Research Area B Arts and the Transcultural: Concepts, Histories and Practices (Net 1)

Coordination: Monica Juneja, Christiane Brosius, Melanie Trede, Franziska Koch, Cathrine Bublatzky

The search for a new conceptual vocabulary and research apparatus to study the dynamics of transculturality in the fields of art history, visual culture and media anthropology is a reflexive enterprise which requires synergetic collaboration across regions, time spans and disciplinary boundaries. The network project “Arts and the Transcultural: concepts, histories and practices” offered such a cross-disciplinary research environment of scholars working on subjects which focus on art worlds and practices in a transcultural perspective. Based on collaborative research and publications, joint teaching and research colloquia/symposia at Heidelberg University, the network strengthened the foundations of ongoing research and provided fresh impulses emanating from the Heidelberg Cluster to practitioners of art history, anthropology and visual culture within and beyond Heidelberg. It had also moved beyond the university to work together with institutions of exhibition.
Engaging with different cultures and their relationalities requires a critical questioning of the boundaries demarcating units of investigation as they have been handed down in writing on art worlds. Rather than adhering to national, linguistic or ethnocentric demarcations, we aimed to understand boundaries more productively. We followed the logic of circulatory practices in our attempt to raise challenging questions about cultural difference, multiple temporalities and shifting, often paradoxical relationships to locality which artists and other agents negotiate, all of which call for alternative explanatory paradigms.