080066 SE Seminar: Contemporary Art and Globalization: Borders, Boundaries and Territoriality (nst.K.) (2014W)

This seminar focuses on the particular ways in which contemporary aesthetic production has negotiated the role of borders, boundaries, and territoriality as sites of knowledge production within the complex processes and techniques of neoliberal global capitalism. We will analyze a wide spectrum of artistic practices and cultural artifacts in various national and cultural contexts in relation to these three conceptual categories as they have been developed in different disciplines.
Some questions that will motivate our study will be: 1)What is the relation between borders, boundaries, and territoriality and new techniques of governmentality and management of people and populations associated with the processes and effects of globalization? 2) How have experiences of exclusion and inclusion, often associated with these concepts, been distributed within diverse systems, sites, and subjects of contemporary life and what aesthetic techniques, forms and strategies have emerged to represent and critically interrogate such issues ? 3) Can these concepts help us reframe binaries such as ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ ‘west’ and ‘non-west,’ and ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ along different axes and what would be the implications for both contemporary museological practices and curatorial projects outside the museum? 4) What is the relation between these concepts and broader debates surrounding race, migration, human rights, the status of migrants, refugees, and post-colonial subjects and the intensifying anxiety about religious, ethnic and cultural difference?