Encounters Beyond the Gallery

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.

• PrologueIntroduction1Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing2Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural AlterityFaction 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 Route3Voices: Dossier of Texts on Shipibo-Conibo Designs4Making Sense of Shipibo-Conibo DesignsFaction 3 Itinerant Thoughts – London, Paris, Peru and Elsewhere5Voices: Dossier of Texts on Tamil Threshold Designs6Making Sense of Tamil Threshold DesignsFaction 4 Itinerant Thoughts – Paris, London, Tamil Nadu and ElsewhereEpilogue

'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