Changing Art Worlds | At the Institute and Online
Globalization of Contemporary Art and its Stunning Rise in the Middle East since the 1990s
Tuesday | 03.02.26 | 11:30 - 13:00
A Lecture |
In the framework of the Polonsky Fellows seminar, we are honored to host a guest speaker, Dr. Ulrich Schreiterer
The global art market frenzy of the last decades led to a surge of new art circuits and institutions in the former “periphery”. Emirates and, more recently, Saudi Arabia have come to regard and nourish (contemporary) art as soft power and “positional resource”. New lavishly funded institutional ecosystems attest to their ambitions to be seen as leading sites in the global art world that challenge its Western hegemony. Artists from the Middle East, for their part, embark on a strategy to meet the art world’s craving for new “positions”. They cut their way tapping into post-colonial discourses of displacement and belonging, migration and diaspora, and identity clashes in an intersection with Islamic art traditions. Yet in spite of their fancy aspirations and narratives, contemporary art production in the Middle East owes is amazing success partly also to mimicry and institutional isomorphy in its material culture and performance.
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session.
The lecture will be held in English.
About the guest:
Dr. Ulrich Schreiterer is a retired senior researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center with extensive experience in higher education governance, global research collaborations, and science diplomacy.