Encounters Beyond the Gallery: Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference

Encounters Beyond the Gallery challenges the terms of their exclusion, looking to relational art, Deleuze-Guattarean aesthetics and notions of perception, as well as anthropological theory for ways to create connections between seemingly disparate worlds. Embracing a unique and experimental format, the book imagines encounters between the art works and art worlds of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tamil women, the Shipibo-Conibo of Eastern Peru and a fictional female contemporary artist named Rikki T, in order to rethink normative aesthetic and cultural categories. Its method reflects the message of the book, and embraces a plurality of voices and perspectives to steer critical attention towards the complexity of artistic life beyond the gallery.

Table of Contents:
Prologue Introduction 1 Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing 2 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Alterity Faction 1 ‘The Raw, the Cooked and the Common Places’ – ‘Rikki T’ at the Serpentine Gallery, Review by ‘Johnny Zucker’ Faction 2 Rikki T and Curator C En Route 3 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Shipibo-Conibo Designs 4 Making Sense of Shipibo-Conibo Designs Faction 3 Itinerant Thoughts – London, Paris, Peru and Elsewhere 5 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Tamil Threshold Designs 6 Making Sense of Tamil Threshold Designs Faction 4 Itinerant Thoughts – Paris, London, Tamil Nadu and Elsewhere Epilogue

About the Author :
Renate Dohmen is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Open University. She was previously Associate Lecturer in Art History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and taught at the World Arts and Artefacts Programme, British Museum & Birkbeck, University of London, as well as at Goldsmith's, University of London. Her research focuses on questions of the global and visual culture in contemporary and colonial contexts.

Review :
'By expanding the concept of the relational into the sphere of culture, Dohmen's ground-breaking and highly original thought experiment enacts a critical model discourse that has the potential to mediate between concurrent aesthetics and diverse cultural actors - including those omitted from the current 'global'.' - Annette Bhagwati, Project Director '100 Years of Now', Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 'Encounters beyond the Gallery is a bold and imaginative exercise in bringing together domains of artistic practice traditionally kept apart by art history's classificatory boundaries. It points to a new methodological direction for a non-convivial dialogue with radical difference. By creatively drawing upon the resources of aesthetic theory and anthropology, Dohmen deploys a redeemed, extended version of relational aesthetics - alter-relationality - to offer a framework for studying contemporary art that unsettles its hegemonic metalanguage. In order to reach out to those art practices that were modernism's backwater utopias and which continue to fall through the net of contemporary art, the book proposes an experimental, performative approach to querying art's new globality and to re-envisaging the relationship between aesthetics, ethnography and art historical practice.', - Monica Juneja, Professor of Global Art History, University of Heidelberg