It is my pleasure to announce that I will present my paper Non-Aligned Modernism - the international network and art movement New Tendencies (first phase, 1961-1965) at the Postwar conference in Munich in May. My paper was submitted in response to an open call and got selected. You find the press release of Haus der Kunst below.

"Postwar — Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965"

International Conference, 21–24 May, 2014

The terms postwar, post-colonialism and post-communism describe the historical conditions under which the world has developed since 1945. Conceived as an in-depth study of the postwar period, the four-day international conference, "Postwar – Art between the Pacific and Atlantic, 1945–1965" shifts from a Western/European vantage point to redirect attention to a multifocal and polyphonic history of art since 1945. By following the sweeping lines of the two oceans across Europe, Asia, the Pacific Rim, Africa, the Mediterranean, North America, and South America, "Postwar" straddles continents, political structures, economic patterns, and institutional frameworks to understand the complex legacies of artistic practice and art historical discourses that emerged globally in the aftermath of World War II’s devastation. 

If we are to remap the cartographies of postwar modernism, what sort of methodologies might we deploy? How, we might ask, were radical aesthetics iterated and to what extent did the political exert pressure on the aesthetic, the cultural on the artistic? In turn, how did artists, critics, and intellectuals negotiate, resist, or even subvert political ideologies? How were artistic practices and aesthetic frameworks reconstrued in dispersed political and cultural contexts, especially in response to hegemonic paradigms? Conversely, how did artistic and intellectual movements from the former colonial peripheries impact the terrains of modernism? How then did the circulation of art, objects, discourses, and ideas shape the global contours of postwar modernism? What, if any, were the connections between form and context in the postwar world? 

The purpose of the "Postwar" conference is to bring together leading and emerging scholars, historians, artists, curators, theorists, and students to examine the artistic forces and cultural legacies that have shaped the production of art since 1945. By collaboratively probing differing concepts of artistic modernity such as abstraction, realism, figuration, and representation, the conference examines how receptions and formulations of modernism informed the manifestation of specific variants of modern art. Alert to the political and cultural implications of both the Atlantic and Pacific, the diachronic axis of the project’s research scope stretches from Germany to Japan as representatives of the Atlantic and Pacific hemispheres. 

Selection of keynote speakers:
Iftikhar Dadi, Cornell University, Ithaca
Catherine David, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris 
Walter Grasskamp, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich 
Boris Groys, New York University, Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, and Bauhaus University, Weimar 

The conference schedule and complete list of nearly 40 participants will be announced soon. If you’d like updates on the Postwar conference, please enter your email address on the right. 

The conference is the first in a broad spectrum of events surrounding the “Postwar” research and exhibition project. It is organized by Haus der Kunst in collaboration with Tate Modern, London, the Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. 

"Postwar — Art between the Pacific and Atlantic, 1945-1965" is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Goethe-Institut.