Over the last ten years, the number of digital projects using catalogues has increased: exhibition catalogues, sales catalogues, catalogues raisonnés, museum catalogues, library catalogues – and of course library catalogues. All of them seem to focus on different and complementary data, but the step of interoperability and sharing remains a horizon.
How to ensure the interoperability of these databases?

In partnership Artl@s, the AWARE association launched in December 2017 WAS (Women Artists Shows-Salons-Societies), a research programme on collective exhibitions of women artists. The ambition is to compile a descriptive and analytical catalogue of these exhibitions, from the end of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century, and to initiate a reflection on their specific history, through a study of the evolution of the social, cultural and institutional conditions that allowed or made necessary the holding of such exhibitions, an analysis of the different levels of mediation and arrangements present in this type of exhibition, or an examination of their symbolic functioning and their critical reception.

How can an artistic or literary discourse specific to the South be held today, whether it be American, African, Oceanian or Asian?

Two days of discussions and debates, centred on the shared reading of academic and literary texts, organised by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel and Roland Béhar.

With Paula Barreiro López, Capucine Boidin, Nicola Brarda, Joannne Brueton, Cecile Chapon, Mina Kleiche-Dray, Maureen Murphy, Diana Roig Sanz, Felix Terrones, Elodie Vaudry, Leon Wainwright, Blaise Wilfert-Portal, Claire Allouche, Sinan John-Richards.

The decentralised internationalism claimed by the Havana, Dakar or Gwangju biennials, which the Venice Biennale is now trying to echo by awarding the Angolan pavilion the 2013 Golden Lion, invites us to move away from an exclusively Euro-American artistic history. The historicisation and measurement of the circulation of art in the former margins is today a decisive task if we want to highlight, nuance or challenge the ‘provincialisation’ of Europe and North America in recent art history. The Artl@s 2015 conference aims to bring together an international group of scholars to collectively investigate what we call “South-South” axes.

Spatial (digital) art history participates in the redefinition of the discipline of art history by embracing the theories and methods of the spatial, global and digital turn that have challenged the humanities in recent decades. But in what directions is this spatial (digital) approach taking the discipline? How does it relate to past and current developments in geography, social sciences and critical theory? What new discoveries and interpretations does it allow for?

Making room for the peripheries has been one of the main challenges of the global approach to art in the last twenty years. In the legacy of postcolonial studies in particular, studies of non-European American regions have thus experienced a remarkable growth since the 1990s, especially in the art of Central Europe and South America. This renewal is also leading to new conflicts about museum collections.

Half-day study session organised in partnership with the University of Paris-Ouest-Nanterre La Défense.

Is art history global enough to take up the challenge of cultural métissage, transnationalism, internationalism and globalisation, without neglecting the cultural nationalisms and processes of artistic territorialisation that are the fabric of our discipline? How do we understand the relationships between circulations, globalisation and the production of ethnicity or nationality in the arts? What strategies can we develop, beyond narrative and description, to write a new history of the arts that escapes both historiographic nationalism and blind globalism, while taking into account the national and transnational dimensions of artistic creation?

The official launch of the ARTL@S project is an opportunity to present the team, its programme, its tools and its methodological choices. We will discuss in particular two central questions: Is it possible to make a long and transnational history of art? What does the quantitative and cartographic approach give to the “spatial turn” of the humanities?