Images of Europe Beyond Europe

In the context of global exchange processes, this research project focuses on ‘other’ images of Europe. This does not refer to images circulating in Europe, but to those images of Europe that existed in locally and temporally remote places and continue to exist today. The starting point is a concept of Europe that defines Europe not as a homogeneous and stable entity, but as something that is historically (meaning ethnically, geographically, economically, politically, religiously, and socially) in flux, thus acknowledging its fundamental mutability. In other words, ‘Europe’ is to be understood as a dynamic, but also as a relational entity, which needs an outside, an ‘other’, in order to come to an understanding of itself. For this reason, it provokes foreign images of itself to be examined in the context of the project.
The aim of this interdisciplinary endeavor is not so much to counter the self-images of Europe – discussed with much greater frequency and once again under scrutiny in current political debates – with the aforementioned foreign images but to include and integrate them in order to arrive at a more complex and multifaceted view. Furthermore, the aim is to enrich the currently developping approaches to a “Global Art History” with topics and methods recently discussed in the historical sciences and that can be defined as “Entangled Art Histories”.
The latest research results of the project have been published in Blick Richtung Europa? 30 ‘außereuropäische’ Objekte geben Auskunft, ed. Matthias Weiß and Tanja Michalsky, Munich 2024.