Migrant, Nomad, Traveler – Towards a Transnational Art History

‘The Centre is Nowhere’: British Art and the Global

“…It accepts the corresponding 'hazard', in Dogramaci's words, 'of accepting the incompleteness of stories as well as breaks and gaps as inevitable components of a history of contacts and the products resulting from them'. 27 As Dogramaci's comment suggests, foregrounding global 'circulations' has the potential to leave a field somewhat destabilized. And as Mieke Bal observes, 'globalization appears to suggest that the centre is no longer in the West; the centre is nowhere'.…”

Montages of exile. Photographic techniques and spatial dimensions in the artwork of Grete Stern

“…James Clifford, has adapted the term of the contact zone for the museum as a social space of interaction 30 and Burcu Dogramaci has used it to describe exiled artists' studios as spaces for cultural encounters. 31 Both approaches are particularly useful for my analysis, as Grete Stern's house functioned as both a studio and an exhibition room at the same time. Even though 'the factory' 32 , as the house was called in the Buenos Aires art scene, cannot in a narrower sense be understood as a project of participatory art, as it is described by Divya Tolia-Kelly, the art production and exhibition in Stern's house still created 'a space for embodied, multilingual, marginalized experiences to be expressed in visual form' 33 It was a 'meeting place to artists, a cultural circle, a space in which to display works of all kinds' 34 for local artists as well as for exiled ones.…”

“…The portrait shows the painter Antonio Berni, who was born in Rosario in 1905 as the son of Italian immigrants, located in his studioas Dogramaci suggested, a space that might be a potential contact zone itself. 47 He is in the center of the picture sitting on a chair with his body oriented towards the camera. Behind the artist we can see a working table with papers and brushes, different paintings hanging on the walls and a sculpture standing in the background.…”