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Taking the years between 1905 and 1965 as the temporal frame, this conference sought to rethink Global Modernisms from a transregional perspective. Current conceptualizations of avantgardism and formal innovation often related to places like Paris, New York, Weimar or Moscow continue to inform Global Modernisms’ intellectual field. Global Modernisms are often presented as a symptom for new Westernism that masquerades as the universal. This conference seeks a more constitutive conceptual vision.

Understanding Global Modernisms as clusters of artistic, intellectual, technological, institutional, socio-cultural, and political arrangements, the conference focuses on this field as an effect of contiguities and infrastructures. We approach contiguities as global and local zones of intellectual and artistic proximity and difference, and infrastructure as a combination of physical, political, social and intellectual formations. The conference then aimed to situate the concept of Global Modernisms within the scalarity of the macro, meso and the micro and within the plurality of temporal and geographical spaces, movements and events.
 

Program highlights:

Thursday, 5 November 2015, 7 pm
Keynote by Arjun Appadurai (New York University)
Indian Popular Cinema in the Making of a Decolonized Modernity

Friday, 6 November, 7 pm
Roundtable “Curating Global Modernisms in the 21st Century”
With Catherine David, Clementine Deliss, Patrick Flores, Anselm Franke, Nicola Müllerschön und Stefan Weber

Venue:
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin
Conception:
Atreyee Gupta (Berlin/Oakland), Hannah Baader (Berlin/Florenz), Patrick Flores (Manila)

“Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetic Practices” was the Annual Conference of the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Foundation in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Convened by Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices.