Transmission as a Creative Act: Pluriversalizing contemporary art’s relationship/s to the past
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS and Online
- Room
- Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT), Lower Ground Floor
- Event type
- Lecture
About this event
This lecture examines how globally engaged Chinese contemporary artists use historiographic art to critically reflect on contemporary art’s relation to the past. It takes their artistic approaches to history writing as the starting point to explore the historical, epistemological, and transcultural complexity of contemporary art in a critical global framework.
While historiographic art is frequently discussed as a global phenomenon, existing scholarship has not sufficiently addressed the culturally specific and plural ways in which artistic engagements with the past are conceptualized. Prevailing frameworks remain shaped by Euro-American historiographic assumptions, thereby limiting the interpretive scope of historiographic art.
To address this gap, the lecture adopts a pluriversal approach that expands art historical and intellectual archives beyond Western traditions. It demonstrates that additional layers of meaning emerge when contemporary historiographic artworks are read through the lens of a longer history of Chinese historiographic art and related aesthetics of transformation and transmission.
Speaker: Dr Birgit Hopfener, Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton University.
Discussant: Professor Paul Gladston, UNSW Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art.
Organisers
Professor Paul Gladston (UNSW), Professor Charlotte Horlyck (SOAS) and Professor Jason Kuo (UMD)
About the speaker
Dr Birgit Hopfener is Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton University, cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture (ICSLAC).
She situates herself in the fields of critical global art history and Chinese art history. Her current research centers on questions around the heterogeneity of temporal assumptions (historiographical models, their respective concepts of time and temporality and temporal regimes) that constitute and frame our world, its art, subjects, and knowledges. With the aim to shed light on the transcultural historicity of contemporary art, its multiple structures and experiences of time from a specific locale, her current book project focuses on art historiographic works by contemporary Chinese artists.
She authored the book Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen: Bedingungen und Artikulationen kultureller Differenz in der chinesische Installationkunst (2013) and co-edited the volumes Negotiating Difference: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Context (2012) and Situating Global Art. Topologies – Temporalities - Trajectories (2018). Her recent publications include the special issue “Towards a multi-temporal pluriverse of art. Decolonizing universalized historiographic and temporal frameworks”, 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur, (April/Mai 2024). Forthcoming are the co-edited publications Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization Ottawa Academy Chapbook, and Worlding Art History Pedagogies, both publications are chapbooks in the series Worlding Public Cultures, ici Berlin press.
Birgit Hopfener is a member of the editorial boards of 21: Inquiries, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and the editorial advisory board for the book series Worlding Public Cultures, ICI press, Berlin. From 2020–2024, she was on the editorial board of the Art Journal. She is a founding member of the international consortium Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Cultural Exchange (trACE) and the international research group Worlding Public Cultures.
About the series
This event is the inaugural lecture of the University of New South Wales Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art International Lecture Series.
In association with the School of Arts, SOAS, University of London and the Wang Fangyu Endowment for Calligraphy Education, University of Maryland.
The University of New South Wales Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art (UNSW JNCCA) International Lecture Series will present lectures by leading scholars on a bi-annual basis rotating between UNSW, SOAS and the University of Maryland (UMD). The series is made possible by the endowed funds of the UNSW JNCCA and is co-supported by School of Arts, SOAS, University of London and the Wang Fangyu Endowment for Calligraphy Education, UMD.
Image: Liu Ding, Room of Boundlessness (Cangmang Shi), 2025, installation, courtesy of the artist
