Pazooki, Leila »Moments of Glory« (2010). Installation view. Detail. © Leila Pazooki

What Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin were actually looking for was a digital Mash Up capable of narrating a visual world history in 100 seconds. What their computers then found after having evaluated over 15.000 items of historical data from the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia and locating them on a world map, was something else: were one to ask this global internet databank, it would then take, from the earliest registered event, more than 1.100 years before something of historical relevance beyond Europe would happen. In the humanities, the idea that history is able to describe the world with 'pure vision', that it is neutral and objective, has long been controversial. However, in modern art history nobody asks whose history of art one is, in fact, writing.

Today, by contrast, the question Is this your history? is frequently present in art: hence, Caribbean artist Tirzo Martha enquires whether his art tells his own history, or whether that of another co-authors his conception of art when, for example, in The Invasion of The Netherlands supported by Chavez (2008) he incorporates the heritage of colonialism into his installations with Ikea furniture. The question about whether one may still produce contemporary art without being obliged to demand the recognition of the western art world is the question Iranian artist Leila Pazooki poses in her work Moments of Glory (2010). The neon letters of her light installation oscillate between ridicule and capitulation, between the icons of the western art world and the artists of the peripheries. At the same time, the dubiousness of national or cultural categories always becomes evident where common, 'born-in'/'based-in' formulations in the biographies of contemporary artists trip up art criticism. And when observing the way in which the museums throughout the world are barely capable of asking curators throughout the world as to the art worlds of the world, then the question fundamentally raises itself as to who, today, may legitimately talk about whose history of art.