SESSION: Performing Otherness in Contemporary Art

In today’s globalised contemporary art, more artists from marginalised, formerly colonised territories are gaining global visibility. Yet, the asymmetric relationship persists, resulting in a condition where institutional power structures, often situated in the Global North, continue to dominate the production and validation of art, and what art historian Piotr Piotrowski (2008) called “vertical art history” continues to persist. In some cases, it leads to what Lisa Lau (2009) termed “re-orientalism”, or the tendency of native cultural producers to comply with and perpetuate orientalist stereotypes themselves. This, in turn, leads to reinforcing the dynamics between centres and peripheries. Similar tendencies could be found in art historical discourse, which led Eric Michaud (2019) to consider whether the growing ethnicization of contemporary art differs from the racial discourse that fuelled the emergence of art history as an academic discipline.

This panel raises questions on identity politics in contemporary art in the wake of growing importance of indigenous art and seeks to reconsider the potential of transcultural or transnational discourses in the context of institutional demand to perform cultural difference. It examines how artists, curators, and scholars navigate this condition, addressing the potential effects of over-employing the ideas of cultural identity, authenticity and ask questions such as: What are the opportunities and challenges that artists and cultural practitioners face when they raise questions on such notions? How can we use these to rupture the centre-periphery relation and find cross-border solidarities?

Session Convenor:

Assel Kadyrkhanova, University of Amsterdam

Mehmet Berkay Sülek, University of Amsterdam

Session Speakers:

Marsha Pearce, The Fitzwilliam Museum, The University of Cambridge

‘How Do You Want Me?’ Toward a Trembling Art History

In his series How Do You Want Me? (2007), Guyanese-British artist presents life-size photographs in which he performs for the camera, taking on various personas. Locke explains the works are, in part, a response to “the voracious desire of the art world for the latest exotic thing.” He deliberately amplifies his alterity while also drawing viewers into an excess of symbols: royal insignia and coats of arms that reflect notions of nationhood, hierarchy, and power. Of note is the use of one of these photographs for the cover image of the book accompanying Locke’s recent survey exhibition (October 2025-January 2026). This paper deploys Locke’s series and its titular question as a critical point of departure for engaging identity politics in contemporary art and for interrogating the asymmetrical relationship between centres and peripheries that still dominates the validation, curation, and narratology of art. Using Glissant’s concept of tremble thinking and building on the discourse of “a geohistory of art” (DaCosta Kaufmann), it argues for a trembling art history – a practice of historiography beyond the fault line of “here” and “there.” The paper asserts an interpretation of “geo” in geohistory as geology, taking conversations beyond geographical/mapped places to a deep structure of ontological tremors whereby artists are seen as trembling, not in fear, but as a kind of agentive opacity that troubles stereotypes. In asking the research question: “How do you want me?”, visual analyses are conducted. Works by Caribbean/Caribbean-heritage artists are examined, including pieces by Sandra Brewster and Richard Mark Rawlins.

Emily Butler, University of Reading

The Artist as (Mis)translator

IIn a globalizing world, does translation offer a key to more democratic relations, or does it reinforce power imbalances? This paper explores how contemporary artists act as (mis)translators, performing linguistic, semiotic, cultural and epistemic crossings that question the very possibility of translation itself.

While translation is often considered an act of communication or bridge-building, it can also serve as a tool of hegemonic co-option. However, artists working in transnational contexts often expose its limits, where meaning resists; these artists, in turn, resist being translated from a position of ‘otherness’. Drawing on translation theory from Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and recent curatorial discourse on opacity, the paper repositions translation as a site for transformation rather than fidelity, where difference is neither erased nor domesticated. The resulting ‘translation zone’ (Apter, The Translation Zone, 2006) enables us to reconsider our knowledge and relations to construct “a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other.” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994)

Through close readings of works by Nalini Malani, Lerato Shadi and Sky Hopinka, I propose that these artists use (mis)translation in their practice to reveal the asymmetries of language, power and representation. Using sound, subtitling, animation, gesture and film, they create hybrid, polyphonic vocabularies that embrace a ‘kaleidoscopic totality’ of worldviews (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant, Callaloo,1990).

Positioned within the session Performing Otherness in Contemporary Art, this paper argues that the artist as (mis)translator reframes translation as a critical act and exposes the politics of who translates, who is translated, and what remains untranslatable.

Yuji Kawasima, IE University (School of Architecture and Design)

Clara Zarza, IE University (School of Architecture and Design)

Minor Materialities Against Performed Otherness

In this presentation, we argue that so-called “minor” materialities—fragile, vernacular, perishable, affect-laden things historically downgraded by the canon—provide a critical lens to rethink contemporary art’s economies of visibility. From the 1980s to the present, Euro-North American institutions have incorporated previously marginalised subjectswhile often spectacularising and fetishising their practices, sustaining Piotr Piotrowski’s “vertical art history” and enabling re-orientalising demands to perform cultural difference. Our question is how minor materialities can displace authenticity scripts and relocate value from identity-as-display to relations and uses. Anchored in material culture studies (Ahmed; Appadurai; Cheng; Espejo Ayca; Hartman; Miller; Stewart), we understand objects as active carriers of biographies, affects, and socialities. Through close readings of domestic remnants and “infraordinary” practices—Mona Hatoum, Miyako Ishiuchi, Mari Katayama, Leonilson, and Feliciano Centurión—we identify two institutional tendencies:
(1) the celebratory turn to auto/biography as an emblem of inclusion; (2) the conversion of lives, objects, and processes into digestible commodities. We show how modest materials institute counter-archives of care, illness, migration, and kinship without capitulating to market spectacle. We then present a concise object-biography to model non-spectacularising readings. Taking Feliciano Centurión’s embroidered pillowcase, Luz
divina del alma (1996), as a case, we follow cotton, thread, stain, and inscription across domestic care, illness, queer gift economies, and later institutional capture, showing how a low-value textile accrues memory and risk. Reframing attention from identity performance to the life of materials offers an early-warning device: the small reveals asymmetries sooner and renders visible what institutional scales conceal in
contemporary art today.

Sophie Mak-Schram, Cardiff Metropolitan University

“Nearby”: Mixed heritages and resistance in the work of Stephanie Comilang and Alice Rekab

The art historical onus on the artist and material histories, has positioned the discipline behind in terms of its structural analysis of identity politics. From the sidelining of 1980s Chinese modernism as ‘belated’ to the continued prevalence of nationality as an identifying descriptor for artists working in the globalised art world, cultural identity reinstates both geographical and temporal hierarchies. Despite the rise in conversations about ‘decolonising’ and anti-racism, both art historical and exhibitionary methodologies have tended to maintain a Derridean hospitality in which terms continue to be set by those supposedly neutral; the Euro-American ‘host’ or art historical eye.

This paper considers how hybridity (Bhabha, 1994) and untranslatability (Apter, 2006) are proposed through the works of Stephanie Comilang and Alice Rekab, two mixed heritage artists who explore migration and belonging. Comilang’s video Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (2018) narrates the experiences of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong from the perspective of a drone, and Alice Rekab’s work draws on their Irish-Sierra Leonean heritage to destabilise hierarchies of familial and material heritage. Both artists simultaneously draw on their lived experiences and resist this over-identification. Thinking with Trinh Minh Ha’s idea of “speaking nearby” as an ethical imperative when working and making transculturally, this paper will both close-read how this “nearby” is structured into Camilang’s videos and Rekab’s sculptural installations, as well as suggest that contemporary art history can engage with “nearby” as an alternative methodology to othering.