New World Systems? Reassessing the Transnational Traffic of Art
Association of Art Historians Annual conference, Royal College of Arts, London

Anthony Gardner, The Queen's College / The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, The University of Oxford, Editor of ARTMargins, anthony.gardnerruskin-sch.ox.ac.uk
Angela Harutyunyan, The American University of Beirut, Editor of ARTMargins ah140aub.edu.lb

It has become commonplace to celebrate contemporary art histories and events as global or transnational, breaking apart the North Atlantic bias of past understandings of art. Yet, the call to traverse outmoded geopolitical categories largely comes from art’s North Atlantic heartlands and finds celebratory reverberations in the centres of transnational capital, from New York to Sydney and from Shanghai to Dubai. This session invites papers that reassess the “transnational” in contemporary art histories and practice. In particular, we want to address the impact that transnational art events and discourses have had upon the material conditions of art production and reception. Does “the transnational” as a cultural category simply circulate a geopolitics of desire that follows the global flows of financial capital and cultural diplomacy? How have artists, curators and historians developed strategies to navigate these flows of representation while at the same time resisting them? And how might we construct “new world systems” of art that emphasise a critical transnationalism that neither fetishises the local nor replicates the neoliberal traffic of the global? Can we rethink the “transnational” as a possibility for a new global materialist aesthetics that traverses the term’s purely cultural connotations? We particularly encourage contributions that seek to reimagine the material and historical production of art’s globality from the perspectives of what used to be called the “margins”, the “peripheries” and the “new worlds” of art.