T-AP SI: Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation

Lead Research Organisation: University of the Arts London
Department Name: Chelsea College of Art and Design

Abstract

Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation is a collaborative research project and transnational platform designed to foster more resilient public cultures and institutions to address the challenges of populist nationalisms and global migrations in pluralist democracies.

This project focuses on the global dimensions of contemporary public culture and applies its findings on social
innovation in the higher education, museum, and cultural sectors. It proposes worlding (Heidegger 2002 [1950];Spivak 1985; Hunt 2014; Cheah 2016) or the situated-ness of world-making, as an activating concept and analytical tool. Going beyond current top-down models of "inclusion," "diversity" and other representations of the "global," the concept of worlding grounds the global within local worlds and allows entangled histories to emerge, opening pathways to decolonize "universal" Western narratives and epistemologies.

Through a series of academies in collaboration with public institutions (National Gallery of Canada; Tate Modern; National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands; Tate Modern; Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin) this project is designed to enable transatlantic, multisectoral and public knowledge sharing between those working in and on different geocultural contexts. Worlding Public Cultures will culminate in a website of baseline data, two peer-reviewed volumes and two collaboratively written white papers on pedagogy and curating in a global context. Furthermore, it will play an important role in developing the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange (TrACE) network.

Ultimately, by conducting research on and for institutions of public culture, this project will be an agent of social innovation that impacts how the global is theorized, making concrete recommendations for the education and museum sectors and, ultimately, contributing to the creation of a more resilient society with more elastic models of social cohesion through changes in public discourse.

Planned Impact

The target audiences for the project's work products range across the university, museum and civil society sectors, and include: university-based academics and researchers, museum professionals (curators, educators and leaders), students, activists, artists and community members for public events. The project will employ a range of media and engagement strategies to facilitate public interaction with the project, particularly during the academies. These will include live blogging and social media updates during academies with the possibility of live event streaming at Tate Modern and ICI Berlin. The project will also draw on and collaborate with the world-class learning and outreach programmes of partner institutions such the National Gallery of Canada, Tate Modern and National Museum of World Cultures, as well as the extensive and longstanding public programmes of the research centres.

Additionally, a dedicated public website, hosted by UAL, accessible by all team partners will serve as the main public dissemination point for the project. The website will host a database of baseline data and curated digital artifacts, as well as project updates and summaries, and provide pathways for public engagement and feedback. It will serve as the public face of the TrACE network, and will be one of the repositories for the archiving project material and outputs (see http://www.blackartistsmodernism.co.uk for an example of a previous project website hosted by UAL). The project website will function as a crucial tool for compiling the project database and enabling the enhanced engagement of multiple project stakeholders. This website will be managed by the consortium and will be hosted by UAL as part of its standard IT provision of comprehensive support for research project websites.

In addition to more popular forms of public dissemination, the project will reach its academic audiences through the publication of two edited volumes. We have already received concrete expressions of interest and financial support from Heidelberg University Press and the book series at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin (see corresponding letters of commitment), and also have contacts at Tate Papers, Third Text and Dark Matter, where Goodwin is currently an editorial associate.
Finally, the work of the four academies and data collection project will be distilled into two compact, practice-oriented documents designed to have an immediate impact on teaching and curating in a global context. These two white papers will synthesize the project's research on social innovation for the purposes of applying those insights to the higher education and museum and culture sectors, and will be disseminated on the TrACE website, through TrACE networks, and through the networks of our museum Cooperation Partners.
 
