MA Programm "Transcultural Studies"
Welcome to Transcultural Reflections
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020 | Allgemein | No Comments
This blog features selected (visual) essays by students of Heidelberg University’s MA-Programm “Transcultural Studies” that are developed as part of my art historical seminars with a focus on visual and material culture spanning Asia, Europe and many other parts of the world.
The blog encourages students to present their intellectually engaging and research based academic reflections in a public format. It aims at introducing our insights on how objects, agents, concepts and institutions are culturally conditioned, how they circulate, and how they trigger particular practices and discourses in the fields of art and visual culture.
While responding to a specific seminar’s topic such as “socially engaged art”, the presented case studies serve to highlight how cultural difference is constituted as well as contested in processes marked by transculturality. It follows an “understanding [of] cultural difference, not as an arbitrary irrelevance that detracts from the ‘essence’ of art, nor as a social problem to be managed by compensatory policies, but as a distinctive feature of modern art and modernity that was always there and which is not going to go away”[1].
[1] Kobena Mercer, “Introduction”, in: Cosmopolitan Modernisms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, p. 9.