Laura Valentina Bohnenblust: Arte flotante – Strategies of Mobility in the Art of Argentina

Arte flotante – Strategies of Mobility in the Art of Argentina between 1950 and 1970

Barco Yapeyú, which hosted the primera exposición flotante de cincuenta pintores Argentinos, 1956, (Foto: Fundación Histarmar).

In her PhD project, Laura Bohnenblust investigates mobility strategies related to art history in Argentina from 1950 to 1970. Processes of national and continental crossing of borders, the encounters that result from these practices and the effects they have on the reception and production of art are at the center of her analysis, which she outlines on three different level: (1) On the level of art institutions, she amends the history of exhibitions by collecting data on the floating museum (“exposición flotante”). (2) On the level of the actors of the art scene, Laura Bohnenblust reveals interdependencies between local art production and global art criticism by using case studies of internationally traveling art critics. (3) On the tier of the artwork itself, she analyzes the art-theoretical discourse on Site Specificity (Kwon 1997 et. al) and updates it with the term arte flotante.

Laura Bohnenblust has been a PhD candidate at the Institute of Art History, University of Bern, Switzerland, since April 2016, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Peter J. Schneemann and Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen, University of Zurich. In her PhD project, she investigates mobile exhibition formats, artist migration, and nomadic art works related to art history in Argentina from 1950 – 1970. Since September 2016, she has been a member of the Graduate School of Humanities doctoral program Global Studies at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg (University of Bern). Laura Bohnenblust studied Art History (2010–2016) and German literature (2010–2014) at the University of Bern. During the research for her master’s thesis (entitled “Slashing, Smashing, Setting on Fire. Destruction in Argentinian art of the 1960s”), she participated at the crítica de arte-program at the IUNA and the clase de curadería at the UTDT in Buenos Aires (2015). She is currently working as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern and as an art educator at the Kunstmuseum Basel.