Joaquín Barriendos: Geopolitics of Global Art

Image of the entrance hall to the exhibition Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern, held at MoMA (October 2015 – February 2016)

Geopolitics of Global Art: The Reinvention of Latin America as a Geoaesthetic Region

In his presentation Barriendos will discuss the writings and work of two emblematic figures of the Latin American artistic avant-gardes: the Uruguayans Joaquín Torres-García and Pedro Figari. Well-known for his ‘Inverted Map of South America’ the former and for the concept ‘Autonomic Regionalism’ the latter, these two influential artists and intellectuals were instrumental in the consolidation of what Barriendos calls the philosophical construction of the South as a modern (geo)aesthetic category. Now, the way in which both absorbed and discussed European avant-gardes on the one hand and artistic primitivism on the other cannot be more opposite. His intention thus is to introduce these case studies for discussing a series of geo-aesthetic transatlantic imaginaries related to the circulation of artistic imaginaries across Western and Non-Western modernities.

Joaquín Barriendos (Mexico City, 1973) is assistant professor at Columbia University (Latin American and Iberian Cultures). He specializes in Global Art Studies, Cross-Cultural Museum Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Latin American Visual Culture. He has been fellow researcher at the Institute National d’Histoire de l’Art-Paris (Art et Mondialisation), visiting researcher in the Program in Museum Studies (New York University), and associate researcher at AGI University of Barcelona (Art, Globalization, Interculturality). Together with scholars from Latin America, Europe, United States, and Africa, he launched in 2007 Global Visual Cultures, a transacademic platform devoted to analyze intercultural aesthetic phenomena across different world regions. He has published two books on related topics, Geoestética y Transculturalidad (2008) and Global Circuits: the Geography of Art and the New Configurations of Critical Thought (2010), and has published extensively on the globalization of Latin American contemporary art as well as on the economic, aesthetic, racial, and epistemic asymmetries that give shape to the so-called global art world.