Chair of Theories of Arts and Media

The Professorship for Art and Media Theory is dedicated to the phenomena and debates of modern and contemporary art. In research and teaching with a focus on Europe, North and South America, material practices, specific discourses and aesthetic forms are analyzed as well as their institutional, social, political and technological framings.

The histories and theories of the visual arts, as well as art criticism and curatorial practice, are not considered as isolated phenomena, but are always historically situated in relation to other cultural formations and fields of knowledge. In particular, the work of the professorship interweaves art historical and media studies questions and topics: Western modern art from the 1860s onwards is already inextricably linked or confronted with the industrial processes of mechanical reproducibility. In particular, however, contemporary art since the 1960s – which has opened up in a global context to an expanded force fields beyond the traditional spaces and sites of art and, at the same time, has dissolve the boundaries of genres and mediums – is imbricated in a dispositif of media technology that is as diverse as it is expansive. This is all the more the case when considering artistic modes of articulation under the highly technological conditions of the digital present and its algorithmic calculations.

The current research of the professorship focuses on critical determinations of the relationships between art and the environment, between “institutional critique” and debates on restitution, between the history of sculpture and theories of “assemblage”. The theoretically oriented scholarly examination of the arts as part of interdisciplinary "Kulturwissenschaften" and their reflexive, cognitive, critical, and mnemonic potentials in various geo-political contexts contributes decisively to sharpening the time-diagnostic view of our ecological, postcolonial, and medial situation.