Doctorates

  • Clara Alisch: Transgressive Transformations: (Queer) Feminist Dialogues in Mother*hood, Care Work and Re/Production (working title)

    “The capacity to care is fluid” (Henrot, 2023: 57), states French artist Camille Henrot – thus formulating a central assumption of my dissertation project: care is not a fixed, gender-determined area of responsibility, but rather a fluid, politically contested and socially structured process.

    From my situated perspective as a longstanding occupational health nurse, fine artist, art historian and mother*, I examine how care work and mother*hood can be conceived, shaped and transformed beyond normative notions.

    The research project Transgressive Transformations examines the way in which care work as a culturally, economically and politically shaped practice can not only be made visible but also be transformed. The analysis of structural inequalities – with regard to gender, class and race – that are historically inscribed in patriarchal re/production relations and prolonged in current care practices forms the starting point of my project. I am particularly interested in how alternative models can challenge these inequalities. At issue is not only recognition and fair remuneration but also the question of who can, should or may give care – and under which conditions.

    The title refers to a double movement: the crossing of normative borders (transgression) and the active reshaping of social relations (transformation). Based on a relational, dynamic conception of mother*hood as a figure of thought, my project connects (queer) feminist care theories, post-capitalist labour models, intersectional and decolonial perspectives, as well as artistic and activist practices.

    A special focus is placed on the question of how non-normative care practices – e.g. collective and resistant care communities, elective affinities or collaborative labour and models of commons – can be made tangible in theory and practice. I explore both institutional barriers and emancipatory practices and raise the question of possible concrete actions: What forms of care re-organisation can create more just conditions? How can the precarisation and (in)visibility of care work be broken open through artistic and social interventions – also from a cross-cultural perspective?

    Despite existing artistic and theoretical debates, questions remain: Why have feminist artistic positions on mother*hood long remained inaccessible in their existence and why do they continue to be (in)visible in institutional structures? As a researcher, how can I avoid contributing to this (in)visibility myself? And how can this be addressed from the perspective of art? At the same time, the question arises as to why care is often addressed in art, but rarely recognised as a structurally effective, institutionally anchored practice – and how artistic research can contribute to bridging the gap between representation and lived, political practice. 

    The methodological approach to my research is based on the Collective Care Labs that I have developed. In these participatory formats, I collaborate with actors from the fields of care, art and activism to test and reflect upon alternative forms of care. The focus is on collective knowledge processes, affective resonance spaces and shared worlds of experience. The artistic experimental setups not only serve as a means of representation, but also enable concrete negotiation processes – care is collectively questioned, made tangible and further developed. An essential component of my research is my artistic practice – understood as a situated, affective and dialogically oriented form of knowledge production. My works create spaces for listening, remembering and speaking, in which care and reproductive work are individually reflected upon and collectively negotiated. This creates spaces of resonance in which personal experiences relate to social narratives. It is exemplified in multimedia works such as Lactoland (2021–2023), in which sensory elements such as taste or touch are used to access topics such as breastfeeding or mother*hood. Viewers are invited to take a position, share experiences and connect with others. This form of situating (Haraway 1988) – making subjective points of view visible – replaces supposed objectivity with relational knowledge. 

    By making myself visible in the work, openness to other perspectives is created – especially to marginalised or precarious voices. Artistic practice thus becomes a place of exchange, reflection and collective thinking – and contributes to making care visible as a socially negotiable, transformable space. In this way, my project grasps care not only as an object of theoretical analysis, but as a shared experiential practice – with the aim of developing new perspectives, understandings and spaces of possibility for care work.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick (University of the Arts Bremen)
    Prof. Dr. Sigrid Adorf (Zurich University of the Arts)

  • Antoine Chessex: Echoing The Unheard: Listening against sound-in-itself (working title)

    Echoing as a cultural-analytical mode of listening and sonic practice forms the core of the present dissertation project. The study constitutes an exploration of artistic practices engaging with sound that unfold as a critical echo to modernist auditory cultures of the so-called Western avant-garde. Through attentive listening as a cultural-analytical methodology, the project traces the development of sonic practices in both past and present artistic fields. By doing so, the dissertation project provides a theoretical grounding for echoing as a mode of cultural analysis and sonic practice.

