Project Head

Prof. Dr. Karin Gludovatz

Research Fellows

Dr. Ulrike Boskamp

Sophie Annette Kranen, M.A.

 

Project Description

The tours and travels undertaken by artists in the early modern period constitute, for this research group, an exemplary context within which a specific form of mobility, perceptions of alterity and identity, aesthetic experiences and artistic production become bound up together and mutually shape, partially cancel out, reinforce and transform each other.

The project pursues the question of how situations of transcultural negotiation were narrated, for example in artist biographies and travelogues. On the basis of case studies, it analyses what new semanticisations, transformations and overwritings can be observed in pictures produced by artists while travelling. Starting from the assumption that, in passing through areas and moving from place to place, a dynamic ‘in-between’ is generated that, as Homi Bhabha observed, is not limited to an enrichment of experiences of alterity but can also weaken the boundary between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, this research unit seeks to elucidate what role was assumed by, or assigned to, artistic production while travelling, as a practice situated ‘in-between’. As the investigations of the first research phase have shown, differing artistic practices, pictorial concepts, iconographies etc. were themselves key objects of processes of transcultural negotiation. A focus of analysis therefore lies on the visual artistic means with which differences were generated or deconstructed in specific transcultural constellations. Our studies of source materials have also shown, however, that the self-reflexive discursification of these processes thereby plays a major role. This second research phase will consequently inquire above all into how transcultural negotiations transformed not only artistic motifs, design principles and techniques, but what contributions they made to the understanding and concept of art and its means and processes in early modern Europe.