Title Worlding Through the Caribbean Public Programme 
Description The consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean symposium included a bespoke online audio-visual artistic programme to complement and deepen public engagement with the themes of the symposium, curated by Rahila Haque, Worlding Public Cultures Doctoral Student Fellow at UAL's TrAIN research centre. This online exhibition featured two principal elements; an Audio Programme and a Film Programme Audio Programme For their new audio commissions for Worlding Public Cultures, artist Ashley Holmes, and artist and writer Ayesha Hameed in conversation with poet and essayist Shivanee Ramlochan, consider the Caribbean's deep cultural legacies of poetics and music. They journey through sound and spoken word, to explore the reverberations of personal, cultural and ancestral memory. The ocean and landscape as sites of violence are also demonstrated as a form of diasporic and queer possibility; building new subjectivities through language and sonic experiments - what Stuart Hall has described as survival strategies of Caribbean vernacular culture, '[...] the underground, subversive, rhythmic 'rereading' of an overground, dominant harmonics.' (Hall, 2003). Ashley Holmes, Pending, Still (Sync n Feeling Dub), 2021 Ashley Holmes has created a new sound piece that documents an exploration of liminality, Black geographies, and how musical traditions derived from the Caribbean have travelled. Pending, Still (Sync n Feeling Dub) is an experimental composition that weaves together an accumulation of fleeting and momentary incidents in sound that have been manipulated, layered and sampled from various digital and analogue music recordings, performances, vocals and field recordings. The piece utilises various digital effects, delays and echoes to journey through and connect Britain and the Caribbean, making reference to Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, an exploration of relational belonging as a decolonial poetic intervention. The audio piece is informed by Holmes' interest in links between the ecologies, social contexts and nuances of Dub and music from Jamaica during the 1970s, to Grime and it's continually mutating subgenres in Britain, in the early-mid 2000's to present day. Pending, Still (Sync n Feeling Dub) examines the potential of music and DJing as a valuable research methodology, to think about cultural memory, generational cycles of re-visiting sound and ways that we define and understand our relation to history, nature, affect and space. Artist Biography Ashley Holmes is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Sheffield interested in the collection, dissemination and presentation of music and sound. Holmes' work traces the nuances, legacies and unique authority of music from Jamaica and its political, social and cultural contexts. His practice encompasses audio-visual installations, collaborations, radio broadcasts, performances and ongoing research projects that make connections between public space, sonic fiction, memory and citizenship. He hosts Tough Matter, a monthly broadcast on NTS Radio, and also facilitates Open Deck - a series of gatherings giving space to collectively listen and hold discursive space around relationships to music, sound and oral histories. Ayesha Hameed: Radio Brown Atlantis with Shivanee Ramlochan Radio Brown Atlantis is a project by artist and writer Ayesha Hameed. The project takes the shape of an experimental radio program that invites practitioners in the field of sonic art, music, and performative thought. This aims to explore the entanglements between Brown and Black bodies from the African diaspora, and South Asians displaced by indenture, connected through the experience of oceanic colonial routes. At the core of the project, the subaquatic zones of Brown Atlantis unfold as catalysts for racial potentialities that are constituted in the conjunction of the ontologies of earth, ocean and non-western subjectivities. The radio program engages in spontaneous conversations, shaped by music, literature, sonic art and storytelling. In this episode of Brown Atlantis commissioned for Worlding Public Cultures Caribbean programme, Hameed and poet and essayist Shivanee Ramlochan discuss the capacity of poetry, to speak to the truth beneath the truth of long legacies of indenture and sexual violence. They also explore the dark channelling and sorcery through the act of bearing witness, the queerness of running through Caribbean fields of cane, and Shah Rukh Khan's hair. Biographies Ayesha Hameed explores the heritage of Black diasporas through the figure of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. Hameed examines the mnemonic power of these media - their capacity to transform the body into a body that remembers. The motifs of water, borders, and displacement are recurrent in her work, and offer a reflection on migration stories and materialities, and, more broadly, the relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature. Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2019), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019), and Dakar Biennale (2018). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021). She is currently Co-Programme Leader of the PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London. Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet and essayist. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 People's Choice T&T Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Shivanee was shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize for Poetry. 'The Red Thread Cycle', from her debut collection, won second place in the Small Axe Literary Competition Prize for Poetry, and was on audiovisual display at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas in 2019. She has received residencies from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Millay Arts, and Catapult Caribbean Arts Grant. She has served as a poetry reader and editorial judge for Commonwealth Writers, Honeysuckle Press, Moko Magazine, and others. Her second book, a nonfiction narrative on Indo-Caribbean women's disobedience, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2022. Shivanee's work can be found online at www.novelniche.net, www.shivaneeramlochan.com, @novelniche Film Programme The programme reflects some of the key thematics that shaped the symposium, and included recent works by Rhea Storr and Jamilah Sabur that contemplate Caribbean cultural traditions as ontological praxis, and the profound harmony and resistance of carnival and spiritual practices. Personal counter-histories in the work of Helen Cammock unravel the legacy of the sugar trade in the Caribbean as a struggle to understand the realities of forced labour, value and loss. Works by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman and Alberta Whittle confront the lived and embodied precarities of ecological catastrophe, and the elemental rhythms and interconnectedness of human experience with seismic geological and climatic events. The programme was streamed on the WPC website for 72 hours from 12.00 (GMT) on Wednesday 1st December. With thanks to the artists and LUX. Programme Rhea Storr Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical, 2020 10 minutes Afrofuturism is communicated via the Bahamian people through Junkanoo, a form of carnival in the Bahamas, originally celebrated by the enslaved who were given Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's day off only. The history of Junkanoo is political as much as aesthetic. The film follows the 'Shell Saxons Superstars', producing a portrait of not only the parade but examines the way in which the Saxons organise space, questioning the effect of their organisation and how they are culturally represented. 'Black radical imagination' is a term used by Robin Kelley, predominantly to describe US Black radical organising in the 20th Century. The film instead aims to utilise a geographical location and history that is Caribbean focused. 'Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical' also voices the innovations of Junkanoo within an experimental film history, one which draws on the aesthetics of 1980's Black film workshops that do not adhere to documentary realism, but produces counter narratives. A 16mm cyanotype blue wash is the signal of Black imaginative life. Its mission is to communicate an incommunicability: knowledge that is enacted or performed to which film cannot do justice. Artist Biography Rhea Storr is an artist filmmaker who explores the representation of Black and mixed-race cultures; masquerade as a site of protest or subversion is an ongoing theme in her work, and the effect of place or space on cultural representation. Occasionally she draws on her rural upbringing and British Bahamian heritage. Rhea Storr often works in 16mm film; she considers that analogue film might be useful to Black artists, both in the aesthetics it creates and the production models it facilitates. She is currently undertaking a PhD entitled, 'Towards a Black British Aesthetic: How is Black Radical Imagination realised through 16mm filmmaking practices?' She is a co-director of not nowhere an artists' film co-operative in London, that has a particular focus on analogue film. She is resident at Somerset House, London and occasionally programs at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. She is the winner of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2020, and the inaugural Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize. She was educated at Oxford University and the Royal College of Art. Jamilah Sabur Obra, 2019 3 minutes Obra reflects upon metaphysical practices in Jamaica. Obra combines scenes recorded at The Cardiff Hall, a former plantation in Saint Ann Parish and the Spanish Town mosque, built in the mid-twentieth century by an Indian immigrant Mohammed Khan. With imagery of white tunics, beekeeping suits, the Ethiopian flag and archival footage of Haile Selassie at the League of Nations, Geneva in 1936; together, they create a serene tapestry draped across the Jamaican landscape. Courtesy the artist and Copperfield, London. Artist biography Jamilah Sabur draws on geology, memory and language as points of reference. Her work considers what it means to see on a planetary scale, re-calibrating our understanding of place, time and history. Her recent solo exhibitions include: DADA Holdings, Nina Johnson, Miami (2021); Bulk Pangaea, New Orleans Lakefront Airport as part of the triennial Prospect. 5 New Orleans: Yesterday we said tomorrow (2021); La montagne fredonne sous l'océan/The mountain sings underwater, Fondation PHI, Momenta Biennale, Montréal, Québec (2021), Observations: Selected Works by Jamilah Sabur, University of Maryland Art Gallery (2020); recent group exhibitions include: The Willfulness of Objects, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2020); Mending the Sky, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans (2020); Here Be Dragons, Copperfield, London (2020). Sabur earned a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (2009), and an MFA from University of California, San Diego (2014). Helen Cammock There's a Hole in the Sky Part I, 2016 19 minutes Shot on location in Barbados, There's a Hole in the Sky Part I asks questions about worth and value - both cultural and human. In this film, Cammock interacts with workers from two sites: one of the last sugar factories in Barbados, a tourist sugar grind, and rum plantation. The fragmented dialogue around labour and cultural transference develops a disjunction through prose and song, between what is seen and what is heard. The script extends from Cammock's writing, research and found excerpts from newspapers and texts from writers including Maya Angelou, and Barbadians George Lamming and Derek Walcott. Artist Biography Helen Cammock explores social histories through film, photography, print, text, song and performance. She is motivated by her commitment to questioning mainstream historical narratives around blackness, womanhood, wealth, power, poverty and vulnerability. Mining her own biography in addition to the histories of oppression and resistance, multiple and layered narratives reveal the cyclical nature of histories. Cammock was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize 2019, and the 7th Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Recent exhibitions include STUK Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium (2021); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2020); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2020); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2019); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2019); VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Reading Museum in Reading, UK; Cubitt, London, UK (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at British Art Show 9, Aberdeen, Scotland (2021); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2020); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2020); Somerset House, London, UK (2019); Hollybush Gardens, London, UK (2017 and 2013) and Firstsite, Colchester, UK. She has also staged performances at Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2020); The Showroom, London, UK (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2017); Cubitt, London; VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland and the ICA, London, UK (2017). Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman 4 Waters - Deep Implicancy, 2019 31 minutes 4 Waters - Deep Implicancy is a retelling of the Haitian Revolution from the perspective of an earthquake in 1784. This earthquake marked an indigenous foretelling of Black Independence and the revolution that would come twenty years later, temporarily shaking the entrenched social order of colonial hierarchy as the enslaved fled for safety to the mountains and plantations grounded to a halt. At a cosmic level, it brought knowledge from the first metric of time. Crossing four waters - the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, they follow the displacement of peoples alongside the movement of clouds, ideas, earth, and migration of matter, at a quantum level, from one state to another. Combining disparate geographies and bodies of/in water, they consider four historically and cosmically contentious islands within them - Lesvos, Marshall Islands, Haiti, Tiwi. The film addresses urgent global issues including migration, displacement, legacies of colonialism and ecological devastation, presenting a reimagined pre-life cosmos of gathered and imagined knowledges, a time without time that Ferreira da Silva describes as 'Deep Implicancy'. Artist's Biographies Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane, that's why he has two passports. He is an artist, filmmaker and writer. With recent presentations at CCA Glasgow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Manifesta 10, Marseille; Showroom Gallery, London; TPW Gallery, Toronto; Forum Expanded, Berlin Berlinale; Jameel Art Centre, Dubai; Berlin Biennial 10, Germany; Serpentine, London X Qalandia Biennial, Palestine; Gasworks, London; Bold Tendencies, London, UK; Or Gallery, Vancouver; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT and Docslisboa, Portugal; Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; Bergen Assembly, Norway; at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the 56th Venice Biennale and SuperCommunity; Industry of Light, London; the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt; at Ashkal Alwan and the Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; Le Gaite Lyric, Paris; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Rat School of Art in Seoul, amongst others. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings and e-flux. Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practicing artist. Her work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçao Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg/MIT Press, 2021) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Cul 
Type Of Art Artistic/Creative Exhibition 
Year Produced 2021 
Impact None yet reported. 
URL https://www.worldingcultures.org/gatherings
 
Description Interim Finding (the award is still active, others to follow): Uncovering bias in the data structure of the International Council of Museum's CIDOC-CRM data model that serves as an international standard for museum and cultural heritage databases worldwide.
This issue came to light during the ongoing process of developing the Worlding Public Cultures database and collection of the data that populates it. Key areas of investigation included: the theoretical interrogation of the strategies, and actions frameworks that have given shape to databases, ontologies, and structured vocabularies; the engagement with professional communities responsible for the formulation of the data ontology used in the project; the ethical and critical aspects taken into consideration when reproducing data collected from multiple sources; and the design of a graphical interface within typical web applications that exposes the cultural and epistemological biases implicit in the CIDOC CRM to users that interact with the database. This process or method that we are calling Worlding Database Ontologies, can be provisionally characterised as a potential major contribution to 'decolonising' or 'worlding' databases in the museum and cultural heritage sectors which were the product of the role of museums in the European and global colonial project since the 18th century.
Exploitation Route The outcome around bias in data structure can be further researched to develop alternative models of data structure in museum and cultural heritage information and classification systems. This work can help in the wider project of decolonising databases in cultural institutions.
Sectors Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
URL https://cidoc-crm.org/Issue/ID-530-bias-in-data-structure
 
Description An interim finding has come out of an investigation on data ethics and epistemologies that emerged from critical and self-reflective debates among the research consortium teams during the process of designing and building the project database. This investigation is a collaboration with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), a standard documentation ontology used by museum databases worldwide. The results will be reflected in the WPC publication series and in ongoing collaborative work with the CIDOC-CRM Special Interest Group facilitated by Dr Athanasios Velios (UAL) a member of the UAL team. This is very much a work in process based around the creation of a decolonizing data protocol and collaboration with the CIDOC-CRM. The protocol has two aspects: first, transparency: making transparent to users the inherent biases in the technical structure of the database while protecting communities deemed vulnerable; second, institutional impact by working with the Special Interest Group of CIDOC-CRM.
First Year Of Impact 2021
Sector Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Impact Types Cultural,Policy & public services
 
Description Bias in Data Structure, Issue 530, ICOM, CIDOC-CRM
Geographic Reach Multiple continents/international 
Policy Influence Type Contribution to new or improved professional practice
Impact As a result of the workshop and subsequent discussions with the SIG, Issue 530 on bias in data structure was raised and adopted by the SIG. The SIG is working on a statement on bias which will be released in the near future.
URL https://cidoc-crm.org/Issue/ID-530-bias-in-data-structure
 
Title Worlding Database Ontologies 
Description Worlding Public Cultures (WPC) proposes 'worlding' as an activating concept and analytical tool. The concept goes beyond current top-down models of "inclusion," "diversity" and other representations of the "global". Worlding grounds the global within local worlds and allows entangled histories to emerge, opening pathways to decolonise "universal" Western narratives and epistemologies. Challenging and generating new forms of knowledge in the digital domain is considered a worlding exercise by decolonial digital humanities, a research field that can inform data-centric practices in the museum sector. A key element of the project is a database that shares a structured set of curated data about exhibitions that address "Global" arts and culture worldwide. The database structure is mapped on the CIDOC CRM and database entries often include terminology from structured vocabularies and authority files such as the Getty Vocabularies and VIAF. As part of a critical and worlding exercise, we interrogated the frameworks that shape ontologies like CIDOC CRM and exposed implicit biases of our database structure in the graphical interface. In Worlding Database Ontologies we propose a first step towards decolonisation that is applicable not only to our project but also to museum databases worldwide. 
Type Of Material Improvements to research infrastructure 
Year Produced 2022 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact The Worlding Database Ontologies method from WPC resulted in the identification of an problem of 'bias in data structure' in the International Council of Museum's (ICOM) CIDOC-CRM database ontology model. The issue was officially raised and discussed as 'Issue 530: Bias in Data Structure' in the Special Interest Group (SIG) of the International Committee for Documentation, part of ICOM. 
URL https://cidoc-crm.org/Issue/ID-530-bias-in-data-structure
 
Title Worlding Public Cultures Database 
Description Currently in process we are building a website of baseline data, including a mapping exercise which will result in the collection of key baseline datasets that will reveal how global, transnational and transcultural narratives are being represented in universities and museums worldwide. Also, a vetted list of resources for research, teaching and curating in a global context and notes compiled by doctoral and post-doctoral students about each academy, assembly, and gathering. Baseline data sets are being gathered by doctoral, postdoctoral students, team members and PIs. The baseline data will consist of the following types of digital artefacts with a transnational, transcultural, or global remit: 1. Exhibitions; 2. Conferences and Education programs; 3. Research Centres; 4. Courses being offered in Universities. All data sets are being drawn from publicly accessible websites, blogs and social media, and sourced internationally through comprehensive online searches and network referrals. Records of all academies will be kept in text, photographic, and audio archives. Extensive notes on the academies and gatherings will be kept by our team of graduate and postgraduate students, and all written materials shared by academy participants will be archived. All academy participants are requested to sign release forms, and those who do not will not be entered into the public record. Curated entries are being gathered for the database by doctoral and postdoctoral students, as well as by team members and PIs, and will be publicly accessible on the WPC project website. The curated entries will consist of the following digital artefacts with a transnational, transcultural, or global remit: 1. Selected syllabi; 2. Annotated bibliographies; 3. Recorded interviews with selected curators and academics. In an effort to make peer-reviewed resources available on the website, the research team will make selections of university course syllabi, bibliographic references, and conduct interviews with selected curators and academics. Although the resources for the bibliography are publicly available, the project will have to rely upon the research team's international network of contacts in order to obtain syllabi and to make contact with curators and academics for interview. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2022 
Provided To Others? No  
Impact None yet reported. The database is still under construction. 
 
