Dis:connected Artistic Belonging and Recognition in Global Modernity.

The twentieth century is characterized by a high degree of mobility and circulation of artists. Art history is increasingly paying attention to dis:connectivities of transnational artistic trajectories and their role in shaping multiple modernities. This workshop interrogates which historiographic narratives artists on the move get inscribed into, juxtaposing these narratives with the artists’ own perceptions of professional belonging and recognition. By artists on the move we understand (visual) artists that have left their place of origin and ended up elsewhere, intentionally or unintentionally. We examine whether the move constitutes a detour in the artist’s life and career, in that it diverts a (personal or professional) trajectory, and how the move and new place of creation impacts the artist’s career and inscription into (institutional, art historical, hegemonic) narratives.
Here we are especially interested in artists that went to places outside
well-established centres of modernity. How were they received in these places, what were their own expectations regarding their professional and personal development, and how were these
matched? The question of dis:connectivity is pertinent here in that it highlights the possibility of being at once connected and disconnected to different narratives of belonging and recognition,
and potential tensions between subjective perceptions and formal histories.

We are interested in papers that deal with aspects of the following questions:
- How do artists consider their move and what impact does it have on their life, work, and career?
- How do artists themselves reflect on the place they ended up in – as detour or prime destination – and on what the place means for their reception and career?
- What stereotypes and imaginations are mobilized?
- How do art historians, critics, institutions etc. of the place of migration receive the artist?
- Whose agency is implicated in questions of belonging and recognition (the artist’s, art historians and critics in the home country and country of migration, exhibitions, institutions)?
- What does being inscribed into a historiographic narrative entail?
- Does the artist’s subjective perception match other (institutional, art historical, hegemonic) narratives, and what are the tensions between them?

The workshop will take place at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre Global Dis:connect in Munich.
Please send your abstract (300 words) and short biography (100 words) by 20 January 2025 to the workshop organisers, Dr Claudia Cendales Paredes (claudiacendalespgmail.com) and Dr Nadia von Maltzahn (maltzahnorient-institut.org).