Global Studies (Einleitung: Andrea Buddensieg, Peter Weibel)

Opening words from Peter Weibel, Director of ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe 

Andrea Buddensieg, ZKM, Organizer of the Event

The advent of globalization in the sense of an opening of markets and borders was tied with the promise of dissolving dissonances and conflict and leading to the utopia of post-histoire. To the same extent that this has not occurred politically and socially, it has led to a reduction in science’s complexity. Instead, an increasing separation of methodologies and perspectives can be observed, particularly in those fields that have to do with images and “production of culture.” Human and social sciences may deal with the same objects, but they use different, seemingly mutually incompatible approaches. Art and culture historians, film studies scholars, sociologists, ethnologists, and also representatives of museum practice have access to their own techniques for categorization, analysis, and mediation. With “Global Studies,” ZKM | Karlsruhe has set up a platform that anchors the discourse of art and media in a globalized world at an interdisciplinary level. The platform is an initiative of the project “Global Art and the Museum,” which has documented the complex transformation of the art scene against the backdrop of globalization since 2006.

Concept: Hans Belting, Jacob Birken and Andrea Buddensieg

Andrea Buddensieg is curator and project manager of the project GAM – Global Art and the Museum. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Bonn. She worked at KPM Porzellan Manufaktur Berlin and was part of the project management team for the exhibition Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art in 2001/2002 at ZKM. From 2002 to 2006 she ran the Public Relations Department at ZKM. In 2011/2012 she curated together with Peter Weibel the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989 at ZKM. Her main research interests are twentieth-century design and contemporary art. She has lectured at several academies, and in 2008 she was guest scholar at CASVA, National Gallery of Art, in Washington D.C.

She contributed to exhibition catalogs and is coeditor of the books Contemporary Art and the Museum. A Global Perspective (Ostfildern, 2007), The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets, Museums (Ostfildern, 2009), Global Studies. Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture (Ostfildern, 2011), and The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (The MIT Press, 2013).