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Just Published
cover imageLecture Video
Kotva, Simone Abyssal Apex: On Scale and scala in Christian Mysticism
In the history of Western Christian mysticism, height meets depth and scales collide. In this lecture, Kotva will be thinking about the coincidence of apex and abyss in selected manuals of mystical theology. While some manuals favour the image of the mind’s ascent, others emphasise its descent — but all speak of ‘stages’ (scalae) and step-by-step itineraries. A tension emerges between incremental progress (where scale appears measurable) and the collapsing of scale in mystic union (where scale appears suspended). What is the relationship between scalae and scale, between linear progress on the one hand and suspended scales on the other? Simone Kotva is a Reader in Systematic Theology in the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion at the University of Gothenburg. Simone is a scholar-practitioner of mysticism with a special interest in Catholic spiritual exercises. She is the author of Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2020) as well as Ecologies of Ecstasy: Mysticism, Philosophy and Vegetal Life (Columbia, 2026).
2026
Just Published
cover imageWorkshop
Kotva, Simone, Burgon, Anya, Chepurin, Kirill, Field, Rebecca, and Glover, Tim Scales of Mysticism
Mysticism has always involved encounters with scale: the self dissolving into something larger, the vast becoming intimate, experience that overflows the boundaries of the individual and the measurable. It is telling that Evelyn Underhill referred to mysticism as ‘experience in its most intense form’. The mystical encounter is, by definition, excessive, beyond the bounds of ordinary human consciousness. Because of this, mystical texts must negotiate the thickly paradoxical relations of the earthly and the divine, using poetic strategies of displacement, negation, and movement to describe that which the human mind cannot easily comprehend. Mystical writing is—following the Middle English meaning of the word mystik—essentially figurative, signalling the mysteries of God through appropriately ‘misty’ language. The mystical text pursues a non-closing chain of signification, shifting across scales as it gestures always further towards ineffability. Yet if describing a mystical experience is demanding, pursuing one is just as challenging. For millennia, religious and spiritual traditions have developed practical spiritual exercises for seeking toward mystical experiences. These are historically and culturally contingent, often carefully mediated, sometimes radical accounts of the pursuit of a mystical encounter. Such exercises involve sustained and focused attention, prayer, and meditation on an object, word, feeling, or thought. They ask the contemplative to see the world with a different gaze, one which often challenges presumptions of dualism, materialism, and individualism. This gaze is, almost always, one which tries to see across scales. Yet ‘mysticism’ is itself a contested and historically contingent term. We are now well past the essentialist assumption—associated with William James, Stace, and others—that there exists a universal, transhistorical mystical experience with a common phenomenological core. Mysticism as a category was largely constructed in the late nineteenth century, and subsequent scholarship has shown how that construction marginalised gender, embodiment, and the specificities of cultural and doctrinal context. This event does not seek to rehabilitate a unified or essentialist mysticism. Rather, it proposes scale as heuristic: a way of thinking across the diversity of mystical literature, practice, and experience without collapsing that diversity into a false universal. Whatever else mysticism is or is not, it consistently stages encounters with scale—and it is this that makes it, even now, a productive and generative category for humanistic inquiry. This event gathers new currents in the scholarship on mystical literature, theory, and practice, pressing beyond confessional and periodising frameworks to ask what mysticism does—as a habit of perception, or a form of knowing that resists reduction to the religious, the historical, or the sectarian. Mysticism, defined here intentionally capaciously, names an experience of inner excess that suspends the logic of the bounded individual and opens onto things otherwise foreclosed: modes of attention, forms of community, and relations to the nonhuman world.
2026
cover imageLecture Video
Love, Heather The Map and the Territory: Representation, Scale, and the Real in Queer Studies
This talk addresses the question of the map and the territory through the intellectual and institutional history of queer studies. It has been the burden of queer thought to push back against philosophical realism and the idea that, for instance, gender is simply there, a set of incontrovertible biological facts or an ordinary feature of shared experience. The performativity thesis in queer theory has brought about a new era of gender freedom by loosening the relation between culture, language, and self-understanding from the ‘givens’ of the body, law, and history. But it has resulted in two problems, which Heather Love investigates in this talk: 1. Reference: the long-standing problem of material reality and its appearance within queer and trans theory and 2. Scale: the non-adequation between queer thought and the needs, interests, and self-understanding of the LGBT community. Love will argue that by taking the map for the territory, and representation for existence, queer scholars have not only made it difficult to address ‘bodies that matter’, they have also intensified the methodological problem of scale. Heather Love is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; in September 2026, she will join Rutgers University as the Kenneth Burke Chair of English. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (‘Rethinking Sex’) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations (‘Description Across Disciplines’). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project (‘To Be Real’), which addresses the uses of the personal in queer criticism.
