(Un)Mapping Modern Art

The original meaning of “infrastructure” (from the Latin infra, and structura) refers to a substructure or ground, and to static constructions which, like nodal points, establish important lines of connection and guarantee supply. Applied to the arts, the term may be said to designate institutions such as museums, exhibition venues, biennials, and universities but also funding institutions, publishers, and other (academic) authorities that contribute to relevant discourses, networks, and the publicizing of art.

Taking a transnational, non-Eurocentric perspective, the goal of this project is to critically question these infrastructures in the modern era, as well as to examine their possible alternatives. It will ask specifically about blind spots, neglected peripheries, and the forgotten margins of history, moving our understanding of modern art production beyond the dominant canon and narrative. Orders, spaces, and actors will be mapped in specific case studies in order to survey the infrastructural field anew.

About the speakers

John Clark is Professor Emeritus in Art History at the University of Sydney where he taught for twenty-one years. His Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai art of the 1980s and 1990s won the Best Art Book Prize of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2011. Modernities of Chinese Art and Modernities of Japanese Art were published in 2010 and 2013. His two-volume The Asian Modern, 1850s – 1990s, which examines twenty-five Asian artists in five generations from the 1850s to 1990s, was published by the National Gallery of Singapore in 2020. Also in press from National University of Singapore Press, is his Contemporary Asian Art at Biennials.

Partha Mitter is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Sussex. He is a writer and historian of art and culture, specialising in the reception of Indian art in the West, as well as in modernity, art, and identity in India, and more recently in global modernism. His many publications include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art; Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations; Indian Art (Oxford Art History Series); and The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde – 1922-1947.

Rachel Esner is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Amsterdam. She specializes in 19th-century French art and photography, on which she has published widely, as well as in the history of collections, museology and curating. She is currently researching the history of exhibitions in the Netherlands in a long-term project entitled ‘Documenting Curatorial Practice in Dutch Art Museums, 1945-Today’, and is a founding member of the research platform ‘Women in the Dutch Art World: Collectors, Curators, Critics’ (in conjunction with the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum and the RKD).

Gregor Langfeld is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Open University (Netherlands) and the University of Amsterdam. He is an esteemed expert on canonization processes and the institutionalization of modern art. He has written several books about diverse infrastructures in the art field, including German Art in New York: The Canonization of Modern Art, 1904-1957 (2015) and Duitse kunst in Nederland: Verzamelen, tentoonstellen, kritieken, 1919–1964 (2004). Another field of expertise is migration from a global perspective: in December 2019 he edited the Stedelijk Studies issue Modernism in Migration: Relocating Artists, Objects, and Ideas, 1910–1970.