Rome Contemporary

The Research Priority Rome Contemporary aims to reevaluate the significance of Rome in the artistic sphere during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. During this time, established narratives on the one hand insist on an increasing peripheralization of the city and on the other, demonstrate how the self-referential formula of Rome’s historically unique position endures. 

In engaging with previous art historical interpretations, Rome Contemporary supports innovative research on the Roman art scene by probing into and mapping its international entanglements. This initiative challenges the common assumption that with the end of the Ancien Régime the city lost its far-reaching importance in the art world. It does so by inviting studies that examine objects from the visual arts and related fields with consideration of their particular conditions of production, publication, and circulation in Rome and beyond. 
Rome Contemporary confronts universalizing tendencies in modern scholarship on contemporary art by emphatically focusing on the idiomatic alongside the spatiotemporal and cultural situatedness of its objects of inquiry. This initiative is also aimed at destabilizing a narrow understanding of locality. The trope of Rome as a palimpsest is interrogated by recalling the network of reciprocal exchange processes that have linked and still connect the city translocally. This aspect of Rome Contemporary seeks both to define and expand upon the various frames of reference encountered in the Roman art scene in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In a related manner, the initiative enables and promotes an ongoing discussion surrounding the historiographical conventions, canons, and structures upon which the history of contemporary art in Italy relies.