Jahrestagung 2024
“Decolonial Aesthetic Practices?”
RTG Annual Conference 2024
07. – 09.11.2024, Culture Campus (Domäne Marienburg)
The international conference convenes scholars and practitioners from various fields to explore the interplay between theory and practice within decolonial frameworks.
The first section examines decolonial aesthetic practices that critically engage with the Eurocentric concept of historiography, narration and epistemology and its methodological coloniality. The contributions deal with decoloniality as a method in the analytical practice of art history and art studies, address the challenges for critical practices of a philosophy in an entangled historical perspective and examine the limits of some key concepts of decoloniality.
The second section focuses on decolonial aesthetic practices in the fields of visual arts, museums and visual media. The lectures explore how colonial materials, colonial destruction and the colonial power structures internalized and perpetuated in institutions, objects, images, testimonies and spaces can be addressed responsibly. Finally, they call for institutional power and existing analytical approaches to be questioned in ways that ensure the transformation of colonial practices into decolonial practices in the long term.
The third section, engaging with an Arab-African perspective, addresses a central paradox: despite the call to decolonize stemming from a rejection of colonial structures, can this injunction be perceived as a Western construct? How can decolonial struggles avoid being hijacked? This section critically examines whether the act of decolonizing effectively dismantles colonial power structures or merely reproduces them.