Description TrACE (Transnational Arts and Culture Exchange) 
Organisation Free University of Amsterdam
Country Netherlands 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution As Co-PI of the Worlding Public Cultures project I have played a leading role in the overall management and coordination of the project and consortium including leading the process for the Collaboration Agreement between all the universities organised by UAL. I have also overseen the building and development of the project website and database in collaboration with Dr Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja and Dr Athanasios Velios. With Prof Ming Tiampo, Co-PI of WPC, I led on the collaboration with Tate Modern for the London Gathering (Academy) 'consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean' a major international symposium with contributions from scholars worldwide in December 2021 online. This event also included a collaboration with the MA Fine Art programme at Chelsea College of Arts, a curated programme of audio-visual artworks and artist residencies overseen by the UAL team. My team at TrAIN UAL is the lead partner for the design of the website of baseline data, including a mapping exercise which will result in the collection of key baseline datasets that will reveal how global, transnational and transcultural narratives are being represented in universities and museums worldwide. Also, a vetted list of resources for research, teaching and curating in a global context and notes compiled by doctoral and post-doctoral students about each academy, assembly, and gathering.
Collaborator Contribution The partner organisations have all lead and are leading on organising a series of academies, symposia and gathering that discuss and disseminate key findings and debates arising from the research. So far these have included events in Ottawa (with the National Gallery of Canada), Amsterdam (with Framer Framed and National Museum of World Cultures as partners), London (with Tate Modern as a partner). Future events will take place in Dresden (with Dresden State Art Museum as a partner) in summer 2022 and Montreal in 2023. More information on these events can be found at: https://www.worldingcultures.org/gatherings The partner organisations have contributed to the planning and development of a new open-access publication series with the Institute of Cultural Inquiry Berlin, presenting the collaborative research outcomes and discourses generated through the Worlding Public Cultures project. This will include additional contributions from external authors, recruited among the distinguished speakers of WPC's 4 international events. In addition two white papers - one on pedagogy, and the other on curating in a global context will be produced, overseen by myself and Co-PI Prof Ming Tiampo of Carleton University The project partners have also played an important role in developing the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange (TrACE) network with plans currently in development to expand membership in the Global South
Impact Ottawa Academy, 8-10 Nov. 2019 Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization was an international academy held 8th-10th November 2019, designed to collaboratively re-imagine and pluralize the 'global' from multiple geocultural perspectives. Working in collaboration with Àbadakone / Continuous Fire / Feu continuel, the International Indigenous Art Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, the academy took as its ethical starting point its situation on unceded Algonquin territory, and the city of Ottawa's entangled settler colonial, migrant, diasporic, and other transnational and transcultural histories. The Carleton University Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, in partnership with the institutional members of TrACE (Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange), organised Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization. Amsterdam Assembly, 7-9 Oct. 2021 From 7-9th October 2021, Framer Framed hosted the Amsterdam Assembly: Letting go of Having to Speak All the Time, a gathering and thinking space for activists, artists, scholars, and other cultural practitioners to discuss various topics around decolonisation, pedagogy, racism, and the politics of archiving. The Assembly employed an 'ethics of listening' as a useful mode to create a space for thinking together and establish conditions for interconnectedness between different locales. While this Assembly took place in the Netherlands, we wanted it to be a site of reflection where activists, artists, and cultural practitioners in the Netherlands think about their struggles and positionalities in relation to the pressing matters in different contexts. The Assembly was preceded by the production of Connecting Oceans, a podcast for translocal conversation between artists, activists, and scholars.The University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit and Research Centre for Material Culture (Leiden), in partnership with the institutional members of TrACE (Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange), organised the Amsterdam Assembly: Letting go of Having to Speak All the Time. London Gathering, 1-7 Dec. 2021 The international symposium consent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean was accompanied by an online programme of artists' audio and film works. This major international online conference in partnership with Tate explored the legacies of Caribbean thought on global art histories, public culture and activism, complementing Tate Britain's exhibition: Life Between Islands: British - Caribbean Art 1950s - now. consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean took the Caribbean and Caribbean thought as a starting point, to reconsider global histories of art and contemporary public cultures. Drawing on the foundational work of Caribbean thinkers Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, the symposium explored their impact on our understanding of the material, epistemological and ontological repercussions of these Caribbean histories. Addressing the contested public paces of universities, museums, and cultural institutions, this symposium thought with and through Glissant, Hall, and Wynter to radically transform our ways of relating to the world around us. The event included a keynote lecture by celebrated Black studies and Black feminism scholar Katherine McKittrick, as well as five panels covering topics ranging from public culture, education, counter-histories, colonialism, world-making and the environment.The Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at UAL , in partnership with the institutional members of TrACE (Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange), organised consent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean. Dresden Academy 14-16 July 2022 Lessons Learned? Transcultural Perspectives in Curating & Pedagogies The Heidelberg Academy explored successes and failures of existing pedagogical practices in museums and potentials for new transcultural and 'worlded' approaches. The international Academy, "Lessons Learned? Transcultural Positions in Curating and Pedagogies", explored the successes and failures of existing pedagogical practices in museums, and potentials for new transcultural and 'worlded' approaches. Conceptualised by Heidelberg University's team of Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation, this Academy unfolded as a three-day series of on-site and virtual discussions and exhibition visits around the Dresden State Museum Collections (SKD) from 14-16 July 2022. The SKD museums hold amongst the most important and expansive present-day collections in Germany that speak to histories of transcultural collecting and conservation since the 16th century. Lessons Learned? was integrated into the second edition of SKD's Transcultural Academy at the Japanisches Palais in Dresden. Location: Online and in-person at the Japanisches Palais, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD), Palaisplatz 11, 01097 Dresden, Germany This collaboration is multi-disciplinary involving the following disciplines: Art History, Curatorial Studies, Anthropology, Digital Humanities, Museum Documentation, Museology, Black Studies, Heritage Studies, Critical Studies
Start Year 2019
 
