GAM – Global Art and the Museum was initiated by Peter Weibel and Hans Belting in 2006 at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. The project represents a first attempt at documenting the contested boundaries of today’s art world; its aim is to spark a debate on how the globalization process changes the art scene and to undertake a critical review of the development 20 years after its onset.

Globalization is the most important phenomenon in the history of recent art. Biennials and landmark exhibitions initiated the global turn in the art scene when the so-called New World Order removed Cold War restrictions and not only introduced international free trade with all its implications, but also shifted the attention from a bi-polar political conflict to new ideas of cosmopolitanism or multiculturalism after 1989.

In 2011 the project culminated in the exhibition The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989. By means of artistic approaches and documentary materials, the exhibition  examines the way in which globalization, both with its pervasive mechanisms of the market and its utopias of networking and generosity, impacts upon the various spheres of artistic production and reception. The critical analysis of the key institutions and dispositives of the art world seeks to illustrate the manner in which globalization has both shaped and itself become a theme in artistic production that intentionally creates and reviews its own conditions and parameters.

Download exhibition brochure for free

The exihibtion was shown from Sept. 17, 2011 – Feb. 5, 2012 in ZKM I Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe. A catalogue to The Global Contemporary will be published in Summer 2012. In the meanwhile, you can download the exhibition brochure with introductions to the exhibition’s concepts and texts on all of the shown work here:  http://global-contemporary.de/en/documentation.