2026
cover imagePresentation
Fer Nogueira, Rafael Baioni, and diasszzz Desbatismos/Debaptisms: Dissident Cartographies and Artistic Practices of Deprogramming
Fer Nogueira, Rafael Baioni, and diasszzz, ‘Desbatismos/Debaptisms: Dissident Cartographies and Artistic Practices of Deprogramming’, presentation presented at the symposium Conceptual Activism: Engaging Queerly in Conflictual Times, ICI Berlin, 30 March 2026, mp4, 01:07:35 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260330-2>
2026
Just Published
cover imageBook Section
Laurens Dhaenens, Franziska Koch, Anton Lee, Varda Nisar, Miriam Oesterreich, Tanya Talwar, Song Xiaoxia, and Esra Yıldız Questionnaire on Syllabi, 2023–2024
This questionnaire developed out of the workshop ‘Worlding Art History through Syllabi’ which we as WPC co-organized in October 2022 together with the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. The workshop invited over twenty international scholars to present and discuss their approaches to designing and using syllabi to teach global art history. Over the course of two days, understandings of what a syllabus is and how it is used came to be questioned, shedding light not only on the role of personal teaching preferences, but also on departmental, institutional and even national agendas, language barriers, and the influence of collaborative approaches to teaching (particularly across higher education institutions, and museums). The questionnaire was developed in conjunction with the responses of participants, a number of whom agreed to continue the conversation and share personal insights into their use of syllabi.
2026. teaching strategies; syllabi; global art history; institutions; museum-based teaching
Just Published
cover imageBook Section
Varda Nisar, maya rae oppenheimer, and Edith-Anne Pageot Against the Grain: Teaching and Learning in Art History and Cultural Studies
Reflection is an important practice, particularly when considering teaching from a decolonial, anticolonial, critical or experiential position. Rather than a single case study, the authors of this section share their reflections on recent, kindred, pedagogical projects. Varda Nisar contributes teaching and learning experiences borne of facilitating seminars with undergraduate students in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. Edith-Anne Pageot brings her reflections on researching and discussing her professional and personal experiences at the University of Ottawa and the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada. maya rae oppenheimer writes through collaborative and critical pedagogy experiments, some co-taught with Nisar. We begin with a conversation.
2026. Canada; Pakistan; positionality; autoethnography; facilitation; curatorial gesture
Just Published
cover imageBook Section
Song Xiaoxia and Birgit Hopfener Teaching Global Art History through the Lens of Chinese Art: A Conversation
In this conversation, art historians Song Xiaoxia and Birgit Hopfener exchange their views on teaching art history and theory in a global framework. Both scholars are particularly interested in decentring Eurocentric frameworks of art through the lens of Chinese art and philosophy, and from a transcultural perspective.
2026. global art history; contemporary Chinese Art; eurocentrism; contemporaneity; pedagogy
Just Published
cover imageBook Section
Ming Tiampo From Internationalizing the Art History Survey to Pluriversal Worldings: Twenty Years of Teaching Global Art History
This paper reflects on twenty years of teaching of global art history. Drawing on my teaching at Carleton University since 2003, I trace my movement from additive and thematic survey models constrained by Eurocentric teleologies toward comparative, transnational approaches that unsettle inherited categories of period, region, and influence. This methodological shift informs, and is informed by, my ongoing collaborative work on a textbook entitled Intersecting Modernisms, which has shaped and been shaped by the design of my undergraduate courses. I argue that surveys and textbooks function as disciplinary infrastructure, and that transforming them constitutes a form of pedagogical resistance to resurgent ethnonationalism and the narrowing of historical imagination.