Description TrACE (Transnational Arts and Culture Exchange) 
Organisation University of Amsterdam
Country Netherlands 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution As Co-PI of the Worlding Public Cultures project I have played a leading role in the overall management and coordination of the project and consortium including leading the process for the Collaboration Agreement between all the universities organised by UAL. I have also overseen the building and development of the project website and database in collaboration with Dr Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja and Dr Athanasios Velios. With Prof Ming Tiampo, Co-PI of WPC, I led on the collaboration with Tate Modern for the London Gathering (Academy) 'consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean' a major international symposium with contributions from scholars worldwide in December 2021 online. This event also included a collaboration with the MA Fine Art programme at Chelsea College of Arts, a curated programme of audio-visual artworks and artist residencies overseen by the UAL team. My team at TrAIN UAL is the lead partner for the design of the website of baseline data, including a mapping exercise which will result in the collection of key baseline datasets that will reveal how global, transnational and transcultural narratives are being represented in universities and museums worldwide. Also, a vetted list of resources for research, teaching and curating in a global context and notes compiled by doctoral and post-doctoral students about each academy, assembly, and gathering.
Collaborator Contribution The partner organisations have all lead and are leading on organising a series of academies, symposia and gathering that discuss and disseminate key findings and debates arising from the research. So far these have included events in Ottawa (with the National Gallery of Canada), Amsterdam (with Framer Framed and National Museum of World Cultures as partners), London (with Tate Modern as a partner). Future events will take place in Dresden (with Dresden State Art Museum as a partner) in summer 2022 and Montreal in 2023. More information on these events can be found at: https://www.worldingcultures.org/gatherings The partner organisations have contributed to the planning and development of a new open-access publication series with the Institute of Cultural Inquiry Berlin, presenting the collaborative research outcomes and discourses generated through the Worlding Public Cultures project. This will include additional contributions from external authors, recruited among the distinguished speakers of WPC's 4 international events. In addition two white papers - one on pedagogy, and the other on curating in a global context will be produced, overseen by myself and Co-PI Prof Ming Tiampo of Carleton University The project partners have also played an important role in developing the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange (TrACE) network with plans currently in development to expand membership in the Global South
Impact Ottawa Academy, 8-10 Nov. 2019 Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization was an international academy held 8th-10th November 2019, designed to collaboratively re-imagine and pluralize the 'global' from multiple geocultural perspectives. Working in collaboration with Àbadakone / Continuous Fire / Feu continuel, the International Indigenous Art Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, the academy took as its ethical starting point its situation on unceded Algonquin territory, and the city of Ottawa's entangled settler colonial, migrant, diasporic, and other transnational and transcultural histories. The Carleton University Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, in partnership with the institutional members of TrACE (Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange), organised Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization. Amsterdam Assembly, 7-9 Oct. 2021 From 7-9th October 2021, Framer Framed hosted the Amsterdam Assembly: Letting go of Having to Speak All the Time, a gathering and thinking space for activists, artists, scholars, and other cultural practitioners to discuss various topics around decolonisation, pedagogy, racism, and the politics of archiving. The Assembly employed an 'ethics of listening' as a useful mode to create a space for thinking together and establish conditions for interconnectedness between different locales. While this Assembly took place in the Netherlands, we wanted it to be a site of reflection where activists, artists, and cultural practitioners in the Netherlands think about their struggles and positionalities in relation to the pressing matters in different contexts. The Assembly was preceded by the production of Connecting Oceans, a podcast for translocal conversation between artists, activists, and scholars.The University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit and Research Centre for Material Culture (Leiden), in partnership with the institutional members of TrACE (Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange), organised the Amsterdam Assembly: Letting go of Having to Speak All the Time. London Gathering, 1-7 Dec. 2021 The international symposium consent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean was accompanied by an online programme of artists' audio and film works. This major international online conference in partnership with Tate explored the legacies of Caribbean thought on global art histories, public culture and activism, complementing Tate Britain's exhibition: Life Between Islands: British - Caribbean Art 1950s - now. consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean took the Caribbean and Caribbean thought as a starting point, to reconsider global histories of art and contemporary public cultures. Drawing on the foundational work of Caribbean thinkers Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, the symposium explored their impact on our understanding of the material, epistemological and ontological repercussions of these Caribbean histories. Addressing the contested public paces of universities, museums, and cultural institutions, this symposium thought with and through Glissant, Hall, and Wynter to radically transform our ways of relating to the world around us. The event included a keynote lecture by celebrated Black studies and Black feminism scholar Katherine McKittrick, as well as five panels covering topics ranging from public culture, education, counter-histories, colonialism, world-making and the environment.The Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at UAL , in partnership with the institutional members of TrACE (Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange), organised consent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean. Dresden Academy 14-16 July 2022 Lessons Learned? Transcultural Perspectives in Curating & Pedagogies The Heidelberg Academy explored successes and failures of existing pedagogical practices in museums and potentials for new transcultural and 'worlded' approaches. The international Academy, "Lessons Learned? Transcultural Positions in Curating and Pedagogies", explored the successes and failures of existing pedagogical practices in museums, and potentials for new transcultural and 'worlded' approaches. Conceptualised by Heidelberg University's team of Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation, this Academy unfolded as a three-day series of on-site and virtual discussions and exhibition visits around the Dresden State Museum Collections (SKD) from 14-16 July 2022. The SKD museums hold amongst the most important and expansive present-day collections in Germany that speak to histories of transcultural collecting and conservation since the 16th century. Lessons Learned? was integrated into the second edition of SKD's Transcultural Academy at the Japanisches Palais in Dresden. Location: Online and in-person at the Japanisches Palais, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD), Palaisplatz 11, 01097 Dresden, Germany This collaboration is multi-disciplinary involving the following disciplines: Art History, Curatorial Studies, Anthropology, Digital Humanities, Museum Documentation, Museology, Black Studies, Heritage Studies, Critical Studies
Start Year 2019
 
Description 'Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation' Publication Series Launch 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact During this event hosted by ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry on the 10th of October of 2022, Carine Zaayman (author of the premiering WPC book, Anarchival Practices: The Clanwilliam Arts Project as Re-imagining Custodianship of the Past, ICI Berlin Press 2022) was in conversation with Wesley C. Hogan. The event was held in person and was livestreamed via Zoom. The audience was a mix of scholars, from early career researchers to senior academics, and professionals from the museum and cultural sector.

This event was the launch of the Worlding Public Cultures publication series which aims to investigate the global dimensions of contemporary culture through the concept of 'worlding', an understanding of the world generated through continuous processes of world-making. 'Worlding' builds on the postcolonial project of critiquing universalized Eurocentric frameworks. It is committed to a radical ontology of openness and relationality. Going beyond current top-down models of inclusion, diversity, and other representations of the global, 'worlding' critiques radical alterity in favour of a pluriversality attendant to entanglements, difficult histories, and power relations. It grounds the global within local and transculturally/transnationally intertwined worlds, and foregrounds the possibility of continuously making and re-making new worlds through cultural production.

Carine Zaayman's book instantiates the Anarchive as a means to reimagine how custodianship of the past is practiced. The Anarchive constellates archives and the absences that attend them in a manner that both centralizes the vastness of absence, and leaves it unreconstructed. The chapbook articulates the implications of the Anarchival constellation for scholarship and artistic practices that draw on archival material. Her argument is founded on an engagement with colonial archives that hold strands of Southern African pasts, and demonstrate its implications by examining the Clanwilliam Arts Project. Through an analysis of this case study, she argues that the Anarchive facilitates a privileging of decolonial forms of custodianship of the past that can lead to communal, co-designed and embodied forms of historical narration. For more information see: https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/item/6073
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://www.worldingcultures.org/gatherings/launch-of-wpc-publication-series
 
Description Amsterdam Assembly: Letting Go of Having to Speak All the Time 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Study participants or study members
Results and Impact Amsterdam Assembly: Letting Go of Having to Speak All the Time
From 7-9th October, Framer Framed hosted the Amsterdam Assembly: Letting go of Having to Speak All the Time, a gathering and thinking space for activists, artists, scholars, and other cultural practitioners to discuss various topics around decolonisation, pedagogy, racism, and the politics of archiving.

How can we talk to each other to pass down intergenerational memories? How can we not repeat violent patterns in our ecosystems? Let us practice intellectual humility. Let us step aside, let us stop taking centre stage. Let us talk to each other and practice listening. We will sit and think together. We will write in commons, and pass on certain knowledge and wisdom. How do we start listening?

The Assembly employed an 'ethics of listening' as a useful mode to create a space for thinking together and establish conditions for interconnectedness between different locales. While this Assembly took place in the Netherlands, we wanted it to be a site of reflection where activists, artists, and cultural practitioners in the Netherlands think about their struggles and positionalities in relation to the pressing matters in different contexts. The Assembly was preceded by the production of Connecting Oceans, a podcast for translocal conversation between artists, activists, and scholars.

