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From their beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, the world's fairs sought to generate a synthesized body of knowledge about the world by gathering an encyclopedic and didactic collection of objects from a wide array of fields: technology, machinery, handicrafts, the visual arts, performance, and ethnography - knowledge made visible and experienced through artifacts sourced from all over the world. This expanded visual experience can also be understood as one that interprets the gaze as a catalyst for a multi-sensory perception and categorization of material culture, of both two- and three-dimensional objects of vision. Thus, these exhibitions not only synthesized 'the world', but they also synthesized arts, handicrafts, architecture, and technology into an imagined Gesamtkunstwerk. The objects and works of art - handcrafted or machine-made - displayed at the world's fairs were conceived as a mass spectacle as they were turned into the signifiers of a narrative - imagined and presented as coherent - of technological progress, colonial expansion, and artistic innovation. The colonized regions were to stand in contrast to this, with ethnographica and handicrafts presented as traditional, 'authentic'. Nevertheless, a complex network of "shared histories" and transnational interconnections became manifest at the world's fairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1886, twelve of Gottfried Lindauer's portraits formed part of the presentation of the British colony New Zealand at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. For the European public, in this context these portraits represented 'Otherness', for they were exhibited -- and in this way 'naturalized' -- together with cultural artefacts, members of the indigenous population performing handcrafts, and specimens of nature in greenhouses. The paintings were functionalized into ethnographic-documentary, 'authentic' representations of Māori culture. Within this exhibition glorifying colonial power, they were turned into objects displaying British scientific knowledge and prestige. This essay reads Lindauer's paintings in the context of nineteenth-century European portraiture, a genre where exotic colonial goods and plants were appropriated as luxury items. The resultant constellation marked by exoticizing self-representation in Europe and exoticizing representation of 'indigenous' Others reveals the uniqueness of Lindauer's work, which defies such a schematic classification of exoticization: the portraits were in part commissioned by Māori who wished a pictorial representation of themselves or their relatives. By presenting the Māori nobly as large-sized figures in the portrait genre, Lindauer's paintings simultaneously offer the scope for various readings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue compiles papers presented at the 2015 "Gottfried Lindauer -- Painting New Zealand" conference organized by the Technische Universität Darmstadt and the Nationalgalerie Berlin. Both the issue and the conference itself constitute an extension of the acclaimed exhibition "Gottfried Lindauer -- The Māori Portraits", shown between 20 November 2014 and 12 April 2015 in the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin, and present an array of scholarly and theoretical perspectives. The essays reflect in microcosm current larger research and archival work and are thus able to place the work of the artist, hitherto discussed mostly in an ethnographic context, into an already globalized framework shaped by transcultural contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]