Over the last three decades, the term “global” has increasingly been adopted in both theoretical and practical terms across art history and curatorial studies to designate the artistic and intellectual exchanges that have animated artistic and curatorial practice in the past two centuries. Whether materialized in individual practices, local and traveling exhibitions, or large-scale biennials, the term “global” remains a contentious one, weighted by histories of decolonization and postcolonial independence and animated by the phenomenon of globalization. Looking across a selection of art historical perspectives and exhibitions as examples, this talk will place pressure on the term “global” and consider its applicability to artistic and curatorial practices in the present.

BIO

Tausif Noor (he/him/his) is a critic, curator, and PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His criticism and essays appear in journals and periodicals including Artforum, Art History, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker, as well in various exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. He is the recipient of the 2023 Grace Dudley Prize for Art Writing and a 2022 Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation Grant for Short Form Writing. Noor has worked in curatorial capacities at the ICA Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum, and the Imperial War Museum in London. He is currently Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where he co-curated the collection exhibition To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)Permanent Collection and, with Matthew Villar Miranda, the 55th Annual UC Berkeley MFA Exhibition The Currents Beneath, and also helped mount the exhibitions Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread, Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, and MATRIX 286: Amol K Patil – A Forest of Remembrance. With Victoria Sung, he is at work on a forthcoming retrospective of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and its accompanying exhibition catalogue.