BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk// X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Reimagining Modernism\, Mapping the Contemporary: Critical Perspec tives on Transnationality in Art - Speaker to be confirmed DTSTART:20130923T080000Z DTEND:20130923T170000Z UID:TALK46764@talks.cam.ac.uk CONTACT:24901 DESCRIPTION:A major\, two-day international conference reconceptualising m odernist artistic practices from a transnational\, interdisciplinary persp ective.\n\nThe conference takes as its point of departure the consolidatio n of a new historiography of artistic modernism written at a global level and characterized by a weakening or even outright rejection of the demarca tions that traditionally served to separate Western artistic practice from ‘the rest’. Influential recent studies and exhibitions have argued fo r the categories of cosmopolitan\, rather than national\, modernisms\; glo bal rather than Anglo-American conceptualism\; a diasporic rather than con tinental Afro-modernism. These developments go beyond a tokenistic inclusi on of artistic practices from formerly economically peripheral and semi-pe ripheral nations into the mainstream canon\; they do not simply expand the group of nations understood to be ‘core’ to the development of modern ism in line with changing geopolitical realities and the waning of Western hegemony. Rather\, they challenge the imagined community of the nation or region as the basic unit of artistic territorialisation\, focusing instea d on diverse\, networked artistic communities that are understood to coher e at a transnational and/or transregional level\, often with particular gl obal cities as their enabling nodes. 
\n\nAs postmodernism has taken its place in history so we are obliged to rearticulate the notion of the ‘c ontemporary’ once again. This conference explores the ways in which doin g so requires us to revisit the putative supersession of modernism\, exami ning what types of relations may be found between modernist and contempora ry transnational artistic practices Does the development of a transnationa l history of artistic modernism reflect the ascendancy of a genuinely post colonial disciplinary moment\, one that surrenders the idea of Western exc eptionalism? Is there a risk that we are witnessing a reorientation of sch olarly priorities in step with the type of selective ‘denationalization ’ pursued by global capital\, one that preserves deep\, if no longer uni form\, structural inequities between the global North and South\, West and East\, while continuing to rely on the power of particular nation states as its guarantor? In the name of what present\, then\, is the past to be r eimagined?\n\nThe conference develops a critical perspective on the prolif erating discourses of the transnational\, considering how they have reshap ed the study of modern and contemporary art and the links that are articul ated between them. It focuses on scholarship which foregrounds the methodo logical implications\, as well as the historical unfolding\, of transnatio nal developments in and between artistic and curatorial practice. LOCATION:Jock Colville Hall\, Churchill College\, University of Cambridge END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR