Other Art Histories

The Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception at King’s College London has the pleasure to invite you to this talk, accompanied by a screening, on reframing the history of art history, while asking bigger questions about the condition of modernity and the narratives that have shaped it.

What is it like to look at art history sideways, from the perspective of niche practices undertaken in marginalised territories? In this presentation, Gabriel Menotti and German Nunez discuss possibilities of reframing the discipline and its established categories from the Global South, based on their experience of editing the pioneering anthology, Barbarian Currents: Half a Century of Brazilian Media Arts (Open Humanities Press, 2025, open access).

Barbarian Currents gathers more than fifty original texts from Brazilian authors, artists, critics and curators – most of them published in English for the first time. The book advances a compelling sociological approach to the development of arts and technology in Latin America and, arguably, the world.

The talk will be accompanied by a screening of historical Brazilian video art.

Gabriel Menotti is a Brazilian independent curator and filmmaker working across various media. He works as Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. He has published extensively on the subject of images, institutions and technology. His works have been shown at various institutions worldwide, such as the São Paulo Biennial, Centre Pompidou and the transmediale festival. His latest publications are the monograph O filme em circuito (Editora Machado, 2016) and the Barbarian Currents anthology. Menotti is also one of the coordinators of the Besides the Screen research network and festival.

German Alfonso Nunez is a social art historian whose research examines the intersections of contemporary art, social history, technology and visual culture, with a particular focus on Brazil. He received his PhD from the University of the Arts London and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), the University of São Paulo (USP) and Stanford University. He is the co-editor of Barbarian Currents and the editor of the publication marking the 75th anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. Since May 2026, he has been Assistant Professor at the Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Image: Xeroperformance, Paulo Bruscky, 1980