Programme
PEDAGOGY: Decolonizing Education
October 7, 10:00-17:10 CET

10:00-10:30 | Welcome, orientation, and introduction
Wayne Modest, Chiara de Cesari, Carine Zaayman, Nuraini Juliastuti

10:30-11:30 | Performative lecture: Spatial politics, policies, and new possibilities for dialogues
Ola Hassanain

11:30-12:30 | Practicing an International Art Student Network in the Netherlands
@No.More.Later // Gizem Üstüner (she/her) and M.C. Julie Yu (she/they)

13:30-15:30 | Lecture and book making workshop: Publishing as social movement
Lúcia Rosa (Dulcinéia Catadora collective)

15:40-17:10 | Lecture: Embodiment, Performance, Decolonisation, and Listening Practices
Deborah Thomas/Practicing Refusal Collective -The Sojourner Project

LISTENING: Building together many voices
October 8, 11:00-21:00 CET | at FRAMER FRAMED

11:00-12:00 | Performative Lecture: A decade of Zwarte Piet is racisme and Carnival
Quinsy Gario

12:00-13:00 | Mixtape on Radical Institutionalism
IMAGINART (Yazan Khalili, Eszter Szakacs, Aria Spinelli, Chiara de Cesari, Abdulkerim Pusat, Nuraini Juliastuti, Carine Zaayman)

13:00-14:00 | LUNCH: Launch of Reasoning podcast series, Connecting Oceans, playing pilot
*Click HERE to read the transcription of the podcast!

14:00-15:30 | Storytelling
Homing (Frigiti Tori: vergeten verhalen van de gedeelde geschiedenis tussen Nederland en Suriname), The PAO Embassy ASKV: Stories Where We Are From (Nneka Mora from Nigeria and Amir Mohammadi from Iran, Godfrey Lado), Stories from Kap Na'm To Fena (Lakoat.Kujawas, Mollo)

16:00-17:00 | Reflection session with Hodan Warsame

BUILDING THE TOOLKIT, OR LEARNING THE HABITS FOR LIBERATION
October 9, 11:00-16:00 CET | ONLINE via ZOOM

11:00-12:00 | Building Community for Liberation
Tracian Meikle

13:00-16:00 | Writing in Commons: Decolonial Companion Book
Assembly attendees and WPC Team - lead by Quinsy Gario and Maya Rae Oppenheimer
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://framerframed.nl/en/projecten/amsterdam-assembly/
 
Description Lecture by Pheng Cheah 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact This lecture was hosted by ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and it was held on the 10th of October of 2022.
It was organized by the Heidelberg University team of Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation in collaboration with Ming Tiampo (WPC / Carleton University) and Birgit Hopfener (WPC / Carleton University), in cooperation with ICI Berlin. The event was held in person and livestreamed online via Zoom. It reached an scholarly audience of postgraduate students, early career academics and senior academics as well as professionals from the museum and cultural sector.

In his well-known essay, Die Zeit des Weltbildes, Heidegger describes modernity as the age in which the world has been reduced to a picture. The conceptualization of the world as picture is the fundamental basis of globalization and the geopolitical relations of power, inequality and exploitation that characterize the world-system created by late capitalism. The world as picture is also the basis of various conceptual approaches for understanding worldliness informing various disciplines in the humanities and the narrative social sciences: world history, globality (global exchange and intercourse) and environmental kinship. But what is implied by the world as picture is the excess that is excluded or obscured by the picture frame because the idea of a frame intimates at something that lies beyond the picture that is its ontological condition of possibility. This talk examines two philosophical accounts of what is beyond the world as picture: Heidegger's idea of worlding and Deleuze and Guattari's idea of becoming the whole world as it is connected to their account of minor literature. It highlights the fundamental differences between these philosophies of world and the above approaches. Time permitting, I will then explore how postcolonial world literature, when read as part of the temporal process of worlding and world-creation, disrupts and shatters the world picture by participating in struggles within specific fields of forces in contemporary globalization. Such literature unsettles their readers' sense of territorial boundaries and makes them aware of how they are constitutively implicated in the hierarchies of the contemporary world even as it resists being arrested in a geographically bounded and determinable subject-object such as a nation, a continent or a region.

Pheng Cheah is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His research interests include late 18th-20th century continental philosophy and contemporary critical theory, postcolonial theory and anglophone postcolonial literatures, theories of nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization, philosophy and literature, legal philosophy, social and political thought, and feminist theory. He is the author of What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016), Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (2006), and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (2003).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://www.worldingcultures.org/gatherings/Pheng-Cheah-lecture
 
Description Lessons Learned? Transcultural Perspectives in Curating & Pedagogies 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Lessons Learned? Transcultural Perspectives in Curating & Pedagogies explored successes and failures of existing pedagogical practices in museums and potentials for new transcultural and 'worlded' approaches. This international Academy, conceptualised by Worlding Public Cultures's Heidelberg University team in cooperation with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD / Dresden State Art Collection) unfolded as a three-day series of on-site and virtual discussions and exhibition visits around the SKD from 14-16 July 2022. The SKD museums are amongst the most important and expansive present-day collections in Germany that speak to histories of transcultural collecting and conservation since the 16th century. Lessons Learned? formed part of the second edition of SKD's Transcultural Academy at the Japanisches Palais.The programme concluded with a separate lecture and e-workshop titled Lessons Learned? (Part 2): Rethinking Pedagogies: An 'Intellectual Space' for (Un-)Learning Art History on 20 July 2022 (16:00-18:00 CET on Zoom). This event featured a guest lecture by Prof. Emerita Claire Farago, two invited responses and a public discussion on how to (un)learn art history through university teaching. The event was attended by the Head of Research of the SKD and it's director who both commented on it's potential impact for future collaborative work on decolonising the collections and re-situating their role in East German art history.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://www.worldingcultures.org/gatherings/dresden-academy
 
Description Rethinking Pedagogies: An 'Intellectual Space' for (Un-)Learning Art History 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact This was a follow-up event of the academy Lessons Learned? Transcultural Perspectives in Curating and Pedagogies. Featuring a Keynote Lecture by Prof. Emerita Claire Farago. It was organised The Heidelberg team of Worlding Public Cultures: the Arts and Social Innovation (WPC) in cooperation with the Institute of European Art History of Heidelberg University. It took place online on the 20th of July of 2022. It was attended by academics in various stages of their careers: from postgraduate students, early career academics and senior academics.

While the 'lessons learned' from exhibitions and curating have received abundant attention in recent times, the importance of rethinking modes of pedagogy in art history merit further reflection. What are the tools at our disposal for teaching transcultural, de/postcolonial and non-hierarchical art histories? How can the discipline respond to contemporary crises triggered by neo-liberal economics, war and climate change? This interactive workshop is conceived as an 'intellectual space' in conjunction with the international Academy, Lessons Learned? Transcultural Perspectives on Curating and Pedagogies (14-16 July 2022). This is organised by the Heidelberg University team of WPC in collaboration with the Dresden State Art Collections (SKD) around the question of how transcultural theoretical perspectives can be informed by case studies from curatorial and collecting practices. For more information, please visit: https://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php?id=5129

Following on from this, Lessons Learned? (Part 2) took the form of a guest lecture and workshop, which looked more specifically to the role of teaching. How can scholars of art history, transcultural studies, museums studies and other neighboring disciplines provide more 'worlded' perspectives? Most importantly, what new modes of critical pedagogy can be developed to serve as impulses for (un-)learning the complexities of imperial, colonial, modernist, universalist, and Eurocentric underpinnings of our methodology, institutional hierarchies and ways of knowing?

