Transcultural Abstraction, Colonial Histories

Bringing together scholars across geographic subfields, this panel seeks to develop more expansive histories and methodologies for abstract art, centred on the intersections between abstraction, nationalism, colonialism, and coloniality. Focused particularly on the formative decades of the practice’s “invention,” we aim to probe anew the power relations, aesthetic motivations, and transcultural connections undergirding abstract art’s early development and global dissemination. We seek to ask: How did abstraction index the political, technological, racialized, and socio-economic divisions that shaped artmaking in different localities across the globe? What opportunities did the practice offer for resistance and solidarity? And how might attending to overlooked or marginalized epistemologies and positionalities—including visual traditions and cultural practices outside of modernist painting—be central to a renewed history and historiography of the topic?

This session invites contributions that critically interrogate abstract art within an interdisciplinary frame; examine distinct conceptual and philosophical bases for non-mimetic form; foreground local invocations and alternative genealogies of abstraction from Indigenous and non-Western contexts; and challenge the coloniality of Euro-American narratives. We are especially interested in papers that directly engage relations between abstract art and the colonial and imperial histories of Europe, Russia, Japan, and the United States.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Max Boersma, Freie Universität Berlin, m.boersma@fu-berlin.de

Yiqing Li, University of Macau, lesleyli@um.edu.mo

Stephanie Su, University of Colorado, Boulder, Stephanie.Su@colorado.edu