European Canon and Contemporary Artists’ Moving Image

The European Canon Through a Global Lens examines how contemporary artists working in video and photography engage with canonical Western fine art and its institutions. Drawing on a diverse corpus of works by global artists from East Asia, Europe, the African diaspora, and the Middle East, the book maps the centrifugal and centripetal forces operating around the European canon as a persistent hegemonic core. These forces do not alternate or contradict one another; they act concurrently, generating the turbulent conditions within which global artists navigate their relationship to Western cultural tradition. The result is a dynamic body of artistic rewritings that negotiates Eurocentrism through aesthetic intervention rather than rejection.