The opening lecture "Taking a Creative Commons Approach to World Art Studies" (see abstract below) by the distinguished Prof. Emerita Claire Farago (University of Colorado Boulder) provided an entry point into these issues. It addressed questions of how history and canon-making can be 'worlded', and what challenges this presents, Prof. Farago's talk was followed by two short responses by Prof. Birgit Hopfener (Carleton University, Ottawa / WPC) and Prof. Henry Keazor (Institute for European Art History, Heidelberg University). Following Professor Farago's call to "imagine art history otherwise", colleagues were encouraged to share examples and experiences from their different contexts. The discussion, moderated by Prof. Monica Juneja, Chair of Global Art History, addressed different approaches to teaching and the entanglement of institutional, cultural, historical, political, and theoretical concerns within art history.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://www.worldingcultures.org/gatherings/dresden-academy-part2
 
Description Social Innovation- Learning from Multinational Collaboration Online Conference 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Policymakers/politicians
Results and Impact Social Innovation- Learning from Multinational Collaboration Online Conference
16th and 17th November 2022

The event brought together the Trans-Atlantic Platform Social Innovation grant holders and their collaboration partners (stakeholders), Social Innovation experts, and funding agency representatives to:

- explore the outcomes of the 10 T-AP Social Innovation funded projects
- share knowledge on how to implement innovative research concepts to meet social needs
- develop a common understanding of pivotal issues in collaborative Social Innovation research
- consider the impact and sustainability of Social Innovation projects in the humanities and social sciences
- make recommendations geared to future multinational Social Innovation research
- make recommendations to funding agencies to improve the process for future T-AP calls

The T-AP Social Innovation projects both add to understandings of social innovation and deliver social innovation(s) through new research. The focus of the conferencewas on what Social Innovation research can learn from multinational collaboration by:

- comparing social challenges faced on both sides of the Atlantic,
- learning from the experiences of multisectoral collaboration for Social Innovation practiced on both sides of the Atlantic,
- applying and adapting approaches from one locale to another,
- generalizing and/or scaling-up of local experiences.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://projekttraeger.dlr.de/media/projekte/veranstaltungen/T-AP-SI-Conference/
 
Description Towards a Multitemporal Pluriverse of Art 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Towards a Multitemporal Pluriverse of Art was workshop organized by Birgit Hopfener (Carleton University) and Karin Zitzewitz (Michigan State University) at Carleton University, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Arts, and Culture on Thursday, March 10-12, 2022, and supported by the Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations (ICSLAC, Carleton University).

The premise of the workshop stated that current global ecological, political and social crises have once again underscored the urgency of unlearning universalized modern Western frameworks in order to uncover the world's cosmological, epistemological and ontological heterogeneity. Co-constituted with the modern Western frameworks that have conceptualized the world in line with colonial and imperial Eurocentric power structures, art history has primarily reinforced social, political and epistemological inequalities and hierarchies.

The workshop sessions approached the broader decolonial project through the category of temporality. Despite post-structuralist critiques of historicism, art and art history continue to be dominantly governed by modern Western linear models of time, underpinned by notions of modernization, rupture, avant-garde, revolution, causality, progress and the denial of co-evalness of what is conventionally called "non-Western art." The speakers in the workshop collectively addressed and explored the decolonial concept of the pluriverse in order to investigate the potential of art and art historical scholarship to un/recover the multiplicity of temporal and historiographic frameworks. Speakers included: Yuk Hui (keynote), Associate Professor, City University of Hong Kong; May Chew, Assistant Professor at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal; Tatiana Flores, Professor of Art History and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers, and Director of the Rutgers Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities, The State University of New Jersey; Birgit Hopfener, Associate Professor of Art History, Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor, Confucius Chair, Carleton University; Barbara Leckie, Associate Professor in English and ICSLAC, Carleton University; Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, PhD, art historian, affiliate researcher, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris; Parul Dave Mukherji, Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India; Ruth Phillips, Professor Emerita, Carleton University and Carmen Robertson, Canada Research Chair in North American Indigenous Art and Material Culture at Carleton University.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://carleton.ca/culturalmediations/ruth-and-mark-phillips-professorship-in-cultural-mediations/r...
 
Description What kind of we could we be? Collective thinking by collectives 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Worlding Public Cultures were invited to participate with several organisations that were part of Documenta 15's public programme of events alongside the main exhibition in Kassel, Germany. On September 11 2022 (11.00 - 16.00) Asia Forum and Worlding Public Cultures co-organised a workshop with Documenta 15 'lumbung' member The Question of Funding, around the issues of "What and why collectivism?," and "How collectively?" to explore the ethical, political, and intellectual contours and yields of collective practice, the individual and the collective, friendship as method, new forms of kinship, and contingent solidarity within transcultural perspectives. The conversation also reflected on practical solutions for making collectives more equitable, resilient and sustainable, with collective writing to build a toolkit for collective practice.
INVITED GUESTS (artist collectives, researchers, NGO's, activists)
Asia Forum
Eva Bentcheva (Worlding Public Cultures)
John Chan (Ghost & John)
Vidisha Fadescha (Party Office b2b Fadescha)
Bettina Fung (Asia-Art-Activism)
Nuraini Juliastuti (Kunci)
Tayeba Lipi (Britto Arts Trust)
Mary Maggic (Mai Ling)
Miwa Negoro (Mai Ling), Project Art Works
Mahbubur Rahman (Britto Arts Trust)
Aria Spinelli (IMAGINART)
Minna Valjakka (Leiden University)
Jinny Yu (Republic of the Other)
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/calendar/what-kind-of-we-could-we-be-collective-thinking-by-collecti...
 
Description Worlding Art History through Syllabi Workshop 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact This workshop took place on the 11th of October of 2022 using a hybrid format (in person and online) and was hosted by ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin.
It was conceived by the Heidelberg University team of Worlding Public Cultures in collaboration with Ming Tiampo (WPC / Carleton University) and Birgit Hopfener (WPC / Carleton University). For more information, please see: https://www.ici-berlin.org/past/
Workshop participants encompassed the following mix of postgraduate students, early career academics and senior scholars:
Oliver Aas, Antonia Behan, Eva Bentcheva, Laurens Dhaenens, Pauline Doutreluingne, Eva Ehninger, Philipp Ekardt, Claire Farago, Wesley Hogan, Birgit Hopfener, Sol Izquierdo de la Viña, Monica Juneja, Franziska Kaun, Seunghee Kim, Franziska Koch, Anton Lee, Mark Louie Lugue, Priya Maholay-Jaradi, Roger Nelson, Varda Nisar, Miriam Oesterreich, Luísa Santos, Vera Simone-Schulz, Jakob Schillinger, Moritz Schwörer, Xiaoxia Song, Hanna Steinert, Tanya Talwar, Ming Tiampo, Esra Yildiz, Carine Zaayman, Ayelet Zohar.

