Call for research: Stedelijk Studies Journal issue 14

The postwar artistic ecosystem of Amsterdam has often been characterized by its diverse international perspectives facilitated through Dutch institutions. For issue 14 of the Stedelijk Studies Journal we aim to critically reframe discussions on global art and the “transnational” with the question: what might a decolonized understanding of transnational and transcultural Amsterdam, and the Netherlands more broadly, look like?

Such a framework and critical orientation might attend to how the art world’s contemporary embrace of the “global” has been part and parcel of neoliberal extraction, as much as it has drawn more attention to collaborations across borders that have advanced modern and contemporary art experimentation. Yet it also opens up the possibility of drawing attention to long-neglected histories of the Netherlands in parallel with developments in art or design, and decolonization and independence movements in Indonesia, Suriname and the Antilles. In the present, contemporary artist collectives use the possibilities of intersectional environments or virtual platforms to indicate new avenues of global engagement.  

In our call for research, we invite proposals that examine artists, collectives, exhibitions, and spaces (independent and institutional) that reconsider the transnational histories and present nows of art in Amsterdam and the Netherlands. We seek ideas that address the complex, alternative, artistic and curatorial experiments that concentrate on a diverse range of practitioners in the postwar and contemporary era, many of whom hailed from countries in the Global South and outside of Europe. Complementing previous issues of Stedelijk Studies Journal on global art history and museum practice such as issue 1 “Collecting Geographies: Global Programming and Museums of Modern Art,” issue 6 “The Borders of Europe,” and issue 9 “Modernism in Migration,” issue 14 will ask how might artistic-research and emerging scholarship further complicate our very notion of the transnational as an art-historical paradigm and/or method—and, indeed, “Dutch” as a stable signifier of national identity for cultural practitioners?

Topics could include, but are not limited to:
–International, transnational and/or itinerant artists who were decisive to Amsterdam and/or the Netherlands from 1945 to the present.
–Alternative, independent or institutional art spaces, associations and networks working across artistic and political solidarity with the Netherlands.
–Transnational and international exhibition histories in Dutch museums and art spaces.
–Institutional and state-funded initiatives (for example, Dutch Visual Arts Program, Jan van Eyck Academie, De Appel) that abet international artistic activity in the Netherlands.
–New conceptualizations and forms of transnationalism in Dutch collections and across other contexts.
–Processes of artistic decolonization and migration from former Dutch colonies.
–Historic and present practices of artistic mobilization around sexuality and gender. 
–Transnational, exilic or diasporic experiences of artists in the Netherlands from the former colonies or other locations in the Global South.

The Stedelijk Studies Journal is a high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Issue 14 will be co-edited by Dr. Elize Mazadiego and Dr. Daniel Quiles, with Dr. Charl Landvreugd serving as editor-in-chief.

The journal comprises research related to the Stedelijk collection, exploring institutional history, museum studies, and current topics in the field of art and design. All accepted submissions are subject to scholarly or artistic peer review, and all contributors must be open to receive feedback and work collaboratively toward a final version.

As a way to open up the peer-reviewed process further we will compensate published submissions with a fee of 400 EUR (excl. VAT).

Please send abstracts and artistic proposals (max. 300 words and max. 5 images) and CV (merged in one PDF file) to stedelijkstudies@stedelijk.nl by March 20, 2022.

Issue 14 will be published February 2024. 

Out Now: Stedelijk Studies Journal issue 12: “Notes on Diaspora”