ATTENTION: START POSTPONED BY ONE OUR!

Revisiting the Transcultural Paradigm in Art and Art History

Over the last six years, the Research Unit “Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art“ has analysed the production of art and its discourses in transcultural contexts brought about by trade, travel, migration, or globalization. The research group served as a framework for projects which share aspects of approach and methodology, but differ in their regional and historical focus.
One of our central concerns was that “transcultural” should not be understood and employed as a descriptive term, as this results in an essentialist view of objects and cultural diversity. We addressed this by focusing on processes of negotiation in situations of contact which include works of art or artefacts as well as agents. As mediators or as the object of negotiations, works of art form part of the negotiation process. The paradigms translation, mobility, and decentering proved particularly fruitful with regard to this process-oriented approach. These models will be discussed with recourse to concrete case studies in the three respective panels of our final conference.

Veranstaltungsort: Freie Universität Berlin, “Holzlaube”, Fabeckstraße 23–25, 14195 Berlin, room 2.2058/2.2059

Attention: Start postponed by one our!

Friday, May 19, 2017

15:00 Karin Gludovatz, Welcome and Introduction

Panel A     Dynamics of Transcultural Translations

15:30 Christine Ungruh, Advertising Hermitism: Italian Medieval Porches as a Locus of Transcultural Artistic Negotiation

16:15 Alberto Saviello, Box of Relationships: A Sinhalese-European Ivory Casket from the 16th Century

17:00 Coffee Break

17:30 Margit Kern, The Body Image of Mummies as Object of Transcultural Negotiation

18:15 Julia Kloss-Weber, The Transcultural Potential of Images: A Case Study from New Spanish Art of the 16th Century

Saturday, May 20, 2017

9:30 Joachim Rees, Introduction

Panel B     Mobile Art Histories

9:45 Nora Usanov-Geißler, The Arrival Reconsidered. An Approach to Differing Interpretations of Japanese nanban by?bu

10:30 Ulrike Boskamp, The Language of Flowers. Mobility, Gender and Spywork in the American War of Independence

11:15 Coffee Break

11:45 Annette Kranen, Multiple Antiquities. Seventeenth Century Travellers’ Interpretations of Historic Remains in Ottoman Territories

12:30 Moya Tönnies, Forming a Colonial Heritage Community. British Concepts for Legitimizing Arab Palestinian Cultural Heritage, 1918

13:15 Lunch

Panel C        Decentering

15:00 Georg Vasold, From the Peripheries to the Peripheries: The Case of the Austrian Trade Museum

15:15 Ursula Helg, Mangaaka: On the Crosscultural Power of a 19th Century African (Art) Object – Dynamics of Decentering and Recentering Aesthetic Narratives

15:30 Melanie Klein, Moments of Decentering. A Case Study from South Africa

15:45 Tomoko Mamine, Knots and Dots: Scribbling at the Peripheries of Art in the 1950s

16:00 Pauline Bachmann, The Exhibition Apparatus Decentered? – A Case Study with Art Objects from Brazil

16:15 Response: Charlotte Bydler / Discussion

17:30 Reception