“It is difficult to change the DNA of a museum” – Atreyee Gupta in conversation with Ming Tiampo

Which kind of concepts do we have to speak about modernism for the Non-West? Why is it essential to look at the so called “peripheries” when we think about multiple modernisms? Can we observe a “Cultural Mercantilism” in the arts?

The art historian Ming Tiampo (Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada) in conversation with Atreyee Gupta (Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices / Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin) discusses these questions and presents her new research project “Paris from the Outside In” which seeks to decolonize current narratives of Paris as modernism’s point of origin, and re-theorize how we think and write about artistic centres.

The conversation took place within the frame of the Conference “Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetic Practices” organized by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The conference was convened by the research program Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices.

Ming Tiampo is Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is a scholar of transnational vanguardism with a focus on Japan after 1945. Tiampo’s book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received an honorable mention for the Robert Motherwell Book award. In 2013, she was co-curator of the AICA award-winning Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In addition to her work on Gutai, Tiampo has published on Japanese modernism, war art in Japan, globalization and art, multiculturalism in Canada, and the connections between Inuit and Japanese prints. In 2013, she co-edited Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960 (Brill Academic Press). Tiampo is a founding member of the Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University.

Atreyee Gupta holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Minnesota (2011) and a BA from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, which, as the first post-independence art institution in India, played a key role in framing postcolonial art history from the Global South. Her interest in global aesthetic flows arose from her training in India and in the US, shaping her research and current monograph on abstraction in postwar India and its multimodal intercultural vectors. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, New York; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Goethe Institut and Haus der Kunst, Munich; and, more recently, the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices at Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, an initiative of the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut.