Art Histories
2018/ 2019

Sophia Prinz

Global Modernity, Material Worlds and the Migration of Form

studied applied cultural studies at the University of Lüneburg (now Leuphana University) with a concentration in art and visual culture. From 2006 to 2018, Prinz was a research associate at the department of cultural sociology, first at the University of Konstanz, then at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). There, she received her doctorate in 2012 with a dissertation on the practice of seeing (published in 2014 under the title Die Praxis des Sehens: Über das Zusammenspiel von Körpern, Artefakten und visueller Ordnung). She conceived and coordinated Mobile Worlds: On the Migration of Things in Transcultural Societies, a joint project sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) that ran from 2015 until 2018. For that project, she was awarded the Brandenburg Postdoc Award. Since 2018 she has been a visiting professor of the theory of design at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Alongside her academic commitments, she has also served as a research associate at the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, contributing to many of its exhibitions. Sophia Prinz is Art Histories Fellow funded by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.

Global Modernity, Material Worlds and the Migration of Form

As soon as things move from one place to another, social forms migrate with them. Things are neither passive instruments in a course of action nor mere expressions of a society. Rather, they themselves are actively involved in the formation of meanings, practices, and cultural patterns of perception. Through this, they necessarily influence the social orders of their respective destinations. Following from this observation, the proposed research project intends to illuminate the locally specific forms of global modernity from a practice theory perspective. This proposal is guided by two basic assumptions: First, that global modernity should not be read as a single Western export product but must instead be regarded as a heterogeneous and contested result of a centuries-old history of interconnectedness. Second, that social modernization processes are not only associated with broad socio-structural and discursive changes—such as processes of rationalization, differentiation, and individualization—but also correlate with the emergence of specific material and visual cultures. By implication, conclusions about the particular social and cultural conditions of each local variant of modernity can be drawn from its material and aesthetic characteristics—whether from architecture, design or visual arts.