UNIVERSITY Lecturer

Cross Disciplinary Capabilities Final Project Lab: Bachelor Thesis Seminar

Cross Disciplinary Capabilities Application Lab: Research Focus “Witnessing”

Cross Disciplinary Capabilities Application Lab: Research Focus “Forecast”

Programme Related Reflection: Situated Epistemology — Reflexive Writing — Visual Analysis

What are the media cultures of self-authorized “people’s” tribunals that render judgments without legal standing?
And which media cultures are specifically prone to be tribunalized?
What are the ethic-aesthetic capacities of tribunals, and which potential dangers derive from tribunalization?

Media theoretically and cultural analytically this seminar investigates contemporary media cultures of tribunals. Furthermore, it examines tribunalization phenomena in media cultures more generally, focusing on “forensic aesthetics” ranging from various forms of witnessing, over evidence procedure, to propagandistic strategies, and activist rhetoric.

Tribunal media cultures & media cultures of tribunals: What are the media cultural conditions of various self-authorized people’s tribunals engaging in truth finding and rendering judgments without legal standing? Differing in context and procedure, the case studies under investigation include socially-engaged tribunalizations hosted by platforms of contemporary arts (e.g., Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes [2021–2022] organized Radha D'Souza and Jonas Staal), theatrical courts (e.g., Wiener Prozesse [2024] or the Kongo Tribunal [2015] initiated by Milo Rau), social movements and civil society activism organized as tribunal (e.g., Tribunal: Unraveling the NSU Complex [2017–]), and global alliances built around tribunal hearings (e.g., International Rights of Nature Tribunal [2014–]).

Tribunalization of and through forensic aesthetics: “Forensic aesthetics” (Weizman 2017) has many facets, which can involve (i) witnessing, (ii) intelligence, (iii) evidence procedures, and (iv) fora of presentation and negotiation. Up for discussion are investigations by actors such as Forensic Architecture / Forensis, bellingcat, and the Center for Spatial Technologies as well as investigative video (art) works and exhibitions by Susan Schuppli and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, operating through forensic aesthetics as both methodology of sensing and making perceptible as well as style, rhetoric, and genre.

This course provides an introduction to concepts and methodological challenges of an art history in a global perspective relevant to understanding the emerging academic-activist field of human rights, arts, and aesthetics. Cultural analyses, close readings, and exhibition visits go hand-in-hand.

I.          Introduction (Readings: Eric Fernie, Caroline Turer and Jen Webb, Johannes Bennke and Amit Pinchevski)
II.         Global and Transcultural Art Histories (Readings: Monica Juneja, David Joselit, Beatrice von Bismarck, Christian Kravagna; Artistic positions i.a.: Mai Ling)
III.       Media Aesthetics, “Aesthetic Regime”, and “Diaspora Aesthetics” (Readings: David Marchiori, Jacques Rancière, Mercer Kobena, Dieter Mersch, W. J. T. Mitchell; Artistic positions i.a.: Black Audio Film Collective, Renée Green, The Otolith Group. M. NourbeSe Philip, Karen Walker)
IV.       Purpose and Functionality of Arts for Social Change (Readings: Vid Simoniti, Shannon Jackson, Claire Bishop; Artistic positions i.a.: Tania Bruguera, Rimini Protokoll, Center for Political Beauty, Skopje Solidarity Collection)
V.         Audio-/Visual Politics of Human Rights and Forensics (Readings: Ariella Azoulay, Sharon Sliwinski, Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, Jennifer Ponce de León; Artistic positions i.a.: Carey Young, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Forensic Architecture)
VI.       Critical Museology and the Exhibition as Forum (Readings: Nora Sternfeld, Avi Feldman; Artistic positions i.a.: Denise Ferreira da Silva, Milo Rau, Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal)

Sessions I and II are designed to contribute to an art historical and media-cultural theoretical literacy, while the terminological knowledge acquired forms the basis for sessions III, IV, and V, relating more closely to critical aesthetic and curatorial engagements with human rights.

