Call for Research | ‘Amsterdam: Reconsidering the Transnational’ – Stedelijk Studies Journal #14

Call for Research | ‘Amsterdam: Reconsidering the Transnational’ – Stedelijk Studies Journal #14
Submission: stedelijkstudies@stedelijk.nl
Submission Deadline: 20 February 2023
Read more here.

The postwar artistic ecosystem of Amsterdam has often been characterized by its diverse international perspectives facilitated through Dutch institutions. In recent years, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has expanded its global purview through new acquisitions, thematic exhibitions, and cross-institutional initiatives primarily focused on the Global South. Between 2013 and 2015, the programme “Global Collaborations” established networks between the Stedelijk and what it referred to as “upcoming” Global South regions.

Presently, “Everyday, Someday and Other Stories: Collection 1950-1980” is narrating “different stories from diverse perspectives” via a more global presentation of the permanent collection. The museum’s interest in the international is nothing new, as attested by exhibitions from the late 1980s and early 1990s that coincided with the fall of Communism and the very condition of “globalization”. Wim Beeren’s “U-ABC: schilderijen, beelden, fotografie uit Uruguay, Argentinië, Brazilië, Chili” served as one of several institutional affirmations (by way of a contemporary art exhibition) of the new democracies in the Southern Cone. 1991’s “Wanderlieder,” which commingled thirteen Eastern and West European artists, anticipated the end of the U.S.S.R. by eight days.

For Issue 14 of the Stedelijk Studies Journal we aim to critically reframe discussions on global art and the “transnational” with the question: what might a decolonized understanding of transnational and transcultural Amsterdam, and the Netherlands more broadly, look like?

Such a framework and critical orientation might attend to how the art world’s contemporary embrace of the global has been part and parcel of neoliberal extraction, via foreign capital, as much as it has drawn more attention to collaborations across borders that have advanced modern and contemporary art experimentation. Yet it also opens up the possibility of drawing attention to long-neglected histories in parallel with developments in art or design, such as decolonization and independence movements in Indonesia, Suriname and the Antilles. Among others, one thinks of the self-taught artist Oey Tjeng Sit, Stanley Brouwn or Armand Baag, who arrived to the Netherlands in 1961 and was instrumental in the establishment of Maysa Foundation and Srefidensie Gallery (1971) as key sites supporting Caribbean artists in Amsterdam. In the present, contemporary artist collectives use the possibilities of intersectional environments or virtual platforms to indicate new avenues of global engagement.

In our call for research, we invite proposals that examine artists, collectives, exhibitions, and spaces (independent and institutional) that reconsider the transnational histories and present nows of art in Amsterdam and the Netherlands. We seek ideas that address the complex, alternative, artistic and curatorial experiments that concentrate on a diverse range of practitioners in the postwar and contemporary era, many of who hailed from countries in the Global South and outside of Europe. Complementing previous issues of Stedelijk Studies Journal on global art history and museum practice such as #01 “Collecting Geographies: Global Programming and Museums of Modern Art,” #06 “The Borders of Europe,” and #09 “Modernism in Migration,” Issue 14 will ask how might artistic-research and emerging scholarship further complicate our very notion of the transnational as an art-historical paradigm and/or method—and, indeed, “Dutch” as a stable signifier of national identity for cultural practitioners?

Stedelijk Studies invites proposals that examine artists, collectives, spaces (independent and institutional) and exhibitions that were formative to this history of art in Amsterdam and the Netherlands.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• International, transnational and/or itinerant artists who were decisive to Amsterdam and/or the Netherlands from 1945 to the present.
• Alternative, independent or institutional art spaces, associations and networks working across artistic and political solidarity with the Netherlands.
• Transnational and international exhibition histories in Dutch museums and art spaces
• Institutional and state-funded initiatives (for example, Dutch Visual Arts Program, Jan van Eyck Academie, De Appel) that abet international artistic activity in the Netherlands.
• New conceptualizations and forms of transnationalism in Dutch collections or across other contexts
• Processes of artistic decolonization and migration from former Dutch colonies
• Historic and present practices of artistic mobilization around sexuality and gender
• Transnational, exilic or diasporic experiences of artists in the Netherlands from the former colonies or other locations in the Global South

Process

All accepted submissions are subject to scholarly or artistic peer review, and all contributors must be open to receive such feedback and work collaboratively toward a final version.

As a way to open up the peer-reviewed process further we will compensate published submissions with a fee of 400 EUR (excl. VAT).

Submission: Please send abstracts and artistic proposals (max. 300 words and optionally max. 5 images) and CV (merged in one PDF file) to stedelijkstudies@stedelijk.nl by February 20, 2023.