The sound recording of the seminar Artistic practices and models of political resistance (Universitat de Barcelona, 18 November 2015) are now available in our multimedia section.
On the basis of various case studies, this seminar aimed  to study the ways modernism and modernity (considered representatives of a colonial structure of thinking) served as subversive tools and models of resistance by giving voice to subaltern agents within the context of Cold War politics. Adopting a postcolonial approach, it sought to undermine Western epistemologies, invoking issues of ideological, as well as racial and identificational nature; such issues are understood as mechanisms of resistance against as well as negotiation with the cultural imperialism embodied by the political positioning of the countries in the transatlantic axis. Departing from the concept of “decentralized modernity(/ies)” it proposed to examine the various configurations of artistic modernity between the Atlantic and the Pacific, as well as studying their twofold (artistic and political) dissident potential, as the catalysts of the global imaginaries that determined the Cold War period and contributed to shape today’s world.

 

Jonathan Harris, From Cold War Modernity to postcolonial Contemporaneity: Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and technologies of democratic resistance in South Korean art since the 1990s

 

Fabiola Martínez, No hay mas ruta que la nuestra: Art, politics, and identity in Mexico during the 1950s

 

 

Paula Barreiro López, Modern Art and the “Third World”: Globalising the Cultural Guerrilla in revolutionary Cuba

 

Jaime Vindel, Shards of an artistic-political experience: impacts of Tucumán Arde in the international art context in the early 1970s

 

Laia Manonelles, Dissidence as a product or as a critical device. Experimental art in China