FOR 1703:  Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art. Comparative Perspectives on Historical Contexts and Contemporary Constellations

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: from 2011 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 194713532

The Research Unit examines works of art and practices as well as related discursive modes of signification with regard to their indicative capacity as agents in processes of transcultural merge and entanglement. The initial heuristic proposition, which serves also as an overarching analytical guideline of research, conceptualises art-related practices of interaction as specific modes of negotiating different sets of validation. In a historical perspective such prolonged acts of adjusting variant claims and agencies transformed the ambits of the art object into an emerging site or venue of negotiation in its own right.
The Research Unit's comparative design entails a diachronic approach, focussing on historical processes from the late 13th century onwards, which have been conceptualised in geopolitical terms as the emergence of the modern world-system, characterised by an ever-increasing dynamic interchange between close-range and long-distance relations.
On a synchronic level, the Research Unit addresses modes of interaction and intersection between local/regional ambits of art with distant practices of negotiations and vice versa, thus decomposing past and present discursive tropes, which appropriate art for holistic and essentialist concepts of 'culture' and 'civilisation'.
Diversifying its research agenda on art-related negotiations in African, European, North- and South-American and East-Asian contexts, the Research Unit combines disciplinary expertise with comparative methodologies of adjacent disciplines (such as anthropology, area and cultural studies) in order to contribute to a more integrative and transversal oriented art history, still very much dominated by mutually exclusive spatiotemporal separations.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Central project: Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art. Comparative Perspectives on Historical Contexts and Currents Constellations (Applicant Gludovatz, Karin )
• Fictions of the Original. Analytical Explorations of Discourses and Practices in the Arts of Africa (Applicant Wendl, Tobias )
• Glocalization Processes in the Art of Religious Orders in Early Modern Period (Applicant Kern, Margit )
• In Motion. Artistic Mobility and Transcultural Exchange in the Early Modern Period (Applicant Gludovatz, Karin )
• PORTUS. Mediality and Visual Topoi of Long-Distance Maritime Trade in Japan and the Netherlands (16th-18th Centuries) (Applicant Rees, Joachim )
• The Charisma of the Foreign. The Aesthetics of Religious Exchange in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World (Applicant Krüger, Klaus )
• World Art and the World of Art - Then and Now (Applicant Wendl, Tobias )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Karin Gludovatz, since 5/2014
• Deputy: Professor Dr. Joachim Rees, since 5/2014