Global Art World Research Articles

Virtual connectedness in times of crisis: Chinese online art exhibitions during the COVID-19 pandemic

When Chinese museums had to close their doors due to the outbreak of COVID-19, several online art exhibitions were created that were able to still create a sense of connectedness among their audience members during the pandemic. This article details three online exhibitions – by Chronus Art Center, by M WOODS, and by independent curator Yu Minhong – and explores how they communicate ‘being-in-common’ (a concept by Jean-Luc Nancy) in the online realm; it also proposes alternative forms of cosmopolitanism that do not rely on physical mobility. The exhibitions are analyzed using visual and discourse analysis and supported by semi-structured in-depth interviews with the curators. This study shows that a cosmopolitan art world does not need to rely on physical travel if connectedness is understood as being-in-common rather than meeting-in-person, digital technology is mobilized effectively, and cosmopolitanism is grounded in a re-localization. In an era when the global art world is looking for ways to reinvent itself and the mobility system on which it operates, the article contends that it would do well to look to and learn from the example of Chinese online exhibitions.

The Saqqa-khaneh Calligraphy-Painting Movement in Iran

This article aims to describe the Saqqa-khaneh calligraphy-painting movement in Iran. This School was a significant movement in modern Iranian art that became influential in the formation of a modern approach toward prevailing traditional heritage. This artistic movement came about in the midst of the country’s modernisation, in an endeavour to link traditional Iranian culture with contemporary aspects of the visual arts, and with contemporary western paintings in particular. Abiding by Iranian tradition was not the primary engine driving Saqqa-khaneh art, nor was it to emulate western art. Contemporary Iranian artists have enriched Persian script endowing it with variety and aesthetic intention and have produced many masterpieces, particularly when calligraphy is combined with pictorial language. In the last six decades, this movement has gained a nation-wide significance in contemporary Iranian society and culture, leading to an increasing number of practitioners, collectors and a presence of calligraphy-painting-inspired advertising and design. Moreover, it has gradually found a position in the global art world. In the current art market, Persian contemporary calligraphy-painting stands out among Middle-Eastern productions.

REDRESSING DIGITAL ORIENTALISM: VIETNAMESE CULTURAL PROFESSIONALS’ DIGITAL WORK DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The current study investigates how digital technologies can potentially be used to re-orientate the global narrative on Vietnam, overcome an imbalance in representation and help redress digital orientalism. Global digital technologies allow Vietnamese cultural professionals to reach beyond the borders of their nation and to become part of the global art world. With this,they can participate in the production, dissemination, and circulation of discourses on art and culture globally. In doing so, they can redress digital orientalism by contemporizing narratives on Vietnam. However, there is an underlying tension, as the very means by which their voicesare heard is achieved by using global (western) technologies, tools and platforms. The research uses a digital ethnography of the Facebook pages of 7 contemporary art spaces in Hanoi and 20 semi-structured interviews with art and cultural professionals in Hanoi. The interviews were carried out during the Covid-19 Pandemic and addressed its impact and use of digital technology in their work during this time.

“I Lived without Seeing These Art Works”: (Albanian) Socialist Realism and/against Contemporary Art

Abstract This article looks closely at the inclusion of Albanian Socialist Realism in one of renowned Swiss curator Harald Szeemann's last exhibitions, Blood & Honey: The Future's in the Balkans (Essl Museum, Vienna, 2003). In this exhibition, Szeemann installed a group of around 40 busts created during the socialist era in Albania, which he had seen installed at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana. This installation of sculptures was part of an exhibition entitled Homo Socialisticus, curated by Gëzim Qëndro, and Szeemann deployed it as a generalized foil for “subversive” postsocialist contemporary art included in Blood & Honey. The Homo Socialisticus sculptures occupied a prominent place in the exhibition both spatially and rhetorically, and this article examines how we might read Blood & Honey—and the socialist past in general—through Szeemann's problematic incorporation of this collection of works in one of the key Balkans-oriented exhibitions staged in the early 2000s. The article argues that understanding how Szeemann misread—and discursively oversimplified—Albanian Socialist Realism can help us see not only the continued provincialization of Albania in the contemporary global art world, but more importantly the fundamental misunderstanding of Socialist Realism as a historical phenomenon and a precursor to contemporary geopolitical cultural configurations

Contemporary Art Fairs in Mainland China: From Local to International Status?

