Current global ecological, political and social crises, this workshop argues, have once
again underscored the urgency of unlearning universalized modern Western
frameworks in order to uncover the world’s cosmological, epistemological and
ontological heterogeneity. Co-constituted with the modern Western frameworks that
have conceptualized the world in line with colonial and imperial Eurocentric power
structures, art history has primarily reinforced social, political and epistemological
inequalities and hierarchies.
This session approaches the broader decolonial project through the category of
temporality. Despite post-structuralist critiques of historicism, art and art history continue
to be dominantly governed by modern Western linear models of time, underpinned by
notions of modernization, rupture, avant-garde, revolution, causality, progress and the
denial of co-evalness of what is conventionally called “non-Western art.” This session
embraces the decolonial concept of the pluriverse in order to explore the potential of art
and art historical scholarship to un/recover the multiplicity of temporal and
historiographic frameworks.
The workshop seeks contributions that decolonize universalized historiographic
frameworks and temporal concepts of art and art history through combinations of
Western critique and epistemological research into art’s multiple relations to time and
traditions of (hi)story writing/telling. We invite papers that critically engage with
alternative temporal frameworks of art, different ways of relating the past to the present
and the future or contributions that analyze art historiographies, object biographies,
historiographic art or historiographic exhibitions as articulations and evidence of
engagements with multiple and/or entangled historiographic traditions and models, and
their related concepts and functions of art.
While the workshop organizers focus on modern and contemporary art, we welcome
papers grounded in diverse art historical periods and forms of research, including
museum and curatorial studies and the anthropology and philosophy of art.