By focusing on the various modes and media of the fetishised object, this anthology shifts the debates on thingness into a new global art historical perspective. The contributors explore the attention given to those material images, in both artistic and cultural practice from the heyday of colonial expansion until today. They show that in becoming vehicles and agents of transculturality, so called »fetishes« take shape in the 17th to 19th century aesthetics, psychology and ethnography – and furthermore inspire a recent discourse on magical practice and its secular meanings requiring altered art historical approaches and methods.
Über den Autor
Gabriele Genge is chairholder for Modern and Contemporary Art History and Art Theory at the Universität Duisburg-Essen. Her current research interests cover trans-cultural and postcolonial areas of the discipline with a specific focus on French Colonialism as well as African and African-American image theory, knowledge systems and epistemology. From 2017 to 2020 she supervised the DFG-research project »The Anachronic and the Present: Aesthetic Perception and Artistic Concepts of Temporality in the Black Atlantic«.
Angela Stercken (Ph D), is senior researcher, curator and author. Her research fields lie in transcultural and postcolonial art history, the theory of image, time and space, in phenomena of transmediality and temporality in (maritime) spaces of transfer and migration, and modern and contemporary art in the transatlantic world. Lecture and granted research projects led her to the Universities of Düsseldorf, Munich and Duisburg-Essen, where she completed the research project »The Anachronic and the Present: Aesthetic Perception and Artistic Concepts of Temporality in the ›Black Atlantic‹«.