    The echo is initially understood on a material level as a physical phenomenon that encompasses moments of reflection and diffraction (Barad 2003; Goh 2017). The physical and symbolic dimensions of the echo, which are articulated together in such diffraction, form the foundation of echoing, which is conceived here as a mode of listening characterised by specific power-critical orientations. This mode of listening attends to social and extra-sonic dimensions, and to questions such as who is (un)heard, who initiates speech, and who is aurally (in)significant (Henriques/Rietveld 2018: 276). Drawing on postcolonial theory, the focus is not only on who speaks – or what or who is granted an artistic voice – but also on who listens (Spivak 1990). Using the echo as both an analytical metaphor and a mode of listening, the project aims to articulate alternative conceptual positions that challenge and rearticulate dominant formations of (auditory) knowledge production.

    Within this context, the dissertation pursues the following research questions:

    • What does the modernist sound concept in the Western avant-garde – as “sound-in-itself” (Kim-Cohen 2009: 295) – mean for the social construction of a universalist listening subject? Which artistic voices are rendered inaudible by this conception?
       

    • How do selected critical and/or postcolonial sonic practices relate to the modernist concepts of sound and listening? How does sonic agency (LaBelle 2018) unfold as a form of echo(ing)?
       

    • How can echoing function as a cultural-analytical method and conceptual figure for the analysis of sound artworks that shift modernist modes of listening?

    To analyse the practice of echoing, three sound-art historical contexts are examined as exemplary case studies:

    (1) the emergence of dominant modernist positions and the marginalisation of other sonic-artistic voices within the Western avant-garde (ca. 1950s);

    (2) early critiques of modernist listening in sonic practices (ca. 1970s);

    (3) explorations of the possibilities of alternative and critical listening within contemporary sonic practices (present).

    The analysis focuses on six exemplary sonic practices (two from each period), which together form the analytical corpus in the form of audio recordings, video documentation, and performance transcripts. The artistic examples at the centre of this analysis reflect an unstable transhistorical continuum that traces the emergence of the Western avant-garde and its (critical) transformation beyond the twentieth century. Practices of echoing sustain a critical engagement with the origins of the Western avant-garde. They refuse to reproduce the same elsewhere and instead insist on the necessity of producing differences (Goh 2017). Echoing is thus conceived as a mode of listening through which critical perspectives are articulated and situated within sonic practices.

    To establish echoing at the intersection of sound studies and cultural analysis, the study proceeds from the construction of modernist auditory cultures to analyse their various echo-like counterparts. Through the analysis of sonic practices, echoing is concretized as a cultural-analytical mode of listening, in which specifically situated artistic voices, the sonic medium, the context of production, the symbolic (re-)interpretation of histories, and the positions of the listener are produced within a complex network of differences, relations, and interdependencies.

    Barad, Karen. ‘Posthumanist Performativity. Toward an Understanding of How Matter
    Comes to Matter’. Signs 28/3, 2003: 801–831.
    Goh, Annie. ‘Sounding Situated Knowledges: Echo in Archaeoacoustics’. Parallax 23, no. 3 (3 July 2017): 283–304. 
    Henriques, Julian F. and Rietveld, Hillegonda. ‘Echo’. In: Michael Bull,   Routledge
    Companion to Sound Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.
    Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Towards a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. New York: Continuum, 2009.
    LaBelle, Brandon. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018.
    Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, London and New York: Routledge, 1990.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Sigrid Adorf (Zurich University of the Arts)
    Prof. Dr. Karin Harrasser (Linz University of the Arts)

  • Simon Graf: Past, Materiality, Landscape. A Contemporary History of the Anti-Tank Obstacles in Switzerland since the 1990s

    In the 1990s, thousands of anti-tank obstacles along with other fortification structures for the territorial defence strategy of the Swiss Army became obsolete. More than 13,000 objects were liquidated as part of the army reform “Armee 95” following the end of the Cold War. The decommissioned bunkers and anti-tank barriers not only stood for a military dispositif in the “short 20th century”, but as objects in the Swiss landscape also symbolised a certain national self-image of military preparedness and independence. The liquidation was accompanied by the interdepartmental working group “Natur- und Denkmalschutz bei militärischen Kampf- und Führungsbauten” (“Nature and Monument Protection in Military Combat and Command Structures”) that inventoried the fortifications and classified them according to monument conservation and ecological criteria. In parallel to the fortifications becoming monuments, intensive historical-political debates began in Switzerland on the relationship between Switzerland and the Second World War, leading to a repositioning of the country to its own past.

    This historical situation created an interpretational openness towards the obsolete fortifications, which the PhD project takes as a starting point to raise questions about the history and shift in meaning of the anti-tank obstacles since they were decommissioned. While the bunkers soon aroused the interest of science and art, the anti-tank barriers often remained under the radar as visible but unpretentious objects in the Swiss landscape. Nevertheless, various actors have appropriated the anti-tank obstacles in everyday life, for example, nature preservation organisations, communities, fortress associations, monument conservation, farmers, artists, or neighbours.

    I examine the changes in how anti-tank obstacles have been treated since their decommissioning from three research perspectives: history, landscape and materiality. Firstly, as material relics, the anti-tank barriers have potential historical significance that may or may not be invoked by the actors through their practices and narratives: Do the anti-tank obstacles serve as material repositories of memory that evoke specific memories in the actors? Does the sight of them give rise to historical or cultural reminiscences that are more associative and independent of the object? Or have the actors overwritten the the anti-tank obstacles with new narratives? In which way do references to the past overlap with perspectives relating to present and future and vice versa in the narratives? For example, when the possible museumisation of the objects as cultural heritage is influenced by current object care and aimed at preservation in the future.

    Secondly, the anti-tank obstacles as objects in the landscape are tied to ownership and legal relations and used by different actors. In their practices, such as object care, ecological upgrading, playful appropriation, or artistic reinterpretation, different approaches are revealed that can either not influence each other or stand in conflict with each other. When young people build treehouses, artists install a replica as a sculpture, fortress associations advocate preservation, or a new owner requests a demolition permission, different interests or social positions of the actors become visible. The shift in meaning of the bulky relics since the 1990s is negotiated by those who live with, in and next to the anti-tank obstacles.

    Thirdly, through their specific materiality and spatial presence, the anti-tank obstacles have a landscape-shaping and aesthetic meaning. The former military-historical barriers are now becoming corridors for animals and plants through dwelled and cultivated land. Their linearity opens up space for new uses or separates areas from one another. Their materiality allows certain relationships with plants, animals, people, and other structures, while preventing others. And as formal aesthetic elements, they inspire artists and neighbours alike to recontextualise and decontextualise the anti-tank obstacles through aesthetic practices. For example, by being described as “perfect Land Art” by Olivier Mosset or by being integrated as accessories in garden designs by neighbours. 

    Conceived as a contemporary history of the anti-tank obstacles, the PhD project methodically combines contemporary historical and ethnographic approaches and, as part of the artistic-ethnographic SNSF research project “Materialized Memories in/of the landscape” has a transdisciplinary orientation. Based on interviews, conversations and (video) walks, observations and field notes, as well as visits to archives and source analysis, it asks how and by whom the anti-tank obstacles have been appropriated and reused, and how the treatment of the (young) relics has changed since the 1990s. The past 30 years are understood as a transition phase with a certain interpretational openness, in which different actors negotiate the entangled historical, current and future meanings of the anti-tank barriers with their practices and variety of voices.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Damir Skenderovic, University of Fribourg
    Dr. Sønke Gau, Zurich University of the Arts

    Affiliation:

    The dissertation is affiliated to the Department of Contemporary History of the University of Fribourg. It is written in the frame of the research project Materialized memories in/of the Landscape at the Zurich University of the Arts financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2019–2023).


    Contact

  • Simon Harder: Transformations and Art Education. Negotiating In*Visibilities (completed)

    How can in*visibilities be negotiated? And what does that have to do with dominant social orders? This transdisciplinary project pursues such questions with action-examining, sound-based, semi-fictional, and essayistic methods. 

