Wednesday 12 November 2008, 18.30–20.00

How do cross-cultural perspectives modify the standard picture of twentieth-century art? Writer and critic Kobena Mercer discusses this, and presents ‘difference’ as a question of mutual entanglements among multiple modernisms that expands our understanding of the worldly conditions in which art circulates across space and time.

Kobena Mercer is series editor of Annotating Art's Histories, published by Iniva. The four volumes are Cosmpolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007), Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (2008). In Spring 2009 he will be Visiting Professor at the Centre for African American Studies at Princeton University.

The respondent for this talk is Dr. Dorothy Rowe, Head of Subject for History of Art at the University of Bristol. Her research interests range from German modernism to contemporary diasporic art in Britain. She is author of Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in Imperial and Weimar Germany (Ashgate 2003), co-editor of Architecture and Design in Europe and America 1750-2000 (Blackwell 2006) and a number of published articles on diasporic art in Britain since the 1980s. She is currently completing several book projects including Networks of the German Avant-Garde: Cologne Dada in Context and a co-edited collection (with Marsha Meskimmon) entitled Diasporic Futures: Women, the Arts and Globalization, before beginning a two year Leverhulme funded research project Weimar Women: Photography and Modernity.

Tate Britain  Auditorium
£7 (£5 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes drinks afterwards