Although the contemporary art system has experienced relevant changes in Mainland China over the past decades, only recently it gained an international reputation. Within this context, art fairs played a strategic role in developing relationships with players of the global art world. The aim of this paper is to analyze this internationalization process by focusing on two dimensional measures: the composition of galleries attending art fairs and their network embeddedness. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to explore contemporary art fairs in Mainland China over the period 2007–2019, we show the transition from local to international hub, suggesting the importance of art fairs as a potential soft power vehicle.

New geographies of the biennial: networks for the globalization of art

In order to explore global biennials of contemporary art, this study provides a geospatial analysis of eleven global biennials to examine where artists are drawn from in these international exhibitions. The project aims to cut across a broad scope of biennials held in multiple regions to examine how artists are circulating in the contemporary world, where they are showing and, most importantly, how biennials are defining international contemporary art in the era of globalization. By mapping a series of biennials held around the globe over several iterations in the 2010s, this study provides unprecedented evidence of the geography of biennial selection among major exhibitions, how this has changed over time and whether patterns emerge for participation in global art world events. More than half of these biennials are held in countries that are in the Global South; this means that most of these locations are emerging art centers responding to new economic patterns under globalization. The use of maps to show the geographic distribution of biennial participants will point to various, competing models of the geography of global contemporary art and will allow reflection upon how new biennials are changing the geospatial dynamics of international art exhibitions today.

The Contemporary Artworld of the Arabian Peninsula in a Globalized Context

This article analyzes the production and presentation of artworks of three countries of the Gulf Region –– Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia –– to evaluate its place and potential in the globalized artworld. The Gulf region is a small but significant part of the global artworld with high potential for further development. Art globalization in the Gulf began to develop only in the 2000s –– from about 2006 in the UAE, followed by a second wave in Qatar five years later. A third wave is rising with the increasingly international exposure of Saudi Art. The article examines which factors are essential for participation in a globalized art world and whether the region enjoys international recognition on the global stage. A composite artworld ecosystem model comprising institutions, artists and their artworks, commercial entities and government was conceived on a philosophical and sociological basis within a historical and geopolitical framework. The roles of the museum, biennials, art galleries and art fairs, are converging in many respects. All the nodes of the artworld ecosystem are required for globalization, with participation in the biennial model being the most important factor, being more flexible than the museal institutions in funding and programming. To reach a wider audience, the art fair model could be more relevant than the more esoteric biennial format. The Gulf region’s patrons possess strong motivations for supporting the arts of the region internationally. In addition, the desire to enter the global cultural world through the promotion of art museums as a tourist destination is a strong motivator for governments.

보편성과 특정성 사이의 전략: 세계화된 미술계에서 한국 여성 작가 이불의 말하기

세계화된 미술계, 실상 미국과 서유럽 남성 중심의 미술계에서 비서구권 여성 작가는 그 미술계에 익숙하고 호소력 있는 동시에 낯선 도전의 목소리를 내게 된다. 필자는 “하위주체는 말할 수 있는가?”라는 가야트리 스피박의 질문과 그에 대한 부정적 결론을 다나 해러웨이의 「상황적 지식들」을 통해 재고하며, 동시대 한국 여성 미술가가 어떻게 세계화된 미술계에서 자신의 예술이 말해지는지에 개입하면서 예술로 말할 수 있는지 분석한다. 이 논문에서는 국내에 거주하면서도 국제 미술계에서 활발히 활동하고 있는 이불을 사례로 다룬다. 먼저 국내외 저널과 도록의 글, 작가 인터뷰를 검토하여 이불 자신과 국내외 비평가들의 목소리 차이를 들어본다. 다음은 이불이 국제적 명성을 얻게 된 1990년대 이후 새롭게 발달한 국제 미술 기구와 미술 시장의 네트워크가 어떻게 다양성이 아닌 예술의 동질화를 위한 여과장치(filtering system)로 기능하는지 살펴본다. 마지막으로 호미 바바의 ‘미미크리(mimicry)’ 개념을 참조하여 한국 여성 미술가가 세계화된 미술계에 어떻게 이질성을 가져올 수 있는가라는 질문에 답한다. 그 개념은 이불의 예술이 서구 미술계에 호소력을 가지면서 동시에 도전하는, 전면적 부정이 아닌 교묘한 전략을 보여준다는 것을 발견하게 한다.

Art and Global South: “Playing Venice” at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)

AbstractThis article employs artifacts from the KMB’s “material culture” as a lens into this institution’s branding process and, within it, its interaction with the Venice Biennale. It analyzes larger questions about the career of the biennale cultural form as it re-territorializes in a new location that is added to the art world map “in progress.” Historically, geographical location has been crucial for many biennales in the Global South to articulate their origin, identity, and claims vis-à-vis the global art world. Moreover, biennale proliferation especially in the South has produced cartographic re-imaginings aiming to destabilize the “center-periphery” configuration of the art world map. The article shows that the KMB does not reiterate ideological standings put forward by Southern biennales but crafts its positionality on different grounds. These entail simultaneously anchoring the KMB to histories of circulation in and out of South India tracing back at least two millennia and strategically weaving a relation with the archetypical Venice Biennale in the present.

The artist Karl Marx and the auctioned god: ‘post-practice’ ethnographies of the art world, impossible collaborations, and renewable anthropologies

ABSTRACT Drawing upon ethnographic moments recorded at two of the most prominent art world institutions, the Venice Biennale and the auction house Christie's at its New York headquarters, this article reflects on what it means to investigate the global art world ethnographically and interrogates some of the current trends within the anthropology of art. In particular, the article shows the potential of re–focusing the attention on the interconnectedness of art-world actors, institutions and objects in time and space in order to produce expansive narratives on the art world which reflect not only how art is produced in the present and in the past but also its circulation and commerce. Moreover, by challenging the anthropology of art's focus on the anthropologist–artist dyad, their practice and collaborations, the article shows how a renewed engagement with the art world as an ethnographic field site brings about possibilities for a renewal of anthropology itself.

Regionality and contemporaneity

In the last two decades, Southeast Asian contemporary art has secured its place in the global art world, becoming a fixture on the latter’s expanded exhibition circuits and a promising ‘emerging market’ for investors. This consolidation has engendered a burst of scholarly activity, in line with the improving prospects of Asian art history generally and notwithstanding a lack of dedicated academic structures where the region is concerned. But if Southeast Asia has firmed as a framework for organising contemporary art, it has not been favoured as a basis for interpreting or historicising it. As knowledge production in the region has surged, regionalism has waned. In this article, I review the historiography of Southeast Asian contemporary art to reveal a discontinuity between its pioneers, who were regionalists, and a new historicism whose premises are basically nationalist. Reflexive consciousness of region – and of contemporaneity as a regional phenomenon – is advanced as an under-utilised interpretive device and a bulwark against hegemonic and monolithic art histories.

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

"Artistic Research on Socially and Environmentally Engaged Art - Ethics of Gathering

Art symposiums and similar gatherings in which international artists come together to collaborate are a longstanding tradition of the global art world. In 2019, artists and environmental researchers and experts were invited to work with a local school on environmental issues to create place-specific art and scientific collaborations. Three interdisciplinary teams focused on locally current topics. In this article, we present the process of one of them: the freshwater pearl mussels sub-project. In addition, we discuss the research practice of the International Socially Engaged Art Symposium and the ethics related to the gathering. The research practice included various forms of dialogue, such as presentations, structured group discussions, reflections, mentoring and art-based practice with community members. Tight living together in a humble, small house supported the dialogue. Environmental issues, critical environmentalist thinking and the ethics of the practices were discussed in the process. The ethical elements of the symposium were considered during the processes of defining the themes and aims, curating and producing the event, respecting peer artists and researchers, interacting respectfully with the surrounding community such as school children and community members in countryside villages, and non-human nature, considering the environmental footprint of the symposium and aiming for a meaningful ecological handprint. The documentation, data collection and research reporting also considered ethical issues. The research is part of a cyclic development of art symposiums as socially and environmentally engaged events.

On Language and Modern Art: A Reflection

AbstractThis essay, written collectively by the co-editors of the publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), provides an account of the book's conception, institutional backing, and multi-year process of research and editing. The authors reflect in particular on the translational politics that obtain in the global art world and the museum sector as well as the academic study of the modern Middle East.

Aesthetic Dividuations in a Globalized Art World

As a professor of philosophy in the art academy of Hamburg, I deal with contemporary art practices; as a theorist of aesthetics I try to determine what kind of aesthetic and artistic developments seem to be significant for our times, and which kind of philosophical theories I can offer in order to better conceptualize and understand the given art productions. At the same time, I attempt to transcend contemporary tendencies and concepts and to foster students’ art practices in a way that makes them meaningful for the future. This lecture seeks to provide a possible interpretation of actual art practices in a globalized world, reflecting also on big art exhibitions such as Documenta 14 and on African films. It sketches a specific aesthetic program called Afropolitanism as an understanding which could be conceived of as paradigmatic for our globalized times. Afropolitanism is a term coined by the South African theorist Achille Mbembe in one of his 2010 book Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisé. Starting from there I want to offer a philosophical concept that goes far beyond the European context and hopes to provide a possible conceptual frame for a more complex understanding of the culturally and artistically entangled and hybridized expressions of our days, including those of human subjectivation. I call this concept dividuation as I have explained further in my book Dividuations: Theories of Participation, which was published in English in 2018. Article received: December 15, 2019; Article accepted: January 31, 2029; Published online: April 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper

A função-curador

O artigo procura analisar o modo como a curadoria foi se transformando ao longo das últimas décadas. De organizador de exposições, o curador assumiu-se como agente propositor de narrativas históricas alternativas. Nesse aspecto, a montagem de exposições passou a incorporar elementos da atividade crítica, sendo que, paradoxalmente, a curadoria atua no interior das instituições museológicas e muito próxima do mercado de arte. Pretendemos compreender esse processo não apenas sob a óptica da captura institucional da crítica, mas também como inexorável a um mundo globalizado, atento a perspectivas históricas heterogêneas.

A Room for All

In the last two decades, collaborative art praxes, sometimes categorised as participatory art, have become a staple of the global contemporary artworld. Some might consider them the trending modus operandi in artistic practices today. This kind of production prompts artists to step outside of normative studio situations to create socially engaged projects connected to audiences typically beyond the microcosm of art.Curator and scholar Salwa Mikdadi points out that these kinds of works are a hallmark of art in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). She writes about their potential: ‘In the case of the Arab world, they undoubtedly serve to bring young people together under the banner of art, in the process giving young artists a renewed sense of purpose.’This article discusses the significance of experimental institutions in the MENA in initiating, producing, espousing, and promoting participatory or collaborative art projects. It highlights three arts centres in the region – Cairo, Sharjah and Amman.

Selling Africa

Samuel Fosso’s self-portrait as The Chief: He Who Sold Africa to the Colonists is one of the artist’s most iconic works. Shot in 1997, Fosso created this photograph just a few years after his rise to international fame, at a time when the larger discursive category of “contemporary African art” was taking shape in the global art world. This article explores how, in this context, The Chief’s satirical content became entangled with the idea of “selling Africa” that is expressed in its title. In this image, Fosso thoroughly satirizes the notion of “selling Africa” through his shrewd manipulation of multiple figural stereotypes. However, key moments in the afterlife of this image suggest that this work was mobilized to perform exactly that function of “selling Africa,” which it so insistently parodies.

Performing art history: continuities of Romanian art practices in post-communist performance

ABSTRACT In the present essay Eastern European art before, but also after, 1989 is considered as influential for international art practices dominated by Western European and American paradigms. The approach the author implements, situates post-communist art in a global art world without neglecting its site-specific context. This case study of Romanian performance art, Alexandra Pirici’s and Manuel Pelmus’ project An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale realized at the Romanian pavilion in 2013, questioned euro-centrist and national power structures in the history of the Venice Biennale. The two artists’ site-specific project re-evaluated strategies of institutional critique and challenged the hegemony of the global canon as well as pointed to gaps in the art historical narrative. Photography in its archival structure works as the performances’ starting point rather than its documentation and becomes part of a concept of self-historization which merged with the contemporary artistic language of performance and supported the artists’ recognition at the international art context of the Biennale. The political implications of the body’s presence and activism are broadened by considering a specific notion of individuality that opposes the socialist understanding of the national collective body. This particular post-communist art project revealed the continuity of Eastern European art practices across the Iron Curtain going beyond temporal and local containment.

The evolution of professional contemporary dance in Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso is renowned within international dance circles for its vibrant dance scene. It is the origin of several accomplished and widely touring performing artists as well as a growing number of upcoming dancer-choreographers who want to engage in a professional artistic career. Yet, the existence of the profession of an artist, let alone of a professional choreographer, is not a commonly recognized social fact in this country. Against this background we trace the historical evolution of the dancing profession in Burkina Faso. Focusing on Ouagadougou, we analyse how the contemporary dance field has developed in this specific location as a transnationally connected social space that forms part of a global art world. We analyse its multiple institutional linkages with other spaces highlighting the concrete actors who have contributed to the establishment of dance ‘as an art and a profession’ (Sanou 2008, Afrique Danse Contemporaine. Pantin: Centre National de la Danse, 43) in this country. Thereby we underline the ambivalent role of the state, which remains an indispensable interlocutor not only in the process of recognizing artists’ official status and providing access to public infrastructure but also in establishing schools, which have become important institutions mediating the relations of the art world of contemporary choreography with its social environment.