Social Science Research Council

"Global Nostalgias: Nation and Longing in Contemporary Art"

One of the most pressing concerns for historians of contemporary art is how to assess the impact of globalization on the production, distribution and interpretation of artworks. While most current scholarship on the topic analyzes the institutions and markets of the global art world, my research will consider globalization primarily as a hegemonic way of articulating the relationships between time, place and identity in the contemporary moment. Considering globalization in these terms, the question of how art has been affected by globalization might be reframed as a question of how contemporary artworks mediate and contest changing relationships between time, place and identity. Specifically, I will address how nostalgia, as a structure of desire, mediates these relationships within discourses such as nationalism and globalization.

As a case study of these intersections between nationalism, globalization and nostalgia, I look at contemporary art produced in Finland since 1990. This is a particularly dynamic period of political, economic and cultural shifts in Finland. Since the nineteenth century, Finland has had an exceptionally strong, naturalized sense of national identity and a political discourse of racial, ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Within this system, cultural production could reliably be appropriated into the framework of national representation. However, since the collapse of the USSR, the presumption of an essential, homogenous Finnishness has begun to be reevaluated as Finland has become more integrated into transnational capitalist systems, joined the EU and begun to grapple with the idea of a multicultural society. During the same period, Finnish artists moved from the margins to the centers of the European and global art worlds. I look at several photographers and filmmakers whose work engages critically with these changes. My research will include interviews with artists and critics, archival work at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Finnish Photography in Helsinki and visits to the Documenta exhibition in Germany, the Venice Biennale and Alvar Aalto’s library in Vyborg, Russia.