The Online Colloquium of the winter term 2025/26 by the Research Training Group GRK 2833 “East Asian Futures” will continue in December with a lecture by Professor Birgit HOPFENER. You are cordially invited to attend.

Prof. Dr. Birgit HOPFENER (Carleton University)
“A Group Dance that Never Ends. A Pluriversal Approach to Continuum – Generation by Generation (2017)”
Thursday, December 11, 2025, 6–8 pm (Central European Time)

Abstract
How did the exhibition in the Chinese pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale entitled Continuum – Generation by Generation (buxi 不息) mobilize the concept of buxi, which translates literally as “endlessness” or “never ceasing”? What does it mean to conceive of art, the world, and oneself through the lens of buxi, as endlessly intrarelated? This paper delves into this question from a multi-pronged perspective. First, it explains the meaning of buxi and analyzes how the show engages with aesthetic, epistemological, social and political implications of art and the world conceived through a contemporary perspective on the concept of “endlessness”. Second, the paper explores how a reading of the show and the artworks – their adopted aesthetic strategies, media, techniques, and materialities – through the lens of buxi complicates the critical and aesthetic framework for contemporary art in the global context. Finally, the paper evaluates the engagement with buxi – and the respective alternative processual ontology and temporality of art and world – as a useful mode of decolonizing the discipline of art history, even as it emphasizes the importance of adopting a dynamic pluriversal approach that attends to the transcultural relations that shape and reshape the multiplicity of meanings of art in a global framework, its multiple and entangled critical and aesthetic discourses, and the complexity of power structures, and avoids obscuring significant contexts and experiences.

Bio
Birgit HOPFENER is Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa and currently Visiting Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Freiburg. Her research focuses on critical global art history and cultural theory as well as Chinese art history. Her current research focuses on questions of heterogeneity in temporal assumptions (historiographical models, their respective concepts of time and temporality, and temporal regimes) that constitute and frame our world, its art, subjects, and knowledge bases. With the aim of illuminating the transcultural historicity of contemporary art, her current book project, Doing Critical Global Art History. Transcultural Analyses and a Pluriversal Conceptual Framework for Contemporary Art Historiographic Art, she examines questions of contemporary art historiography in a global context, based on three Chinese contemporary artists, and thus also the history of the discipline of art history and its methods. Birgit HOPFENER is the author of the monograph Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen: Bedingungen und Artikulationen kultureller Differenz in der chinesischen Installationskunst (2013) and co-editor of the volumes Negotiating Difference: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Context (2012) and Situating Global Art. Topologies – Temporalities – Trajectories (2018). Her recent publications include the co-edited special issue “Towards a multi-temporal pluriverse of art Decolonising universalised historiographic and temporal frameworks,” 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Contributions to Art History and Visual Culture, May 2024.

HOPFENER is a member of the editorial boards of 21: Inquiries, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and the editorial advisory board for the book series Worlding Public Cultures, ICI press, Berlin. From 2020–2024, she was on the editorial board of the Art Journal. She is a founding member of the international consortium Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Cultural Exchange (trACE) and the international research group Worlding Public Cultures.

Organizer
Research Training Group 2833 “East Asian Futures: Visions and Realizations on National, Transregional and Global Scales”, Ruhr University Bochum and University of Duisburg-Essen.

Access to the meeting
https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/61070633686?pwd=LJoiIegP3agXUeY3bBbtaICvlri7d5.1
Meeting ID: 610 7063 3686 | Password: 497983