Encounters Beyond the Gallery

'By expanding the concept of the relational into the sphere of culture, Dohmen's ground-breaking and highly original thought experiment enacts a critical model discourse that has the potential to mediate between concurrent aesthetics and diverse cultural actors - including those omitted from the current 'global'.' - Annette Bhagwati, Project Director '100 Years of Now', Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 'Encounters beyond the Gallery is a bold and imaginative exercise in bringing together domains of artistic practice traditionally kept apart by art history's classificatory boundaries. It points to a new methodological direction for a non-convivial dialogue with radical difference. By creatively drawing upon the resources of aesthetic theory and anthropology, Dohmen deploys a redeemed, extended version of relational aesthetics - alter-relationality - to offer a framework for studying contemporary art that unsettles its hegemonic metalanguage. In order to reach out to those art practices that were modernism's backwater utopias and which continue to fall through the net of contemporary art, the book proposes an experimental, performative approach to querying art's new globality and to re-envisaging the relationship between aesthetics, ethnography and art historical practice.', - Monica Juneja, Professor of Global Art History, University of Heidelberg