    The multipart transdisciplinary project seeks a power-critical approach in the field of art education. Situated in the context of postcolonial, heteronormative Switzerland, it seeks to negotiate in*visibilities as abstract categories, as concrete results of sociohistorical processes in their entanglement in the (re)production of social relations of inequality. The project deals with this complexity in several experimental parts. It is a transdisciplinary attempt aiming to constructively intertwine practice and research as mutually challenging, constitutive areas of the field. It connects action-examining, art-based and cultural analytical methods to transdisciplinary experimental trans*formations that have different focuses. The project is oriented towards a “not yet” (Muñoz 2009), a utopia that cannot be achieved but must be pursued, because it is about working towards less violent futures.

    It is part of the research group “Zeichenwerkstatt” that is interested in conceiving and practicing cultural analysis as artistic practice. This PhD project is listed under the title Kunstvermittlung als Verhandlungsraum von UnSichtbarkeiten by the SNSF.

    Thesis defence on 18.05.2020 (Vienna), publication in preparation


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Carmen Mörsch
    Prof. Dr. Sigrid Adorf

    Financing

    Swiss National Science Foundation: March 2015 – February 2018 in the frame of the project Zeichenwerkstatt at the ICS

    PhD project in the frame of the doctorate programme of the Institute for Art Education (IAE) in cooperation with Art and Communication Practices at the Institute of Studies in Art and Art Education of the University of Applied Arts Vienna (“Die Angewandte”).

  • Susanne Hefti: Regressive Architecture Right-wing Populism and Architecture in Switzerland 1960-2020 (completed)

    This project is intended to contribute to the study of the ways in which architecture and politics are intertwined, using right-wing populist narrations and networks as a focal point to assess how deeply their politics affect Switzerland’s political, and thus built environment. It revolves around three main narratives that deal with architecture and urban planning, which are often instrumentalized by the political right – the heartland, right-wing ecologies and exclusive spaces. Following this, three hypothesis are developed: (1) that the positions that right-wing actors have taken in architectural and spatial discourse have significantly influenced the understanding of space in Switzerland; (2) that the influence and network of the populist right-wing actors are reaching deep into the Swiss federalist system and have finally affected the spatial order in very concrete terms, promoting (3) highly constructed, dichotomous, seclusive and exclusive spaces that are characterized by inscriptions of conflicting interests regarding Switzerland’s self-image, heritage conservation and individual financial interests. Furthermore, this space itself is attested a certain performativity. The work aims to examine these interrelations and their determinants in two ways: by engaging with a historical source part and at the same time pursuing a spatial diagnosis in the site studies by the means of documentary photography.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung (ETH)
    Prof. Dr. Sigrid Adorf (Zurich University of the Arts)

    Contact
     

  • Alisa Kronberger: Diffraction Events of the Present. New Materialist Diffractions of Feminist Media Art (completed)

    My dissertation project examines contemporary feminist works of media art against the background of the themes and motifs of early feminist video art of the 1970s. From the perspective of media and art studies, the project addresses a proximity between video art and feminism which was once postulated in an academic and artistic context (Adorf 2008, Osswald 2003, Rollig 2000) and examines their topicality. In view of the orientation towards the differences, continuities and incompatibilities between then and now, my work employ a diffractive method (1) to analyse exemplary video works. The diffractive approach also addresses further persistent dualisms of modernity highly relevant to the feminist debate that, according to theorists and artists, need to be thwarted, traversed and queered: private-public, culture-nature, subject-object, affect-representation etc. Thus, New Materialism (Braidotti 2003, Haraway 1992, Barad 2010, Bennett 2010) comes into focus as the theoretical and methodological framing of my project, which not least attempts to sharpen the question of agential realism (Barad 2012) in regard to video, body and subjectivation processes. The research project is therefore an important contribution to the theoretical and practical positioning of contemporary media art, which in its feminist orientation reflects the status quo of feminisms and current media culture.

