All at Sea: Piracy and the Trade Routes of Art History
March 21-23, 2012, Sydney, Australia
This inaugural event, convened by Kavita Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, brought together scholars that specialize in the visual arts and culture of South East Asia. Scholars from the Indian Ocean littoral, South East Asia, Asia, North America, and Oceania met to discuss questions of economic, cultural, and artistic exchange. The discussion foregrounded 'piracy' as a metaphor to think about art history and it generated a range of important themes. This event was in partnership with the Power Institute at the University of Sydney and made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s grant to the Clark.
Participants
Frederick Asher, University of Minnesota; Jill Bennett, University of New South Wales; John Clark, Australian National University; Shelley Errington, University of California, Santa Cruz; Patrick D. Flores, University of the Philippines-Diliman; Shigemi Inaga, International Research Center for Japanese Studies; Mark Ledbury, Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney; Aamir Mufti, University of California, Los Angeles; Chaitanya Sambrani, Australian National University; Kavita Singh, School of the Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Session topics included:
- ‘Piracy’ as a metaphor for modernity, exchange, and art history
- Global art markets and global art history
- ‘Temporality’ and other critical concepts, such as ‘locality’ and ‘materiality,’ as new entry points into historical and contemporary narratives of art
- Issues of comparative historiography
- Historical formations of the region and their impact on cultural traditions and changing art practices
- The validity of different forms of art historical knowledge
- Conceptions of ‘the nation’ and colonial/postcolonial experiences
- Contemporary art and its references to ‘transition’, ‘movement,’ and ‘trade’ as a pre-modern, and modern issue also
- The antagonism of language(s)