*Offered in conjunction with the course Artistic Strategies & Human Rights

The lecture series inquires into the multifaceted terrain of “Freedom of the Arts” from different vantage points, each offering insights into complex contemporary challenges and their historical genealogies. The four evening sessions encompass (i) the international legal framework governing artistic freedom through freedom of expression and cultural rights, presented by Human Rights Expert Manfred Nowak; (ii) a critical exploration of ethical dimensions of the arts, navigating contentious debates on cancel culture and cultural appropriation, led by Art Sociologist Jens Kastner; (iii) an examination of artistic freedom as part of national security implications, with a focus on art subject to court cases in Russia, as unraveled by Art Historian Sandra Frimmel; and (iv) an investigation of digital transformations influencing arts and critical data, as undertaken by Artistic Researcher and Curator Manuela Naveau.

As these researchers delve into their respective domains, the lecture series aspires to spark cross-disciplinary inquiry and transversal dialogue: Which conditions are required for freedom of the arts, and which categories of rights (for an overview, see Polymenopoulou 2023) can guarantee those conditions? Which human rights treaties, codes, and instruments are relevant to the normative aspects of freedom of the arts, and what are their potential limits (see, e.g., the report on the state of artistic freedom by Freemuse 2023)? Which players and infrastructure promote and protect artistic freedom and how (on the role of the UN see, e.g., Cuny 2023)? In what socio-political climate does censorship of the arts thrive and which legitimate interests can be used to argue for a limitation of artistic freedom, balancing different interests? What ethical dilemmas emerge within the art world, and how does the broader cultural landscape grapple with issues of cancel culture and cultural appropriation? And which purpose do the “estrangement defense”, the “canonic defense”, or the “formalist defense” serve in defending the freedom of transgressive arts (Julius 2020)? To what extent are aesthetic judgments rendered when arts are debated in court (see Frimmel/Traumane 2018)? What’s the relation of the outdated distinction in free and applied arts to the “aesthetic model of freedom” (Menke/Rebentisch 2010) that developed with the discipline of Ästhetik as a sub-discipline to art history? In an era defined by digital transformation, what prospects and challenges arise for artists who intervene in algorithmic “pattern discrimination” (Apprich/Cramer/Chun/Steyerl 2018) and engage in a critical approach to data? The lecture series revolves around these questions, seeking to foster a deeper understanding of freedom of the arts through, among others, case study research, critical theoretical debate, and discourse analysis.

Convenor: Lisa Stuckey

The goal of this mentoring is to guide students through their process of developing an individual form of presentation, tailored to their artistic/artistic-research/curatorial-research/cultural-production practice.

Psychoanalytic approaches by Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and Jacques Lacan are infused with imperial-colonial self-understandings. These range from Eurocentric practices of “othering” to parallelizations between neurotics and “primitives.” However, instead of looking solely at the postcolonial critique of psychoanalysis, the seminar also directs the focus to its productive-critical reception in anti-imperial and anti-racist writings. On basis of close readings of transversally received publications, the seminar inquires into the contemporary relevance of the analytical concepts and methods developed therein — both for a decolonial psychoanalytic cultural theory and for attempts to decolonize psychoanalysis:

I. In Freud and the Non-European (2003), Edward W. Said subjects Freud’s late work to a “contrapuntal reading” to illuminate ambivalences of national identity construction. 
II. Black Skin, White Masks (French, 1952) by Frantz Fanon argues for a revision of psychiatric discourses to recognize the alienation of colonized subjects as a systemic problem and to take socio-economic realities into account.
III. In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi K. Bhabha deals with the dialectic of Western Enlightenment ideals and the genesis of “blacks” in the colonies. He uses psychoanalysis as a theoretical tool to study unconscious mechanisms in colonial structures and to deconstruct modern linear narratives of progress.
IV. In Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), Linda Tuhiwai Smith analyzes Western-influenced approaches to ethnographic research in a power-sensitive way and emphasizes the importance of indigenous knowledge practices.
V. In Colonialidad del Poder (2000), Aníbal Quijano addresses the entanglement of modernity/coloniality from a Marxist perspective. In the concept pf raza he recognizes a “mental category of modernity” that has served to legitimize exploitative relations since the colonization of the Americas to the present day.
VI. In Nomadic Theory (2011), Rosi Braidotti invokes the Freudian-critical “schizoanalysis” developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to formulate a nomadic-posthuman subjectivity that is significant for anti-imperial thought and affirmative critique.

