imposed by imperialist domination undergone a near constant series of negotiations, transfigurations and contestations. Artists, art critics and art historians in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe have challenged the definition and conceptualization of art and its limitations. The severe crisis of art historical writing after World War I, for example, provoked a fundamental reorientation towards developing new terms and methods accompanied by an engagement with artists and art historians outside Europe.

“Questioning Narratives, Negotiating Frameworks” conceives art historical narratives, artworks and exhibitions as venues of comparison, interaction and transformation. It traces those processes of negotiation that critically engage with social, political, economic, cultural and aesthetic values and hierarchies.

The conference examines the dynamics inherent in art that generate discourses on cultural identities, on concepts such as the avant-garde, modernity and on its concomitant catchwords ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality.’

Die Tagung ist öffentlich, der Eintritt ist frei.

Es ist keine Anmeldung erforderlich.

Programme

Thursday, 5 December 2013

Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Hörsaal B

18:00 Gregor Stemmrich (Berlin)

Opening

18:30 Matthew Rampley (Birmingham)

World Art Studies and the New Darwinism

(Reception)

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Friday, 6 December 2013

Museen Dahlem, Großer Vortragssaal

9:30 Viola König (Ethnologisches Museum, SMB)

Welcome Remarks

Panel 1: Negotiating Art-Historical Narratives

9:45 Gregor Stemmrich (Berlin)

Introduction

10:00 Michael Asbury (London)

Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of Brazilian Modern Art

10:30 Paola Ivanov (Berlin)

Rethinking Coevalness: Entangled History and the Objects of Ethnographic Museums

11:00 Discussion

11:30 Coffee Break

12:00 Wibke Schrape (Berlin)

From the Ogata-Lineage to the Kōrin-School: Images as Mediators of Identity in Art-Historical Narratives

12:30 Juliane Noth (Berlin)

Comparing the Histories of Chinese and Western Landscape Painting: Historiography and Artistic Practice in »National Painting Monthly« (1934–35)

13:00 Discussion

13:30 Lunch Break

14:30 Georg Vasold (Berlin)

Looking beyond Europe: Josef Strzygowski and the Re-Evaluation of Art History in the 1920s

15:00 Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie (Santa Barbara)

Art, Nationalism and Modernist Histories: Writing Art History in South Africa and Nigeria

15:30 Discussion

16:00 Wrap-up Discussion Day 1 moderated by Ulrike Boskamp (Berlin) and Alberto Saviello (Berlin)

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Saturday, 7 December 2013

Museen Dahlem, Großer Vortragsaal

Panel 2: Questioning Frameworks of Art

9:45 Tobias Wendl (Berlin)

Introduction

10:00 Shigemi Inaga (Kyoto)

Expressionism and Qiyun Shengdong/Kiin Seidō: Re-Evaluating the Ming-Qing Dynasties Chinese Painting in Modern Japan. Hashimoto Kansetsu and Kyoto School Sinologists 1910-1930

10:30 Isabel Wünsche (Bremen)

Transgressing National Borders and Artistic Styles: The November Group and the International Avant-garde in Berlin during the Interwar Period

11:00 Discussion

11:30 Coffee Break

12:00 Partha Mitter (Oxford)

Jamini Roy: Negotiating the Global from a Local Perspective

12:30 Melanie Klein (Berlin)

Modes of Creation: Art Teaching in South Africa and Uganda between Theory and Practice

13:00 Discussion

13:30 Lunch Break

14:30 Tomoko Mamine (Berlin)

Experimenting Within, Between and Beyond Frames: Gutai's Art of Experience (1950-1960s)

15:00 Pauline Bachmann (Berlin)

Concrete Art and Embodiment: Artistic Strategies in Brazilian Neoconcretism between Local and Global Venues

15:30 Birgit Hopfener (Berlin)

Participation is the Answer but what are the Questions? Critical Negotiations of Participatory Art Discourses in Contemporary China

15:30 Discussion

16:00 Wrap-up Discussion Day 2 moderated by Kerstin Schankweiler (Berlin) and Tobias Vogt  (Berlin)