Birgit Hopfener, "Global Art History and the Challenge of Plurality. From Global Conceptualism
towards a Pluriversal Conceptual Framework for Contemporary Art"
Mainstream
discourse of contemporary art in the global context, predominantly derived from Euro-American scholarship, has been largely
unconcerned with rethinking Euro-American conceptual frameworks, and not yet sufficiently attended to the plural and transculturally
interconnected conceptual and social histories that constitute contemporary art in the global framework. In 1999, the exhibition
Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s that was on show in several venues in the US, took up the challenge of
how to engage with the plurality of contemporary conceptual art by adopting a multi-regional approach. Acknowledging and critically
engaging with the exhibition’s seminal contributions, I take analyses of contemporary Chinese historiographic art as case
studies to make the argument that it is only by further complicating and pluriversalizing the conceptual frameworks for contemporary
art in the global context that we do justice to art’s plurality and work towards “discursive equality” (Parul Dave Mukherji).
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