Centre for Modern Art and Theory
The Local in a Global Context: Art and Visual Culture in the 20th Century
Centre for Modern Art and Theory
The Local in a Global Context: Art and Visual Culture in the 20th Century
In the Autumn semester 2024, a new course offered at the Department of Art History introduced fresh art historical topics to students. Throughout the 20th century it has become increasingly accepted that we live in an interconnected world. Global, national, regional and even local cultures do not exist in mutual isolation but, rather, shape each other. At the same time, international cultural trends are given a national character, while regional and local cultures make use of universal ideas and practices. As a result, we live in a mixed, hybrid world – the “local in the global”.
The course examined this issue as it relates to visual culture since 1900. Using a range of case studies, from modernist architecture in Africa and India to Mexican & Native American art, from ethno-fashion to Moravian folk art, it explored the ways in which artists, designers and architects have exploited this intersection of cultures in productive ways. The course also paid attention to the practices at museums and galleries that address the topic of local and global in their exhibitions. Alongside discussion of individual examples, the course examines the different theoretical concepts that have been used to describe and understand this phenomenon of intersecting practices.
Thanks to the financial support of the Strategic Funds from the University, the students could benefit from input by international scholars from Ukraine, Austria, the Netherlands and the USA alongside lectures by Julia Secklehner, Matthew Rampley and Marta Filipová.
As part of their coursework, students were asked to present a topic related to the lecture series in the form of a poster. They all did an excellent job and here we bring some of the results.
Ema Brucháčková, Diversity and Swedishness: A Paradox within Ikea
Matěj Dvořák, Can Prefabricated Mass Housing Architecture in Soviet-Influenced Countries be Considered as a Tool of Globalization?
Valentina Almendra Cano Herrera, Art in Resistance: How the Chilean Arpilleras Became a Global Symbol of Resistance
Cheng-Hsiang (Austin) Hsu, The Imagery of Taiwan and Taiwanese Identity in Early Taiwanese Art Under the “Inland Extensionism” Policy during the Japanese Period from 1919 to 1937
Katarína Kuchtová, Ceramics: Between Modern and Traditional
Radu Remus Macovei, The Global in Disguise: Instrumentalizing Representational Techniques to Modernize the Countryside in the Interwar Period
Lucie Šubrtová, Modernism’s Hidden Threads: Amazigh Textiles and Coloniality
Livia Zavaterelli, The Serpent as a Universal Archetype: Aby Warburg’s Analysis of the Survival of Images Across Civilisations
