Selected Publications
- “Towards a multi-temporal pluriverse of art. Decolonizing universalized historiographic and temporal frameworks,” co-edited special issue 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur, April/May 2024.
- “A Group Dance that Never Ends. A Pluriversal Approach to the Contemporary Art Exhibition “Continuum – Generation by Generation,” in: 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur, co-edited special issue Towards a multi-temporal pluriverse of art. Decolonizing universalized historiographic and temporal frameworks, April/May 2024.
- “Tradition and Transmission. Examining and Shifting Epistemological and (Art-)historical Grounds of Contemporary Art’s Relation to the Past”, in: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2019, 6:2+3.
- Situating Global Art. Topologies – Temporalities – Trajectories, co-edited volume, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2018.
- Installationskunst in China. Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen: Bedingungen und Artikulationen kultureller Differenz in der chinesischen Installationskunst, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2013.
FRIAS Project
Doing Critical Global Art History. Transcultural analyses and a pluriversal conceptual framework for contemporary art historiographic art
My current work examines contemporary artistic historiographies and how they relate different concepts and histories of art transculturally. It conceives them as invitations, if not challenges, to shed light on the historiographical and epistemological plurality of contemporary art and to rethink methodological approaches to contemporary art history accordingly. Even though historiographic art has been treated as a global phenomenon (Roelstraete 2009, Kernbauer 2022), its historiographical and conceptual frameworks continue to be rooted in Euro-American histories and philosophies of art and history. It is in this regard that the book argues for the necessity to open and pluriversalize the intellectual repositories of contemporary historiographic art by attending to the multiplicity and transcultural entanglements of cultural historical and philosophical foundations of art’s relation to history and historiography, concepts of historical thinking, historiography, time and temporality, artists’ interest in historiography, their historiographic ethos so to speak, beyond and in transcultural relation with Euro-American conceptualizations and histories. Such a pluriversal approachcritiques universalist claims about the nature of art and history and offers a “more plausible theoretical scaffolding for the discipline to then respond to the challenge of cultural plurality” (Juneja 2023), contributing to an epistemological shift that holds open the space for alternative forms of knowledge and their potentialities in ways that echo calls for “discursive equality” (Mukherji 2023). “Doing critical global art history” has identified contemporary artistic historiographies by three, globally engaged Chinese artists as insightful case studies to explore how artists from a specific locale contribute to the complex genealogical polyphony of contemporary art in a global framework. The study situates their works within current discourses on historiographical art and adds new layers of meaning by reading them through the lens of a longer Chinese art history of historiographical art and in relation to European, North-American and other cultural, (art) historical, aesthetic, philosophical and linguistic sources on art and historiography. By opening what is conventionally referred to as “non-Western art” to transcultural analysis, Chinese art leaves its traditionally assigned passive place on the periphery and becomes an active participant in critical global art historiography and theory production among and in conversation with others.