MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

                             

M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) and deBuren (the Dutch-Flemish house for culture and debate) were co-convenors of the conference Considering Monoculture (27.02.2020 – 28.02.2020). This two-day interdisciplinary programme considered current and historical manifestations of monoculture as well as its implications for art, culture and its institutions.

The convenors understood monoculture to be the homogeneous expression of the culture of a single social or ethnic group. The conference did not tie monoculture to a specific set of politics or single ideology, and does not set it against the discourse and rhetoric of multiculturalism, which emerged in the 1990s in Western Europe. It did recognise, however that in recent years, the combination of anti-globalisation sentiment, conflict, terror, mass-migration and the perceived counter-hegemony of identity politics, has created the conditions for new forms of identitarianism to emerge. Across Europe and much of the globe, a drive for national monoculture, in which societies are understood through adhering to homogenous racial, cultural, ideological or religious parameters, has entered the mainstream. For some, this raises the question of where the limits of tolerance for cultural diversity in society should lie. For the cultural field, often considered as having a secular, elitist, cosmopolitan and socially-liberal basis, it is no longer enough simply to denounce the tendency towards monoculture as an abhorrent form of intolerance. At the same time, how could the recent turn towards indigenous practices within artistic discourse, as well as the common framings of art via race, ethnicity or other distinctions of identity or marginality, also itself be seen as contributing towards new forms of essentialism? And what space does this leave for genuine debate and exchange across different cultures?