13. Art, Synthetics, and the Global Majority

As different modernities developed globally after the Second World War, liberation struggles, decolonization and the end of the Cold War gave rise to a variety of postsocialist and capitalist contemporaneities shaped by these distinct historical trajectories. These processes have produced multiple planetary contemporaneities across what is now termed the Global Majority and the former East, both sharing a common condition often described as the Plasticene: an era defined by intensified fossil fuel extraction and the proliferation of synthetic polymers. As postcolonial and postsocialist temporalities – and plastics themselves – become planetary, the session will trace the entanglements of the postsocialist East, the postcolonial Global South, and the (neo)colonial Global North art practices with the plastics, petroinfrastructure, and petrocultures more generally.

The session will examine how plastics have transformed the very conditions of becoming of the artwork across planetary, collective, and individual scales. By focusing on the histories, aesthetics, and ontologies of plastic matter away from the capitalist economic and political centres, this session will explore how synthetic polymers have participated in shaping the material conditions of art production in the Global Majority through the entanglement of social, economic, political, ecological, biological, and geological actors involved in the production of formal and material aspects of art across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Themes: Global Majority, Plastics, Plasticene

Lead Convenor: Andrija Filipovic, Faculty of Media and Communications, Serbia

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.