    (1) Diffraction describes the physical phenomenon of bending around an obstacle. Donna Haraway introduced the term into critical debate as a counterpoint to the optical phenomenon of reflection, since, contrary to the idea of mirroring and sameness, it is attuned to differences (Haraway 1992: 299f.). Diffraction is therefore characterized by patterns of difference (interference patterns) which, according to Haraway, represent where the effects of differences appear. Following Haraway, Karen Barad for the first time proposed the thought figure of “diffraction” (cf. Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, 2007) as a method of (critical) reading through one another in order to create new insights in a non-hierarchical and non-linear way. A diffractive methodology is understood as a respectful, open and dialogical reading as the relational nature of difference (cf. Bath/Meißner/Trinkaus 2013). Accordingly, it is not about a comparative reading between earlier and present video art with a fixed goal in mind, but about making their relationships tangible.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Angela Krewani, University of Marburg, Germany
    Prof. Dr. Sigrid Adorf, Zurich University of the Arts

    Contact

    To the Publication

  • Ruth Lang: Articulations of the Critique of Artistic-Militant Practices in 21st-Century Contemporary Art (working title)

    Ruth Lang’s PhD project deals with the relationship between art, knowledge and critique following the second phase of institutional critique. Artistic-militant practices within the institutionalised field of globalised contemporary art since the 2000s will be examined. In her PhD project, Lang focuses on the analysis of micro-practices of research and activist art practices in Latin America as well as their contextualisation within the European system of contemporary art. With the aim of shedding light on the question of participating in the production of knowledge as well as the creation of epistemological framework conditions, concrete practices are explored on an affective-sensual level and with regard to their media-related and institutional conditionality.

    The PhD project places the focus on the two international exhibition and research projects Ex Argentina (2003–2006) and The Potosí Principle / Principio Potosí (2010–2011), initiated and co-curated by the artists and curators Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. One of the central goals thus consists in the reappraisal of two case examples that were discussed in the German-speaking countries only fragmentarily and with a focus on their partial realisations in Europe. Against the backdrop of the so-called postcolonial turn in contemporary European art, an expansion of traditional concepts of art requires the identification of new analytical categories that enable an examination of the nexus of power/knowledge/art in the 21st century. In this respect, the contextualisation and comparison of selected case studies are to form the basis of a renegotiation of critique. The theoretical starting point of the examination is Michel Foucault’s conception of critique as a critical attitude and the resulting call to conceive critique as a practice. The explicit inclusion of selected contemporary approaches of post-/decolonial theories from Latin America therefore intends to make a contribution to the critical expansion of European perspectives.


    Ruth Lang is a research assistant at the Zurich University of the Arts in the project “Media and Participation. Between Demand and Entitlement – Participatory Critique as a Transforming and Transversal With” (2018–2021) and PhD candidate in the Art History department of the University of Basel. She has been an associated member of the eikones Graduate School since 2020.
    PhD project at the University of Basel


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Markus Klammer
    Prof.in Dr.in Elke Bippus
    Prof.in Dr.in Liliana Gómez

    Financing:

    Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF: “Media and Participation. Between Demand and Entitlement – Participatory Critique as a Transforming and Transversal With” (2018–2021)

     

  • Carla Peca: Cracks, collapses and decay: Narrative strategies of creating and coping with contingency (1947-1972) (working title)

    While architectural modernism responded to the accelerated flow of movement in the industrial world with structural calculations and constructions and set itself the goal of channeling and directing them, scenes of destruction were at the same time projected onto the built environment through the cultural imaginary. The numerous descriptions of inexplicable formations of cracks and unforeseen collapses in literary and cinematic narratives of the post-war period testify to a conflict between the structural engineering efforts to minimize contingency experiences and the simultaneous creation of new moments of error-proneness as well as the human failure to subordinate themselves to the rules of use of their own design objects and technologies. With Ingeborg Bachmann's «Ein Ort für Zufälle», Giuseppe de Santis' Roma Ore 11 and Boris Vian's L'écume des jours, the fictionalized cities of Berlin, Rome and Paris are chosen as exemplary settings for Western European modernity.

    The filmic or literary scenes of ruptures, collapses and decays refer to a broader cultural, social and political confrontation with experiences of contingency and show an uncertainty that is spreading in the face of the modern world. It is only in the fragmentary and multi-perspective narratives in the realm of the imaginary and fiction that an aesthetic translation of this experience takes place, which can be analyzed through close reading. In the scenes of crack formations and collapses, physical and social forces become visible that influence the build and social structures and can activate a destructive potential. They deal with a classic sociological controversy: between statics and dynamics, between calculation and indeterminacy, between structures that shape society and the unpredictability of human dynamics.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Elke Bippus (Zurich University of the Arts)
    Prof. Dr. Laurent Stalder (ETH Institute for Technology in Architecture)

  • Pascale Schreibmüller: queer archives of stillborn (m)others – subjectivation in loss

    Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, asks Maggie Nelson. The project queer archives of stillborn (m)others examines more specifically subjectivations of ‘unproductive’ pregnancy, i.e. pregnancy that does not give birth to a living child or pregnancy that gives birth to a so-called ‘unviable child’: What subject constitutions accompany the non/motherhood of stillborn children and so-called unviable children? And which specific aesthetic-relational practices of (not) showing, (not) hearing, remembering, and speculating play a part in it?