This workshop was organised as part of the international research project and network Worlding Public Cultures: the Arts and Social Innovation (WPC) in cooperation with the ICI Berlin. It invites scholars from the fields of art history, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, media studies, museum studies and other related disciplines to participate in a peer-to-peer exchange of experiences and practices. It focused 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.

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 built upon recent discussions around pedagogies at the Worlding Public Cultures Academy, Lessons Learned? Transcultural Perspectives in Curating and Pedagogies (14-16 July 2022), hosted by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. It takes the form of an interactive gathering. Participants were invited to share examples of their own syllabi, as well as speak on the challenges faced in designing syllabi to reflect multiple geo-cultural perspectives, decolonial and 'global' art histories. Among the questions which this workshop seek to address are:

How is the situatedness of art history taught across regional, national and local contexts?
What methodological approaches are discussed?
Which discursive, spatial and temporal frameworks are syllabi structured around?
What role does close-looking of artworks play in courses? How to connect theoretical readings and visual materials?
How can art historical methods be reconceptualized through comparative approaches?
How are the notions of the 'global', 'transnational' and 'transcultural' defined for students?
What are different approaches to structuring syllabi for undergraduate and postgraduate students? What information do 'foundational courses' provide?
What challenges are faced? What do students and lecturers appreciate the most?
How have institutional and departmental interests shaped the scope of teaching 'global' art history?
How can museums or other art institutions be integrated into teaching?

Programme

Welcome and opening remarks by Franziska Koch and Eva Bentcheva

Session 1: What is a Syllabus?

Presentation by Presentation by Eva Ehninger (Humboldt University Berlin)

Session 2: Rethinking Syllabi in/from Asia

Presentation by Xiaoxia Song (Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing)

Presentation by Priya Maholay-Jaradi (National University of Singapore) and Roger Nelson (Nanyang Technological University)


Session 3: Re/laying the Groundwork

Presentation by Claire Farago (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Presentation by Ming Tiampo (Carleton University)
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://www.worldingcultures.org/gatherings/worlding-art-history-through-syllabi
 
Description Worlding Global Art and Blackness: some speculative openings 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact On March 1st 2023 WPC P-I Prof Paul Goodwin was invited to present a lecture addressing the theme of "Transnational Citizenships" for the Public Seminar series of the Critical Curatorial Cybermedia (CCC) Research Masters programme of the Geneva University of Art & Design (HEAD). This lecture and seminar drew on Paul Goodwin's ongoing research in the Worlding Public Cultures project (WPC) and also curatorial projects focussing on rethinking methodologies of art and globalisation with parallel work on the limits of 'Black art'. The lecture demonstrated how Goodwin's work and thinking in WPC was informed by his practice and theorisations as a curator and researcher of diasporic Black art practices in dialogue with critical Black study. The lecture elucidated some speculative lines of inquiry that connected discourses of 'worlding' with debates in Black studies in order to open up new possibilities for thinking the 'global' and 'blackness' in critical relation. In particular the lecture revolved around how notions of the 'pluriverse' debated in the Worlding Public Cultures project as well as the work of Caribbean writers such as Edouard Glissant and Slyvia Wynter explored in the WPC London Gathering (Tate Modern 2021), opened up new ways of understanding the political importance of ontology in a global context.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://head.hesge.ch/ccc/turbulence/en/worlding-global-art-and-blackness-some-speculative-openings-...
 
Description Worlding Through the Caribbean Online Exhibition 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact . . .the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which over represents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation, which [I define] . . . as the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation. . .
?Sylvia Wynter, 'Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation-An Argument', 2003

The symposium consent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean was accompanied by an online exhibition of artists' audio and film work. It considered Édouard Glissant's crucial proposition to 'consent not to be a single being' (Glissant, 2009) through the entanglements and archipelagic complexity manifested within the Caribbean experience. The exhibition formed around the notion that these states can be the conditions for worlding otherwise: in Sylvia Wynter's words, for 'unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom' (Wynter, 2003) that was established by our collective historical worlding inside the brutality of the colonial project. Across these works, unsettling occurs in the spaces of potentiality created by forms of cultural resistance, and the ever-becoming relationalities in which they are conceived.

The works span music, poetry, conversation and moving image, to reflect the multiplicity of approaches within the respective oeuvres of Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, and their explorations of cultural forms that are intrinsic to their theoretical projects.

The exhibition included two new audio commissions: an experimental sound composition by artist Ashley Holmes, and a new episode of artist and writer Ayesha Hameed's Radio Brown Atlantis, with special guest writer and poet Shivanee Ramlochan.

A programme of artists' film, screened online from 1st to 3rd December 2021, included recent work by Helen Cammock, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, Jamilah Sabur, Rhea Storr and Alberta Whittle.

The online audio and film exhibition was curated by Rahila Haque, TrAIN/WPC Doctoral Fellow and sponsored by Chelsea College of Arts, UAL.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://www.worldingcultures.org/gatherings
 
Description consent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Study participants or study members
Results and Impact Worlding Public Cultures hosted a major international online conference in partnership with Tate and a programme organised by UAL's TrAIN Research Centre (Transnational Art Identity Nation). It explored the legacies of Caribbean thought on global art histories, public culture and activism, complementing Tate Britain's exhibition: Life Between Islands: British - Caribbean Art 1950s - now.

consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean took the Caribbean and Caribbean thought as a starting point, to reconsider global histories of art and contemporary public cultures. Drawing on the foundational work of Caribbean thinkers Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, the symposium explored their impact on our understanding of the material, epistemological and ontological repercussions of these Caribbean histories.

Addressing the contested public paces of universities, museums, and cultural institutions, this symposium thinks with and through Glissant, Hall, and Wynter to radically transform our ways of relating to the world around us. The event included a keynote lecture by celebrated Black studies and Black feminism scholar Katherine McKittrick, as well as five panels covering topics ranging from public culture, education, counter-histories, colonialism, world-making and the environment.

Recordings of the symposium are available online here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2gu33rqkbHX_GR7sFGhpYw

Symposium Programme

Wednesday 1st December

15:30-16:30

Keynote Lecture
Katherine McKittrick
17:00-18:30

Panel 1: Human as Praxis
Speakers include M. Ty , Julian Henriques, Maica Gugolati, Christopher Cozier and Ada M. Patterson.
Thursday 2nd December

15:30-17:00

Panel 2: Counter Histories
Speakers include Adrienne Rooney, Nicole Smythe-Johnson, Sarah Casteel.
17:30-19:00

Panel 3: Public Culture
Speakers include Gilane Tawadros, Malini Guha, Julia M. Hori, Natalie McGuire-Batson.
Friday 3rd December

15:30-17:00

Panel 4: Worlding
Speakers include Alexandra Chang, Lee Xie, Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Nidhi Mahajan and Moad Musbahi.
17:30-19:00

Panel 5: Ecology
Speakers include Susanne M. Winterling, Laleta Davis-Mattis, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Roshini Kempadoo and Guillermina De Ferrar

Organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, in collaboration with UAL's TrAIN Research Centre (Transnational Art Identity Nation) and the TrACE network (Transnational and Transcultural Art Culture Exchange).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/life-between-islands/worlding-through-caribbean