Zeitgenössische Kunst / Globaler Süden
Zeitgenössische Kunst / Globaler Süden
The seminar “Contemporary Art/Global South” begins with a desire to breathe in resonance, to search for other forms of collectivity and hospitality that could accommodate the strangeness, “extraneous” that some call home. It offers a home – a garden refuge of sorts, that emerges from cultures of collaborative and collective practices that center on care, reparations, and healing.
In foregrounding syncretism, the seminar presents decentralized and embodied practices of knowing the world by presenting the possibility to imagine, project, map, narrate, sing, dream, and carve out contemporary artistic practices that are socially aware and at times community-oriented.
In a world where systems of knowledge production continue to focus on individualized progress, seminar participants are often faced with renegotiating where the “self” begins or ends. The seminar often includes presentations by international artists, historians, activists, and scholars, and will include excursions to various locations across Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America as part of recognizing how shared experiences of marginalization echo across geographies (and beyond south-south as a geographical location); and how systems of power continue to inform where and how each of these echoes should reverberate.
In imagining future contemporary art landscapes, we value fragility and failure as much as certainty and know-how. We use uncertainty, opacity, play, and fragility as strategies to counter and de-link from oppressive systems brought on by coloniality, racism, imperialism, and existing forms of exploitation. We seek activist strategies and creative practices that mirror and emphasize the everyday existence of those affected by imperialism and coloniality, including human and non-human forms of survival from those living and no longer with us.
The seminar’s insistence on collectivity and care is central to decolonial methodologies that call upon the academy to continue the work of reimagining itself through practice and not only in theory.
