Art History beyond Identity? Reflections on Relationality: The Case of Vicente do Rego Monteiro

The book’s recent reception – namely, as paradigmatic of modern transatlantic encounters between Latin America and Europe – offers occasion to investigate the state of the field, raising important methodological and theoretical questions for art history: What is at stake when we subsume images under such larger narratives, when they become illustrations of larger conceptual or historiographical agendas? And what are the alternatives to identitarian and geopolitical approaches? How might we consider the poetic experience in a transcultural framework? Indeed, what would it mean to think of transculturality as a form of geopoetics, favouring opacity over any attempt at transparency?

Lena Bader is Research Director at the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris (DFK Paris). She studied art history and cultural studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU), where she received her Ph.D. in 2011 with a thesis on the visual history of art history. She worked as a research assistant at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, at the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, and at HU’s Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik. She held postgraduate fellowships in the Iconic Criticism cluster of the National Centre of Competence in Research in Basel and at the DFK Paris as part of the annual theme, “Poiesis: Doing and Making in the Arts.” Her research interests include the history of science, image theory, and transcultural art histories. Together with Thomas Kirchner, she launched the 2015 initiative Travelling Art Histories. Transregional Networks in the Exchange between Latin America and Europe at the DFK Paris. Her current research deals with travelling images between France and Brazil in the twentieth century.

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Scientific Organization: Lara Demori