Practising Art Internationally: Friendship, Solidarity, and Ethics

Practising Art Internationally aims to detach the notion of international art practice from a rhetoric of globalization and an exclusive focus on the contemporary. It traces a new genealogy of trans-local practices and methods, presenting the visual arts as part of a longer history of contact between individuals motivated by shared struggles, friendship and solidarity. The publication explores what it means to practice internationally in a series of case studies: an artists’ assembly from the 1990s organized against an art fair, an artist’s alliance with migrant workers, a class-based critique within international feminism, transcultural ways of life developed in the LGBTQ community, an analysis of work conditions in cultural institutions, early 20th-century cosmopolitanism in India and pan-Africanism in the second half of the 20th century. These examples show how artistic practices can generate new encounters, ways of life and historical narratives across borders.