Project Details
Projekt
Artistic practice, collecting and compiling as constellations of the self: transcultural exchange processes in global perspective (18th–21st century) (TP 3)
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Eva-Maria Troelenberg
Subject Area
Art History
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539990504
According to the working hypothesis, when an individual puts together a collection, their persona and world view are formed, especially if the cultural reference points of the collection and the collector are different. The process-orientated theory of transculturation forms the methodological framework of the project. As a starting point, image compendia with Hindu themes from the 18th century for colonial commissioners will be analysed on the basis of a case study. In this way, the format of 'autoethnography' is reconsidered as the result of a reciprocal transcultural negotiation process. This makes it possible to explore the possibilities of self-modelling by early Orientalists and indigenous actors without ignoring the asymmetries of colonial power relations. Based on this, a second focal level examines different semantic (re)coding of already existing South Asian images of gods - but removed from the cultic context - in collection constellations from around 1800 to the present with regard to transcultural 'technologies of the self'. It is therefore not about the continuation of object biographies, which in the broadest sense stand for 'provenance' in institutional, national and colonialist contexts, but about the question of how the self can be formed within transcultural constellations of objects. The project also focuses on forms of transcultural compilations - from home furnishings to museum collections - that have emerged from individual (auto)biographical constellations and narratives since the colonial era and up to the present day. These (post-)colonial studies will be used to develop new approaches and concepts on the relationship between persona and object. The contribution that the project can make to the overall theme of the research group is to counter Eurocentric development models of the discourse on makeability - the legacy of the idealistic subject philosophy of the Enlightenment - with thought models of individual and collective relational self-designs in the context of a multiple and polycentric conception of history.
DFG Programme
Research Units
