C06 History as Material? Artistic Historicizing as an Intervening Practice

This subproject focuses on intervening practices that engage with artistic modernism(s), avantgarde movements and a historiography of modern art history and in order to critically examine a modernity understood as western. The foundation is formed through the examination of the closely intertwined connection of western modernity and coloniality, which continues to replicate itself in societal processes and forms of representation up to the present day.

One central question is how processes of artistic historicization of modernism and modernist phenomena can decolonialize the understanding of the artistic production of the modern and its art-historical theorization. How can processes of the designing and discarding of dominant, western-oriented narratives of modernity be reflected upon and deconstructed, without diluting their entanglements in the formation of colonial hegemonies or trivializing their historically widespread epistemic and colonial forms of violence? This is connected to the question of how artistic historicization intervenes in its own disciplinary practice, in the institutionalization of the field of art, in the writing of history and in art theory discourses and infrastructures.

Proceeding from these lines of inquiry, sub-subproject 1 investigates the significance of the artistic historicization of modernity for contemporary art, sub-subproject 2 conducts research into the artistic commenting on imperial monuments for public discourse and sub-subproject 3 questions the dynamics and infrastructures of decentering and recentering in modernist exhibitions.