How has the visual shaped modernity and how has modernity shaped the visual? In this module we will explore how cultures around the globe have used visual mediums to imagine themselves as ‘modern’, and how avant-garde and modernist ways of seeing help construct social realities in modernity. Instead of defining modernity in relation to the tension between European metropolitan and peripheral spaces, this module will explore how exchanges between local, global, national, and regional cultures shaped avant-gardism and modernism. For example, how did empire and colonialism structure modern ways of seeing? Conversely, how did colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial cultures use visual forms of representation to challenge colonialism? Rather than moving chronologically from early to ‘high’ modernism, we will move geographically across a range of local spaces and their visual cultures, including Latin America and the Caribbean, North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Jewish diaspora. In this way, we will be driven by the question ‘Where was modernism?’ rather than ‘When was modernism?’