Transcultural contact zones:
Negotiating the role of art institutions in contemporary societies characterised by migration

This project investigates the specific challenges that European art institutions currently face when they seek to address culturally pluralised publics in today’s migration-induced societies.

Over time, migration has been one of the crucial factors making Europe a site of social contact and conflicts, and the influx of people have made the European populations ever more globally entangled. This has always been the case, but in later years the issue has been more at the forefront of the political agenda. Due to this development, the rethinking of art institutional practices has recently become an urgent matter of concern within a European context, not least because of the continent’s colonial histories.

Employing a transcultural perspective that highlights global entanglements between and within cultures, the project will explore how the role of contemporary art institutions is being negotiated in societies shaped by former and ongoing processes of migration and diversification. Specifically, this project focuses on the following questions: In what concrete ways do art institutions address culturally mixed publics? How do they respond to the histories and presence of structural marginalization and discrimination? How do they attend to conditions of socio-cultural diversity in ways that create fundamental structural changes and institutional transformations? And how can art institutions function as sites of encounter in which diverse social and cultural positions come into contact and are negotiated?