World wide: Art beyond the Western canon

This unit offers an overview of “non-Western” art and exhibition histories underlined by a decolonising impulse. You will be introduced to art and visual cultures across times, places and cultures, situating art history within the broader world landscape. You will have opportunities to explore the art of regions such as Asia, the Pacific, South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Indigenous art. The unit emphasises contemporary art in the globalized context, however you will have opportunities to also consider pre-modern histories of our global contemporaneity. As well as becoming broadly familiar with a range of “non-Western” artists and art practices, you will be introduced to important methods for thinking about “world” or “global” art (postcolonialism, alternative or parallel modernities) and their intersection with alternate cultural knowledge and other disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, museum studies). You will develop critical skills for problematising categories of “Western” and “non-Western art”, and learn to recognise the geo-politics that underpins the making of art history.