Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

Over the last decades, contemporary art has undergone a “Social Turn,” (Jackson 2011), where artists and their practices have increasingly taken to social work. An artwork might take on the form of community organization, an afterschool program, or an agricultural goods import company. Arts has moved into experimenting with and creating infrastructure (Daugaard et al. 2024) and social, political, and economic organization (Holm and Beyes 2022). While these shifts towards social work reflect debates on the role and possibility of arts within the arts themselves, they also correspond to how and what arts are being funded to do. In the global south, a “cultural turn” in the development (Stupples 2014) has given a boon to many local artistic practices as Western foreign countries have increasingly funneled development aid into cultural activities. This course will look at the relation between development paradigms and contemporary art practices as a way to better understand the globalization of contemporary art. We will explore concepts deployed across the arts today, including commoning, mutual aid, and degrowth, to look at how arts have responded to and taken shape within a world order delineated between developed and developing nations. We will seek to develop a critical tool kit for interrogating and better understanding a “developmental turn,” in the arts.

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