2026. modernism; global art history; worlding; pedagogy; textbooks; pluriversality
Just Published
cover imageBook Section
Claire Farago What Comes after World Art?: Taking a Creative Commons Approach to Pedagogy
A ‘worlded’ art history conceives of the global as constituted from multiple and entangled geocultural perspectives, not centered on assumed commonalities of ‘global’ art. One of the few occasions when the discipline of art history is conventionally conceptualized as a whole is at the introductory level, where untenable narratives and nomenclatures inherited from nineteenth-century European art historians are continuously replicated. (How) can a ‘worlded’ introductory course avoid the problems of taxonomy in conventional schemes organized according to canons of monuments, period and national styles, a linear timeline focused on European events, and all the other headaches associated with West-and-the-Rest thinking?
2026. decolonization; global art history; transculturality; pedagogy; pluriversality
Just Published
cover imageBook Section
Eva Ehninger The Art of Education: Art Schools as Subject and Model
This essay explores the potentials of art education — and aesthetic education more broadly — to ‘world’ modern art history. Art education has a material outcome, which can be analysed in light of the underlying theoretical and political premises regarding education and knowledge. It is locally implemented but globally networked and shared. Art schools allow for an object-based approach to topics of research, and this is integrated into local and regional contexts of learning and making. At the same time, they highlight complex transcultural entanglements across different timeframes and geographies.
2026. Germany; art education; modern art history; skill
Just Published
cover imageBook Section
Priya Maholay-Jaradi and Roger Nelson Regional Worlding: Art History’s Pedagogies in Singapore
To what extent are Southeast Asia’s art histories engaged, active, and consequently, worlded in such a way as to facilitate alterity? How might worlding in this context be related to a regional turn in Southeast Asia? In this chapter, we address these and related questions by introducing a collaborative project which examines some ways in which Southeast Asia’s art histories are studied and taught in Singapore, the city-state that is often discussed as being (or aspiring to be) a key centre of the region, and of scholarship on the region. Concurrently, we explore how other art histories — including those of other Asias and of the West — are studied and taught here. We hypothesize that the pedagogical strategies which develop around Southeast Asia’s art histories not only support worlding at various levels, but may also bear an inherent capacity to alter the field.
2026. pedagogy; Singapore; Southeast Asia; regionalism; museums
Just Published
cover imageBook Section
Eva Bentcheva, Birgit Hopfener, Franziska Koch, Miriam Oesterreich, and Ming Tiampo Introduction: Worlding Global Art Histories through Teaching
How can teaching adapt to the challenges of our contemporary world while reflecting a deeper understanding of global art history? In this introduction, we outline the motivations behind this book and trace its development from the transnational research project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation. We also set out the book’s aim to challenge dominant approaches to teaching art history in a globalized world, advocating for a “worlding” of the discipline that acknowledges the complexities of diverse geographies, institutions, and societies. By examining the personal, institutional, and national contexts in which art history is taught, we argue that educators can design curricula that critically engage with universalist frameworks and open up space for debate.
2026. pedagogy; global art history; pluriversality; worlding; authorship; disciplinary critique; curriculum design
Just Published
cover imageBook
Worlding Global Art Histories through Teaching Ed. by Eva Bentcheva, Birgit Hopfener, Franziska Koch, Miriam Oesterreich, and Ming Tiampo
Worlding Global Art Histories through Teaching positions art history education as a tool for world-making and democratic engagement in a time of division. It is a vital resource for educators and students that considers global art histories not as a top-down structure, but as a dynamic and evolving process. Bringing together essays, conversations, and reflections on syllabi, the contributors consider how pedagogy cultivates critical thinking and decolonial awareness. Drawing from teaching experiences in Canada, China, Germany, Singapore, the United States, and other countries, this collection advocates for relationality and pluriversal knowledge as a way to challenge a Eurocentric canon.
2026 | Worlding Public Cultures. world-making; global art history; curriculum design; pedagogy; decolonization; pluriversality; cultural pluralism; knowledge production; educational practice; disciplinary critique
Just Published
book review
Marta Gailli COREOGRAFIE DEL CORPO. UNA LETTURA DI PERFORMING EMBODIMENT
Book review of Performing Embodment
2026
Just Published
cover imageBook Fair
ICI Berlin Press @ MISS READ
This year’s edition of the MISS READ: The Berlin Art Book Fair & Festival is being held at silent green Kulturquartier from 26–28 June with a focus on Bibliodiversity. ICI Berlin Press is bringing its latest releases alongside its back catalogue from the Cultural Inquiry and Worlding Public Cultures series. The fair continues to offer a vibrant platform for critical discourse, experimental publishing, and independent artistic practices, and is also accompanied by a three-day public programme of lectures. Fair & festival Friday, 26 June 2026, 17:00 – 21:00 Saturday, 27 June 2026, 12:00 – 19:00 Sunday, 28 June 2026, 12:00 – 19:00
2026
book review
Andrea Streva Book Review of “Stella Do Patrocínio’s Falatório/Chatter”
Andrea Streva, ‘Book Review Essay: “A Voice Without a Place” A Review of “Stella Do Patrocínio’s Falatório/Chatter”’, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 13.1 (2026)
2026
book review
Nidal Taibi Review of Pasolini. Dialogues avec la France
Nidal Taibi, ‘Pasolini l'irrécupérable’, Le Monde diplomatique (June 2026)
2026
Book review
Berchi, Giacomo Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories by Elena Lombardi (review)
Review of Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories
2026
cover imageDiscussion Video
Conceptual Activism: decolonial – trans_ecological – queer
Conceptual activism is a way of imagining otherwise, involving the materialization as and the embodiment of concepts. Transforming marginalized concepts into practice can prefigure alternative futures. In this discussion the invited guests will present concepts – like confluence, queer gestures, transecology, or conflictual aesthetics – that inform their professional, activist, or artistic practices. These are intended to inspire reflection and exchange on conceptual activism. There will be a particular focus on queering and transing, and how these approaches support decolonial, ecological, and feminist perspectives, while being open to conflict. The discussion is participatory. Audience members are invited to join the speaker’s circle. There will be continuous movement between the inner, in-between, and outer circles of chairs, as well as between languages (German, English).
2026
cover imageSymposium Video
Conceptual Activism: Engaging Queerly in Conflictual Times
This symposium explores the possibilities and limitations of conceptual activism. What does it mean to engage in politics through concepts? Does ‘conceptual’ imply that this kind of activism has less practical relevance or lacks material power? To what extent do concepts imply embodied practices and material relations? Which concepts are interesting from queer and trans theoretical and political perspectives? The focus is on how the dynamics of queering and transing, or intersectional, decolonial practices, challenge the separation of academia, art, and activism. Inspired by Davina Cooper’s work, conceptual activism is seen as a way of imagining otherwise, involving the materialization and embodiment of concepts. Bringing marginalized concepts into practice can help to create alternative futures. In today’s conflictual times, when the risks and dangers posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, and extractivist racial capitalism are often overlooked, with authoritarian politics and regimes acting as the driving force behind these issues, the symposium interrogates conceptual activism as a counter-hegemonic ontology and epistemology. The objective is to fight the normalization of material, symbolic and epistemic violence as modus operandi in everyday life and doing politics. The question is: Can queering and transing as a dynamic interweaving of power and desire advance trans*versal justice and sustain critical movements against domination?
2026
cover imageEvent
Panel III
Panel III of the workshop The Self at Scale, ICI Berlin, 4 May 2026 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260504>
2026
cover imageVideo
Discussion
Discussion of panel iii of the workshop The Self at Scale, ICI Berlin, 4 May 2026, video recording, mp4, 49:18 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260504_6>
2026
cover imageTalk Video
Raic, Monika The Scale of (Self-)Recognition in Jorge Luis Borges’ Los espejos velados
Monika Raic, ‘The Scale of (Self-)Recognition in Jorge Luis Borges’ Los espejos velados’, talk presented at the panel iii of the workshop The Self at Scale, ICI Berlin, 4 May 2026, video recording, mp4, 32:46 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260504_5>
2026
cover imageTalk Video
Ada, Amelia Genres of Refusal: Autofiction and the Trans Body
Amelia Ada, ‘Genres of Refusal: Autofiction and the Trans Body’, talk presented at the panel iii of the workshop The Self at Scale, ICI Berlin, 4 May 2026, video recording, mp4, 21:34 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e260504_4>
2026
3239 resources