DFG Project

The World’s Fairs of the 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to significant impulses for the histories of art and fashion. Both were fixed components of the national self-presentation at the world’s fairs from the very beginning. This research project will conduct a fundamental revision of art and fashion, for the first time in the context of the world’s fairs. show more

First, the research project will make a significant contribution to a de-centering of art and fashion metropolises. Not only was the world brought together in miniature at the world expositions, but also objects and artifacts from very different areas of technology, handcrafts, the visual arts, and fashion were brought together in a holistic model. Such unifying ideas were reflected in the nineteenth-century concept of a “Gesamtkunstwerk.” World’s fairs created such centers of seeing and showing, and served, for example, to establish Paris as an art and fashion metropolis, distinguishing it from its ‘peripheries,’ such as Latin American representations and colonies, which in contrast were presented as traditional and ‘authentic.’

Second, a central concern of the project is to challenge the constructions of modernity associated with the fairs in the context of a “critical globalism.” Staging ‘modern’ art as related to the ‘national schools’ emerging at the same time was also a way of negotiating artistic metropolitanness and ‘periphery’ in the transnational framework of the world’s fairs. Thus, world’s fairs created a competition over modernity, where the western nations were conceived as industrially, artistically, and fashionably advanced. Latin America in particular, as not yet modern but no longer colonized, take on an ambivalent role in the context of the world’s fairs.

Third, art history and fashion studies thus require a substantially new perspective by approaching the entanglements of the world’s fairs from positions of postcolonial and decolonial theory. Such a theoretical formation is particularly well suited for working out ambivalences, since it uses multiplied views to expand the binary constructions of center and periphery, modernity and tradition. The project breaks new ground working out the “entangled histories” of art and fashion at the world’s fairs against the backdrop of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization.

On the basis of case studies in the two following two main areas, essential knowledge can be gained about how art and fashion are mutually connected in the multi-layered context of the world’s fair: 1. “Fashioning the World” (directed by Prof. Dr. Alexandra Karentzos) will concentrate on the role of fashion and textiles in the globalized context of the artistic exchange at the world’s fairs; and 2. “De-/Colonial Modernities: Representing ‘Peripheries’ at World’s Fairs” (directed by Prof. Dr. Miriam Oesterreich) will focus on the ambivalent position of Latin America as ‘peripheral’ presentations.

Dr. Alejandra Uslenghi is Associate Professor in Latin American literature and culture and Comparative Literary studies at Northwestern University. She specializes in modernist literature and visual culture, with an emphasis on the history of photography, and critical theory and philosophy of the image. show more

She has also researched the visual phenomenon of world fairs both in Europe and the Americas. She is the author of Latin America at fin-de-siècle Universal Exhibitions: Modern Cultures of Visuality (Palgrave, London and New York, 2016); the editor of Walter Benjamin: Culturas de la imagen (Eterna Cadencia, Argentina, 2010) and co-editor of La cámara como método. La fotografía moderna de Grete Stern y Horacio Coppola (Eterna Cadencia, Argentina, 2021).

Her essays on 19th-century visual culture have appeared in Revista Estudios Hispánicos; Revista Hispánica Moderna and more recently in the volume Latin American Literature in Transition, 1870-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Her essays on modern photography have been published in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and newly in The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms (Routledge, London, 2022).

Professor Uslenghi also regularly contributes essays to contemporary Latin American artists and photographers' projects, such as Oscar Muñoz. Invisibilia (Phoenix Art Museum and Hirmer Publishers, 2021); Gonzalo Elvira. Leer el sueño (Centro de Arte de Burgos, 2022) and has written for art catalogs, such as Art – Latin America. Against the Survey (edited and curated by James Oles, Davis Museum and University of Texas Press, 2019) and Who says, Who shows, What counts: Thinking about History with the Block's Collection (Northwestern University, 2021).