2024: Special Issue "'Gesamtkunstwerk' World’s Fair. Revisioning International Exhibitions"

Articles 0300-0312
Guest-edited by Buket Altinoba, Alexandra Karentzos and Miriam Oesterreich
Since their beginnings in the mid-19th century, world's fairs have sought to summarize knowledge about the world by compiling presentations from a variety of fields: technology, machinery, crafts, fine arts, and ethnography. Conceived as a mass spectacle, the exhibits blended into a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. At the same time, they became signifiers of a narrative of technological progress, colonial expansion and artistic innovation. Under the headings 'Gesamtkunstwerk and the Assemblage of Things', 'Technology and Art', 'Gender and Fashion', and 'Colonial Entanglements and Postcoloniality', this special issue focuses on four thematic areas that have so far received little attention in the discourse on world's fairs.