FAH1922H: Contemporary Art and Ethnography:Renewed Exchanges

With the rise of various models of "global" art history and the proliferation of biennale culture, the complicated relationships between the practice and theory of art and ethnography seem newly relevant. Contemporary artists and curators, working across global histories refer to methods of "field research/work/site" and engage with the participatory and performative aspects of art-making. Some of the questions we will consider: What does it mean to curate as a form of ethnographic practice? How have these disciplines addressed the complexities of material cultures, the agency of objects, and indigenous and local ways of knowing? How do we understand tropes of "crisis" and calls for "reflexivity" in both these arenas of study, in the wake of renewed concerns about cultural appropriation and calls for decolonization and cultural restitution? Finally, what kinds of imaginative or speculative fictions have been articulated through both ethnographic and archival research by contemporary artists and researchers? The work of ethnographers, art historians, and artists has drawn repeatedly on tropes of travel, discovery, hybridity, cultural proximity, and distancing. How might we usefully draw these common threads into productive conversations to clear space for more radical ways of doing art history?

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