Journal of Global Studies & Contemporary Art

Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo

The Journal of Global Studies & Contemporary Art is a web-based, peer-reviewed publication associated to the Art,Globalization,Interculturality research group at the Department of Art History, Faculty of History and Geography, University of Barcelona.

Its main research objective is to analyze visuality, contemporary artistic practice and intercultural conflict through a global perspective, in the context of the cultural impact of globalization in the so-called late modern period. This approach implies an academic reformulation of critical frameworks and current methodologies in order to foster greater interdisciplinary exchange. The unit’s specific research objectives are: to establish a systematic study of the phenomena of conflict within visual cultures in the global era; and to analyze the contradictions inherent to globalizing processes of culture in the area of artistic practice. Specifically, the group aims to create a space to foster dialogue between the concepts of “visual studies” and “interculturality”, as well as the fields of art history and cultural studies.

Upcoming Journal

Recently critical theories and contemporary artistic practices use the concept of “visual translation” in the process of transmission and reception of contemporary art. The interest in translation, from a transcultural and global perspective, has brought about new approaches to historical artefacts in art history research, leading to an ever-increasing dissolution of boundaries between the various disciplines of art history. Many theories bring Art History, Political Philosophy, Visual Studies, and Translation Studies together to shape a new methodology. Nevertheless, the concept of translation has been articulated as a hermeneutical means to understand the complexity of contemporary works of art in which text and image coexist. It is also true that recent intuitions – especially coming from world art theorists – aimed to establish connections between arts and translation. Yet within critic theory there has never been a concrete research work with the purpose to identify the status quaestionis of a long-time neglected but crucial topic: visual translation.

Current studies of the vision motivate us to use the term visual translation not only to refer to a theoretical comparison between the arts and literature or linguistics (as in the case of ekphrasis and in general of the interartistic phenomena) but also to interpret, through new readings and methodologies, contemporary artistic phenomena, whose conceptual axes are identity, society, territory and politics.

In this context, the act of interpreting arises from the need to decode the work of art in relation to the historical and geographical context in which it was produced, but also in relation to the context in which its reception takes place. In a global world, however, many works of art seem to remain within an intellectual oblivion given by the difficulty of understanding and deciphering them. The concept of visual translation is therefore related to a hermeneutical notion that reflects on the complexities of the contemporary artistic artifact, but also with an epistemological attempt at reflection on the cultural and linguistic exchanges that take place between subjects and international events. In the era of the globalization of art, its public is heterogeneous, mobile, unpredictable, diasporic, hybrid. Visual translation, therefore, falls within the broader scope of visual communication, the transmission of messages, the means used as vehicles of information and consequently the way of receiving and decoding them culturally.

Our interests seek to investigate new and original approaches on the issues of cultural and visual translation as a metaphor for the complex and fascinating relation between societies, languages, and disciplines. As a metaphor, translation can include any visual process. That is why you need to detect some tropes in the relationship between translation and art. To use familiar terminology for translation studies, we could call these issues “contact zones” in which to find the affinities and interferences between translation and visual production.