    The transdisciplinary artistic PhD project is dedicated to archives, aesthetics and subjectivations of stillborn (m)others. The project starts with historical source material from the 1960s to 1990s: testimonies from midwives and physicians, materials from obstetrics, parental counselling and the women’s movement, conversations with contemporary witnesses. The temporal focus is based on the paradigm shift in obstetrics that led to greater importance being attached to the grieving process after stillbirths from the late 1980s onwards. In a fundamental research part, I search archives on Swiss women’s history (such as the Gosteli Archive in Bern) as well as “unofficial”, i.e. biographically embodied, queer archives for voices and narratives on the pre- and post-histories of this paradigm shift and its affective-subjectivising dimensions.

    The found material is worked on and updated in collaborative workshops. Using collaborative processes, artistic research approaches and drawing on my years of experience as a midwife, the project combines voices, sounds, texts, and performances to form ‘Quellkörper’ (source bodies) – materialising relations that can function both as archives and as figurations of stillborn (m)others.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Elke Bippus (Zurich University of the Arts)
    Prof. Dr. Angela Koch (Linz University of Arts)
     
     

  • Noëmie Stähli: Image Actions: Filmic Re-readings (working title)

    The project examines audio-visual methods and staging practices in the field of cultural analysis in the arts and asks to what extent artistic forms of reflection overlap with cultural-analytical research concerns. At its core is therefore a hybrid work approach; an intertwining of a filmic-aesthetic practice with a written theoretical reflection that together intend to contribute to methodical questions in practical image work.

    Both in the artistic engagement with moving images and in the written analyses with a main emphasis on experimental film and video practices based on case studies by third parties, the project focuses on filmic re-readings of (found) image documents and materials. Drawing on essayistic-archival practices in moving images and ‘photographic-filmic’ mise-en-scènes, the project is interested in an aesthetic image research that, based on exemplary depictions and image collections, reflects on questions of collective image memories and culturally shaped patterns of perception, and places a focus on the interplay of concretely circulating images, internalised image genres, linguistic usages, and embodied experiences.

    The PhD project was previously titled “‘Horizons’ – On the Construction of Visibility and Knowledge” (working title).

     
    Supervisors

    Prof. Dr. Sigrid Adorf
    Prof. Dr. Hanne Loreck
    Prof. Yvonne Wilhelm

    Financing

    Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF: January 2016 – December 2020 (with a 12-month interruption) in the frame of the project „“ Insert Citation. Artistic-Scientific Analyses of Cultural Processes of Transmission and Zeichenwerkstatt at the ICS

    PhD project at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts
     
    Contact

  • Léonie Süess: Okapi connected. Unlearning nature with animals (working title)

    Even though African countries have been demanding restitution from Western museums since the 1960s and a number of representation- and power-critical studies on the collections and exhibition practices of Western museums based on (eco-) feminist, post- and decolonial theories have been conducted, it is only the debates currently being held in broad circles of society and on a political level have led to an increased urgency to reappraise and explore the colonial heritage in museums. While until now institutions with collections of objects from non-European cultures were primarily in the focus of postcolonial critique and anti-colonial protest actions, there appears to be an increasing demand for reappraising racialized or colonial gaze regimes vis-à-vis animals and “nature” in natural history museums as well as for more transparency regarding the origins of scientific collections.
    Against this backdrop, the PhD project explores the potential of animal exhibits to question the colonial character of the knowledge about “nature” produced, archived and presented in museums. My field of research unfolds based on the global provenance of okapi specimens and their representation in Western museums. My research in archives and exchanges with conservators, animal keepers, biologists, etc. follows the processes with which okapis were made to objects in the knowledge production and transmission of the “exotic other” in Western exhibition contexts (museums, world fairs, zoos, wild-life reservations) and how they can be questioned as witnesses of their times taking post-humanist approaches from Human Animal Studies and the field of New Materialisms based on their specific materialisations and relations to their environment. Analogous to written theoretical reflections, an experimental curatorial engagement seeks unique gestures of presenting that strive to traverse the narratives and representational conventions of nature/animal imagery shaped by modern epistemes and enable moments of unlearning.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Sigrid Adorf (Zurich University of the Arts)
    Prof. Dr. Amalia Barboza (Linz Unversity of the Arts)

