The move to diversify art historical narratives is often accompanied by a search for commonalities. Instead addressing a need to acknowledge radical difference and untranslatability, each presenter in this panel approached the question of the incommensurable, interrogating tensions between a global approach and site-specific study. Natalia Brizuela discusses three indigenous visual and textual productions and their relation to traditional art spaces; Victoria Collis-Buthelezi addresses the potential untranslatability of blackness across languages; Tímea Junghaus offers a decolonial approach to the archive with regards to Roma art production; and Harsha Ram discusses the “discovery” of the 20th-century Georgian painter, Niko Pirosmani, by the Russian avant-garde.
Meghan Forbes
