Workshop
Art History, Epistemic Injustice and Ideological Violence
Workshop organised by Hana Gründler (Research Group Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual KHI-MPI) and Joanna Smalcerz (University of Warsaw/KHI-MPI)
The workshop looks at the concept of epistemic injustice or even violence and its relation to the art historical realm. We are interested in how the criteria of ‘modernity’ shaped the birth of the discipline and how the geographical foci of art history—and the assumptions that come with it—determine the discipline’s epistemologies, which, despite efforts to broaden perspectives and question the canon, often still involve epistemic injustice and violence. On one hand, our interest is informed by the epistemic injustices embedded in the past and present practices of art history and the wider cultural sphere; on the other hand, by the ideological violence exerted upon and through art history and its narratives within various political and social systems of the 20th century. We aim to explore the geopolitics of the art historical discourse from its inception until today, ranging from the distribution of academic interests and the perpetuation of established artistic geographies through research funding policies to the geopolitics of musealization. The workshop will address the following questions, among others: What has served as the basis for the critical evaluation of art historical production, and how have these criteria been shaped by the paradigms and geographies of modernity? What are the consequences of adopting a linear teleology of historical progress in the study of art? Which alternative ways of knowing art—such as those grounded in affective and sensory modalities— have been excluded or actively repudiated? And, finally, how can we confront art history’s ‘epistemological monoculture’?
PROGRAMME
17 October 2025
14.00–14.20
Welcome and Introduction
Hana Gründler and Joanna Smalcerz
Modernisms and Abstractions
14.20–15.00
Valentina Bartalesi
Prehistory as Resistance and Discourse: Material Cultures between Anti-Authoritarian Stances and National Narratives in Anglo-American Modernisms
15.00–15.40
Max Boersma
On the Coloniality of Abstract Art
Break
Political Hegemonies
16.00–16.40
Itay Sapir
Somniferous Epistemic Violence. Introductory Paratexts in Exhibition Catalogues as a Tool of Nation Building
16.40–17.20
César Saldaña Puerto
Totality Repressed: On the Marginalization of Dialectical Thought in Postwar Art Historiography
Break
Geopolitics and Epistemic Biases
17.40–18.20
Katrin Nahidi
Invisible Infrastructures: Oil, Coloniality, and the Epistemic Violence of Art History
18.20–19.00
Foad Torshizi
Of Passions and Obsessions: Contemporary Iranian Art and the Limits of Testimony
Dinner (For speakers only)
20.00–21.00
On the Traces of Art History’s Epistemic Violence. City Walk
18 October 2025
Ideological Framings
9.30–10.10
Nadia Ali
Writing Islamic Art History from the Closet: Oleg Grabar, Russian Orientalism and Affective Genealogies
10.10–10.50
Marco Pomini
Longing for Home: Attending to Islamic Graffiti in the Inquisitorial Prison of Malta
Curatorial Ethics and its Limits
10.50–11.30
Damiana Otoiu
Displaying Epistemic Violence, Enabling Indigenous Voice: The Ambivalent Legacy of “Miscast”
11.30–12.10
Piotr Słodkowski
“We cannot look at these ugly pictures”. Memory of the Holocaust, “The Branded”, and Epistemic Injustice in Poland around 1955
Tea Time (For speakers only)
Modes of Resistance
13.00–13.40
Frida Viktoria Sandström
Deculturalization: Carla Lonzi's Technically Refunctioned Feminism in 1970
13.40–14.20
Miguel Gaete
The Inverted Model: An Argument for an Art History Upside Down and from the Margins
Downloads
17 – 18 October 2025
This event will take place at Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai, Via dei Servi 51, 50122 Florence.
Notice
This event will be documented photographically and/or recorded on video. Please let us know if you do not agree with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz using images in which you might be recognizable for event documentation and public relation purposes (e.g. social media).