Keywords: Dark Heritage | Decolonization | Knowledge Systems | Critique of National Identity | Indigenous Methodologies | Modernity | Poststructuralist and Postmodern Cultural Theory | Psychoanalysis | Restorative Justice

The seminar is dedicated to a selection of transversally received debates and publications since the 2000s that have made artist, media and cultural scientific methods the subject of their research, theory-building, and critique. In addition to their diagnostic-critical approach, the selected power-sensitive methodologies aim to deconstruct, decolonize, counteract, unlearn, or develop a new methodology.

Each unit consists of a close reading of selected texts in combination with the visual and conceptual analysis of an exhibition, video work, or artistic work (by Fareed Armaly, Constanze Ruhm, Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, and Omer Fast, amongst others). The seminar is structured in seven thematic areas of focus:

I. Photographic Tracing and Montage (with texts by Georges Didi-Huberman)
II. Visual Hauntings and Spectrality (with texts by Esther Peeren)
III. Useful Images and Media Cultural Evidence (with texts by Ralf F. Nohr)
IV. Iconicity and Modeling of Media Architectures (with texts by Sabine Ammon and Inge Hinterwaldner)
V. Self-Documentation and Counterforensic Intelligence (with texts by Eyal Weizman)
VI. Decolonialization of Archives (with texts by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay)
VII. Artistic-Intellectual Topologies (with texts by Mieke Bal)

Keywords: Artistic-Research Topologies | Critical Methodologies | Useful Images | Visual Cultures

How do language architectures, theory fragments, and text display manifest themselves in “the curatorial” (Beatrice von Bismarck 2021) of contemporary research-based exhibitions (increasingly encountered since the 2000s) of institutions and platforms with a socio-politically engaged profile? Beyond classifiable text types, language has been experienced in its materiality and mediality at least since the conceptual arts of the 1960s. But also in the architectural structuring of an exhibition, language can play a central role in or as display. These different aspects will be examined on two levels:

I. Level of the text — commonplaces, theoretical fragments, unexpected connections: In artists’ and curators’ statements, catalog essays, glossaries, biographies, exhibition reviews, etc., quotations and theory fragments are used in a scholarly, essayistic, or poetic manner. References to commonplaces can be thoroughly clichéd or stereotypical. Conversely, unexpected connections might be discerned:
• In what relationship do the respective texts place special case, example, and meta-level?
• How are formal and contextual work analyses linked with discourse analyses?
• Which theoretical and conceptual work is required for an art-scientific examination of art exhibitions and curatorial practices more generally?

II. Level of linguistic architecture — display: At the level of display (which orders showing, exhibiting, and negotiating or becomes a work itself) language often enters into a special relation with display: language architectures can consequently fulfill structural-conceptual, performative, or didactic functions.

Different theoretical and methodological approaches of multidisciplinary (audio-)visual culture studies will be presented in order to conduct context-reflexive, power-sensitive, and critical image, work, exhibition and discourse analyses.

Keywords: Curatorial | Display | Textual Materiality | Research-Based Exhibition | Theory-Architecture

Psychoanalysis has a large unconscious. This includes the many repressed cultural theorists and ethnologists who, with the emergence of the discipline, tried to add a social dimension to the analysis of the ego. Their history of repression begins with the tragic fate of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth: Although the first child and adolescent therapist, she was killed by her foster son in 1924 and thereupon became a lay analyst; her work is hardly known to this day. Wilhelm Reich met a similar fate when he tried to take psychoanalysis in the direction of a mass analysis. Because of his communist-influenced theories, he was suspended from the International Psychoanalytic Association, which Sigmund Freud had co-founded, in 1934. In 1957 Reich died in an American prison. Until today, his reflections on the connection between fascism, family, and sexuality have not become canonical.
The seminar wants to trace these persons who have been erased from psychoanalysis by means of a cultural-theoretical close reading of exemplary texts: among others by Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Wilhelm Reich as well as Otto Gross. Against this background, the seminar asks:

• Why are the politically engaged analysts with a focus on culture and society excluded?
• Why was ego-analysis in its beginnings not allowed to become a we-analysis?
• Which cultural-scientific and ethnological insights threatened to call it into question altogether?

Keywords: Exclusion from the Canon | Feminism | Lay Analysis | Marxism | Psychoanalysis | Socialism

This term the course on Current Art focuses on time-based media (film, video, animation, etc.) and formats including artistic and curatorial approaches to exhibition making. When art institutions are understood as “time machines” that borrow dramaturgical logics from theaters (N. Hirsch 2014), how do exhibitions program and reimagine futures? And which critique does this trend receive, for example from the authors of the Futurity Report (eds. E. C. H. de Bruyn and S. Lütticken, 2020)?

In discourses on the crisis of reality futures can be located between intergenerational debt (E. Esposito 2014), darkened states (T. Macho 2011), loss (M. Fisher 2014), and pro- and regressive potentials of counter-futurisms (K. Eshun 2003). Thinking in future scenarios ranges from science fiction to economic forecasts and activist trainings for the future (J. Staal).

Questions to be reflected upon are:
• Why, in a paradigm of change, is engaged political art nowadays expected to intervene in or even improve the future?
• How can an art-theoretical analysis combine postcolonial and institutional critique of longue durée with sociological insights and mathematical calculations of the near-future in the (virtual) exhibition, as an intellectual and conceptual medium?

Keywords: Film & Time-Based Media | Futurism & Counter-Futurism | Scenario-Thinking | Virtual Exhibition

What is an example in “exemplary art scientific work”? An example, a model. This can become the starting point for further insights ‘about’ and ‘with’ art. And how does the example relate to the case?
Formal and contextual work analysis constitutes an integral basis of art historical work. For cultural studies, too, the trans- and non-disciplinary case study and its narrative are formative. In philosophy, on the other hand, three methods of interpretation can be roughly defined, each of which places the exemplary and the meta-level in a different relationship to one another: (i) induction (empiricism), (ii) deduction (transcendentalism), and (iii) transduction. The latter is a concept of Gilbert Simondon, who with the “aesthetic intention” coined a figure of thought to be made productive for art studies. Because transductive transgressions can be discerned in contemporary artistic, art theoretical, and curatorial methods and approaches, the following practical as well as theory-political questions arise:
• How can unexpected or even unheard-of connections be drawn between seemingly disparate things, materials, practices, theories, etc., in one’s own scholarly research?
• Which (new) systems of order complement and cross the familiar categories of genres, epochs, and styles, and how does this change (contemporary) art studies?

Keywords: Critical Art-Scientific Methodologies | Example & Meta-Level | Transduction

Each question requires its own investigative modes. Based on exemplary texts and practical examples, methods of working in art and cultural studies will be presented and discussed: including archival research, conceptual work, close/distant reading, field research, modeling and mapping, participant observation, as well as formal and contextual work analysis.
Relevant points of reference include the handbook Über die Praxis des kulturwissenschaftlichen Arbeitenens (eds. U. Frietsch and J. Rogge, 2013). Furthermore, the discursive and practical self-understandings of art studies are to be explored under reference to the anthologies ‘Global Art History’: Transkulturelle Verortungen von Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft (eds. J. Allerstorfer and M. Leisch-Kiesl, 2017) and The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History (ed. K. Brown 2020).
Moreover, the course zooms in on methodological debates since poststructuralism that challenge scholarly conventions by targeting the interplay between form and content in the emergent field of artistic research.

Keywords: Formal & Contextual Work Analysis | Global Art History | Transculturality as Methodology

This term the course Current Art focuses on contemporary art exhibitions and the question of what remains of them. Through which media can we engage with them in retrospect? On the one hand, documentations by art institutions and spaces themselves may consist of photographs, videos, curatorial texts, speeches, etc. Additionally, their varied publication-formats and mediation-programs leave traces, such as guided tours, workshops, podcasts, and symposia. On the other hand, journalistic, artistic, and audience-related forms of publicities exist. In order to look at these arrangements, each week a specific exhibition stands in focus, based on various virtual archives. These material-based case-studies are discussed in relation to relevant theoretical debates of the contemporary arts linked to practices.

Therefore, each module is dedicated to a specific practice:

I. THEORIZE: founding myths of contemporary art
II. CURATE: new programs & formats in art institutions
III. TRANSGRESS: political-aesthetic spheres
IV. DECOLONIZE the art system
V. FEEDBACK a: quantification in the arts
VI. FEEDBACK b: instant art-critique
VII. REHEARSE a: replay
VIII. REHEARSE b: reenact.

This procedure is based on the observation that instead of a focus on media-specificity, art-historical genres or styles a focus on practices and their agendas allows a deeper understanding of contemporary arts.

Keywords: Contemporary Art Theory | Archiving the Exhibition & Digital Remains | Curatorial Epistemology