Art, Multiculturalism, and Mobility

This collection takes an interdisciplinary approach exploring questions of multiculturalism and mobility in the arts—including the visual arts, film, performance, art history and historiography, and cultural heritage—from a global perspective over the longue durée, taking up topics from the pre-modern through modern and contemporary eras. Rather than studying cases and concepts that reinforce national artistic frameworks, it investigates the arts broadly conceived as a productive and sometimes destructive site of contact and friction between styles, ideas, practices, arts-related institutions, artists and artistic constituencies, audiences, communities and markets.

Committed to building on the growing corpus of research on globalism, migration, and transnationalism in the arts, the collection welcomes writings on a wide range of issues. The range of article types offered by Open Research Europe—including reviews, essays, research articles, open letters and more—facilitates the publication and sharing of diverse and broad-reaching research as openly and quickly as possible.
Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Mobility of artists and artworks, styles and iconographies
• Refugee, exile, expatriate and otherwise migratory and mobile artists
• Experiences of exile, immigration, refugeeism, and mobility as crucial forces shaping the arts and artistic production as well as art markets and reception of the arts
• Issues of multicultural identity, gender, ethnicity, and transnationalism in the arts
• Art historical and historiographical perspectives on related themes
• The role of art collections and collecting practices, museums, exhibitions, and performances in shaping, promoting, and promulgating notions and socio-cultural perceptions of mobility and multiculturalism
• The role of interdisciplinary research in investigating relevant issues
• Issues of “glocalism”: locality versus internationality or the particular versus the global
• Questions of mobility and discursive concepts of globality
• Issues of colonialism and decolonial approach to cross-regional art histories
• Concepts of performativity and materiality as tools for transcultural art history writing