Anarchival Practices

The recent ‘global turn’ in art history and curatorial practice has prompted the question of how to reflect this through pedagogy. The workshop Worlding Art History through Syllabi takes up the notion of ‘worlding’ to explore how art history is taught in different places and institutions around the world. What would a ‘worlded’ syllabus look like, and how can we collaboratively ‘world’ global art history?

A ‘worlded’ art history rejects the idea of a single global world framed, ordered and represented according to Eurocentric premises or as universally constituted by global capitalism. Instead, it conceives of the global as constituted from multiple and entangled geo-cultural perspectives. It is not centered on assumed commonalities of ‘global’ art. Rather, it seeks to shed light on differences and relations. What are histories, epistemologies, and ontologies that constitute ‘global’ art? What are infrastructural or institutional incommensurabilities which define the many intersecting art histories of the present?

This workshop invites scholars from the fields of art history, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, media studies, museum studies and other related disciplines to participate in an peer-to-peer exchange of experiences and practices. It focuses on how scholars may, or already have, designed teaching syllabi to complicate dominant frameworks of ‘global’ art history. It is particularly interested in how syllabi have the capacity to restructure pedagogical approaches to teaching topics such as global capitalism in the art world, the so-called Global North-South division, transnational and transcultural entanglements, and differences between teaching regional art histories.