    Contact

  • Jana Thierfelder: Challenging interfaces. The epistemic role of design in evolutionary biologic knowledge production (completed)

    The dissertation project starts from the observation that design practices are a decisive tool for the acquisition of knowledge in evolutionary biology. Design is defined here as a processual activity and a specific way of visual thinking; to this end, drafting techniques are employed, such as illustrating, drawing, sketching, note-taking, diagrams, and computer-generated visualizations. This definition allows an emphasis not only on its intuitive, open-ended, and processual perception but also on its use by non-designers, such as biologists, as a customary method. However, the choice of drafting tools during the process of scientific knowledge production impacts the research considerably: hand-written notes on paper admit a different space for action, interpretation and thought, as opposed to its digital alternatives for data production. 

    Trained in visual communication design, in my research I ask how and which cognitive and epistemic aspects of design impact the process of scientific knowledge construction. A case study from evolutionary biology, with a special focus on social behaviours among birds, serves as an example. Besides ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative visual analysis of the material, resulting from the practices in the field help to explore the biologists’ handling of drafting methods, tools, and techniques. To gain insights into the role of design as a tool during research this dissertation aims to examine the implicit information the scientific field notes carry, besides the data, valuable for natural scientific analysis. 

    To investigate the cognitive and epistemic impact of design on evolutionary biological research, theories from social anthropology, science and technology studies (STS) and design theory are combined. While social anthropology helps to address the question of conceptualizing knowledge about phenomena by means of bodily and cultural practices and techniques, STS allows to analyse the social-constructivist, cultural, and technical conditions of scientific work. Theories from design support their formal-aesthetical, visual and media-specific analysis. Consequently, the dissertation project generates insights into the epistemological effects of design practices during research and directly links to current studies in STS-informed design research that suggest an approach between the scientific disciplines and design. 
    Outcomes of the research help to better understand the relationship between conceptualization and visualization, embodied knowledge, and skilled visions in evolutionary biological research, the impact of different data collection methods on the researchers, the data, and the knowledge produced, and the different kinds of representations of nature, constructed by means of design.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Michaela Schäuble, University of Berne
    Prof. Dr. Priska Gisler, University of the Arts Berne

    Kontakt
     

  • Julia Wolf: Re-Visioning Histories. Contemporary Artistic Practices of Shifting Histories Based on the Works of Hiwa K and Petrit Halilaj (completed)

    Contemporary artists focusing on history are often interested in deconstructing posits about the past and partake in shifting alleged certainties that are generally accepted today. The thesis pursues questions of how contemporary works of art reveal the constructedness of histories, what possibilities of shifting histories artists develop in their aesthetic negotiations, and what contributions they make to the discursive field dealing with how histories are currently being conceptualized, written and/or made. The artworks by Hiwa K and Petrit Halilaj engage with contemporary historical events embedded in specific violent and destructive conditions. They become subjects of a close reading and are set in relation to theoretical concepts concerned with the politics of memory, postcoloniality, postmigration and entangled histories. The analysis discusivizes aesthetic practices such as anachronic intervention or re-turning memory and their contribution to the emphatic or reparative sense of meaning inherent in histories.


    Supervision:

    Prof. Dr. Elke Krasny, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
    Prof. Dr. Sigrid Adorf, Zürich University of the Arts

    Funding

    Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF): October 2017 – July 2020 (including a 10-month break) as part of the project "Insert Citation. Analyzing cultural transmission processes artistically and scientifically and sign workshop at the ICS.

    Doctoral project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

     
    Publication: 

    Wolf, Julia (2024): Re-Visioning Histories in der Gegenwartskunst. Die Arbeiten von Hiwa K und Petrit Halilaj. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag