Proseminar:
Gegen das Monument? Neue Formen des Gedenkens im 21. Jahrhundert
Masterseminar:
Art and Urbanity: Aesthetic Practices in the City
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Proseminar: Gegen das Monument? Neue Formen des Gedenkens im 21. Jahrhundert
„Es gibt nichts, was so unsichtbar wäre wie Denkmäler“, schrieb Robert Musil in den 1930er-Jahren. Seit der Französischen Revolution steht das Denkmal in der Kritik, doch das 20. und 21. Jahrhundert bringen radikale Umbrüche: Traditionelle Monumentalität gilt vielen als autoritär, während digitale Medien und partizipative Kunstformen die Erinnerungskultur revolutionieren.
Das Seminar untersucht die Entwicklung von Erinnerungskunst im öffentlichen Raum – von klassischen Denkmälern bis hin zu zeitgenössischen Interventionen. Wie können Denkmäler nicht nur Siegesnarrative, sondern auch Opferperspektiven und marginalisierte Geschichten sichtbar machen? Welche Rolle spielen „Gegendenkmäler“, temporäre Installationen oder digitale Memorials? Wir analysieren Mechanismen von Inklusion und Exklusion, feministische Kritik an Denkmälern sowie das Verhältnis zwischen Kunst, Publikum und politischer Macht.
Kurze schriftliche Reflexionen, die Lektüre zentraler Texte und ein kurzes Quiz begleiten die Diskussionen und Vorträge.
Blockseminar: Termine, 11., 12., 18., 19., 25.,26. Juni und 2. Juli 2026, Anmeldung über OLAT
Masterseminar: Art and Urbanity: Aesthetic Practices in the City
This seminar explores the dynamic interplay between urban phenomena, artistic practice, and the built environment, interrogating how cities are imagined, contested, and represented across visual arts, urban theory, photography, and film. We examine the aesthetic, theoretical, and historical dimensions of this relationship, with a focus on the global circulation of urban narratives and their social, political, and cultural resonances.
Central to our inquiry is the tension between urban space and its representation—how the city is not only a physical construct but also a mediated and pictorial field. Equally, we consider the urban as a social arena, engaging with public art, performance, community-based initiatives, and the intersections of race, gender, and technology. How do new media and social platforms reshape our experience and understanding of urban life?
Activities: close readings of key texts, film screenings, two short research papers, group presentations, and lively discussions.
Blockseminar, Termine, 11., 12., 18., 19., 25.,26. Juni und 2. Juli 2026, Anmeldung über OLAT
Proseminar: Abstraction
Masterseminar: Ecocritical Art
James Nisbet is a Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, where he holds the Chair of the Department of Art History since 2021. Since 2022, he is also the Director of the Environmental Humanities Research Center at the university.
His research explores modern and contemporary art, theory, and criticism, with particular interests in environmental history, modern science, abstraction, conceptualism, and the history of photography. His book Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, published by MIT Press in 2014, examines the breadth of ecological thought across artistic and social practices during these formative decades of environmentalism. His more recent projects include Second Site (2021), which explores new methodologies for understanding the relationship between site specificity and duration, and The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment (2021), co-edited with Lyle Massey, that examines interdisciplinary perspectives on the role of desert environments in both experimental modernist culture and ecological disaster. He is currently preparing the book Before and After Ecology, co-edited with Alan C. Braddock and Alexa Sekyra.
Vortrag
Prof. Dr. James Nisbet:
Sunshine and Tumult at the 1965 International Sculpture Symposium, U.S.A.
30.6.2025, 18 Uhr, SKW B
Workshop Chillida-Gastprofessur
Trees of the Western United States: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives from Arborglyphs to Ecology
Fr., 21.11.2025, 18:00 Uhr
Mit Beiträgen von
- Iñaki Arrieta Baro, Jon Bilbao Basque Library
- James Nisbet, University of California, Irvine
- Alexandra Urza, US Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station / Forest Health, Whitebark Institute
Proseminar Abstraction
This seminar will investigate “Abstraction" in its many valances within visual arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While commonly associated with a series of experiments among the European historical avant-garde in the early twentieth century, abstraction is at once a wider reaching, yet elusive, cultural concept. In its European context, abstraction has been treated as similar to a technology, arising as a “development" or “breakthrough" on the basis of a research agenda set out by “advanced" practitioners. This history would suggest that abstraction—like the roots of Western, colonializing culture at large—was first established on the continent of Europe, before disseminating to other continents and societies across the globe. In this vein, abstraction distinguishes itself as not only free of representational content, but more so as actively rejecting the enterprise and history of representational art altogether. Working through a combination of both art historical and primary source materials, this seminar will examine the creation of abstraction as an artistic practice, while at the same time evaluating its implications as screen for the broader cultural complexities of late modernity.
The seminar will be held in English and papers must be submitted in English. It is possible to use translation tools; the extent to which these are permitted will be explained in the seminar.Masterseminar Ecocritical Art
Since the term was coined in the late nineteenth century, ecology has challenged scientists to think critically about the interrelation of the current physical world and its formation over time. While ecology is a relatively new branch of the natural sciences and, at a fundamental level, seeks to account for the connectedness of living and non-living beings, it nonetheless describes histories of environmental dependency and change that far exceed the moment of ecology's own articulation. A similar dynamic informs the more recent appearance of ecological concerns in the humanities, and especially the History of Art. As an examination of the wide-ranging concept of ecology and its intersection with contemporary visual art and theory, this seminar will be structured by key questions regarding how scholars, curators, and artists should best respond to the planet's climate crisis. Working through this growing literature on aesthetic approaches to addressing environmental media and politics, we will build towards a robust and critical dialogue about the potential for creative responses to ecology in contemporary art, paying close attention to the trajectory of recent exhibitions on the interrelated issues of environment, ecology, and climate.
The seminar will be held in English and papers must be submitted in English. It is possible to use translation tools; the extent to which these are permitted will be explained in the seminar.
The seminar is a block seminar. Please only register if you can attend all the dates.
Dates of the seminar
Masterseminar:
Hard, soft, living matter
Proseminar:
Objekt, Bild, Geste – Performance als Medium und Praxis
Masterseminar:
The Live Exhibition: Curating Performance and Exhibiting the Ephemeral
Study Day
Praxis as Space offers a moment to reflect on how the last three years have altered and heightened the awareness and experience of immediacy and distance in the arts. This workshop will focus on the lingering tensions we grapple with in thinking about duration, presence, and absence in the framework of the exhibition as a social site. Almost fifty years after RoseLee Goldberg addressed space's complex relation to the very experience of experience in her seminal essay “Space as Praxis" (1975), notions of site specificity and affective agency have changed dramatically and yet remain constant. This reciprocity between stillness and movement through various media is especially relevant when thinking about the ritual of the liminal (Wood 2017/Turner 1995) in relation to performative environments and settings that move from one institutional context to the next.
In considering this passage of time, a series of questions arise. How do recent site-specific interactions invested in social relations respond and question the cultural status quo? In what ways can the staging of materiality and immediacy challenge institutional temporalities? And how can new forms of articulating movement impact and (re)determine the significance of participation and agency in contemporary art?
In thinking through these and other questions, the Praxis as Space study day will consider the performative as a transdisciplinary medium and discursive practice from various curatorial, artistic, and theoretical perspectives.
Proseminar: „In Ermanglung einer besseren Bezeichnung“ - Positionen zum Skulpturbegriff seit den 1960er Jahren
Masterseminar: Monumente in der zeitgenössischen Kunst
Exkursion: Skulpturenpark Köln
Seit 2023 hat Christian Berger die Professur für Neuere und neueste Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Siegen inne. Zuvor war er u. a. wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Vertretungsprofessor an der Universität Hamburg sowie Fellow am Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, am Courtauld Institute of Art in London und am Kulturwissenschaftlichen Institut in Essen.
Weitere Infos: https://www.kunst-uni-siegen.de/a-prof-berger-christian/
Hauptseminar: Lebendige Dinge. Skulptur, Materialität und Technologie seit 1900
Masterseminar: Artificial Bodies and Digital Minds. Art and Objecthood in the Post-war Era
Studientag: Uncontainable Materialities. Sculpture and its Mutable Bodies (09.07.2021)
A troubled relation to the materiality of sculpture runs deep in the history of art. It can be traced back to the persistent denials of ancient sculpture's polychrome skin, to anxieties of its backside and related demands of frontality, or to calls for suspending the exuberant physicality of its “theatrical" organisation of space. In its proximity to the tools, infrastructures and mundane materials that visibly and invisibly shape our lives – from brick and clay to aluminum and optical fiber – sculptural materiality always exceeded artistic codifications.
This study day engages with the myriad manifestations and promiscuous functions of an uncontainable materi- ality that has haunted theories of sculpture since the nineteenth century.
Through a series of art historical, curatorial and artistic contributions, the one-day event will focus on how artists and art historians dramatized or downplayed sculptural mutability in the post-war era. What are the social, political and aesthetic implications of an object's material entangle- mentwiththeworld? How have the hierarchies of race, gender, class or ability that define this world effected the production, reception and circulation of sculpture? What role has technology played in expanding the understanding of the medium beyond a coherent body? How and to what ends did artists mobilize the inherent instability of sculpture and its temporal conditions between art and objecthood?
In thinking through these and other questions the study day seeks to explore the past and present potentials of sculpture to unsettle art history's taxonomic impulse.
Hauptseminar: Archive als Ressourcen – Künstler*innen arbeiten mit Archiven
Masterseminar: Das Versprechen der Zukunft. Vorstellungen vom Archiv als Speichermedium
Studientag: SELECT. Konzeptionen aktiver Archive (05.02.2021)
Archive treten zunehmend nicht nur als Speicherorte, sondern auch als soziale Räume oder Netzwerke mit partizipatorischem Potential in Erscheinung. Die Arbeit mit und am Archiv bringt bestimmte Narrative hervor, zeichnet selektiv Entwicklungen nach und entwirft somit auch Perspektivierungen für Dokumentationsstrategien. Insofern sind Archive keineswegs neutral. Sie bringen durch das gesammelte Material Erfahrungs- und Erinnerungsräume mit eigenen Qualitäten und Möglichkeiten zur Wissensproduktion und -Distribution hervor.
Mit SELECT. Konzeptionen aktiver Archive findet im Rahmen der Chillida Gastprofessur am Kunstgeschichtlichen Institut im Sommersemester 2020 ein Studientag statt, der anhand von unterschiedlichen Zugängen zu Archivbeständen Modelle des Sammelns und die Kontextualisierung von Material zur Debatte stellt. Ausgehend von den unterschiedlichen Konzeptionen werden ausgewählte Materialien näher in ihren Sammlungszusammenhängen betrachtet. Im Zentrum stehen Fragen dazu, wie Archive aktiv Formen der Identitätsbildung fördern oder selbst mittels Objekten, Praktiken und Methoden hervorbringen. Auf welche Weise werden personelle oder thematische Netzwerke, politische, persönliche und künstlerische Anliegen sichtbar? Mit welchen Strategien können Ressourcen künstlerisch, kuratorisch oder wissenschaftlich aktiviert und für die Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht werden? Wie werden Archive zu Orten des zeitgenössischen Diskurses, zu Plattformen des Austauschs? Wie kann ein Archiv zum aktiven, in die Gegenwart und Zukunft wirkenden Erinnerungsort einer Gemeinschaft werden?
Hauptseminar: Kunst im öffentlichen Raum
Masterseminar: Kulturelle Konstruktionen von Identität
Workshop: Meanwhile, in the Basque Country… Relations of Hegemony and Minority in Art, Culture, and Identity
How can national and cultural identities be formed and defended against more dominant ideologies? Which roles are assigned to artistic production, its institutions and protagonists? The panel brings together two practitioners from the Basque Country offering insights into their academic/curatorial and artistic approaches.
Hauptseminar: Kunst im öffentlichen Raum. Zum Beispiel von Frankfurt am Main und Berlin
Masterseminar: Zwischen self-made und ready-made: Plastische Produktion seit 1900
Workshop: Assemblage: Sculptural Production in Modern and Contemporary Art from a Transcultural and Technological Perspective
Since the beginning of the modern age, the use of sculptural materials and media in the visual arts has changed significantly. Individually shaped marble, bronze or iron sculptures have almost disappeared. Contemporary installations now contain such an unlimited range of means of production that this diversity has itself become a signature aspect of contemporary art.
The conference takes its starting point in the supposed primordial scenes of connecting everyday life and art: the terms papier collé, ready-made and objet trouvé have become inscribed in the history of the avant-garde. They are responsible not only for the inclusion of new materials and media that were previously used solely in everyday life, but also for an allegedly innovative moment of appropriation that posits the obsolescence of old artistic techniques and their concepts of authorship.
The conference shifts the focus to the artistic practices in their respective transcultural and technological contexts. It addresses the genealogies of terms developed in different contexts, especially the assemblage, but also the bricolage, and récuperation. It will be questioned to what extent a different story can be developed in focusing on compiling materials with a certain origin, which connects the plastic arts with their cultural and, more recently, also technological contexts.
Proseminar: Theorie der abstrakten Skulptur
Masterseminar: Abstrakte Skulptur im öffentlichen Raum – Eine Geschichte der Ablehnung
Proseminar: Sculpture and Display: from Chillida to Cragg
Masterseminar: The Places and Spaces of Contemporary Sculpture: the Sculptor's Studio from Chillida to Cragg
Workshop: Form – Material – Space: Chillida and his Contemporaries (03. - 05.07.2015)
The work of Eduardo Chillida is usually viewed in terms of modernist art. This view is reinforced by Chillida’s own highly elaborate and eloquent accounts of his artistic practice. Chillida frequently positioned his work in a field of artistic and philosophical discourse that emphasises medium specificity and
a metaphysics of form. He referred to the exemplary nature of the art of Brancusi, Braque and Giacometti for his own creative work; and, in his philosophical exchange
with Martin Heidegger, developed the notion of sculptural space as an ontological space evoking the boundless nature of „being“ itself. The conference reconsiders the prevailing interpretations of Chillida’s work, based largely on his own statements, as a seamless continuation of a modernist aesthetic. It takes its cue from the observation that Chillida has rarely ever been viewed within the context of his contemporaries, specifically minimalist and conceptual artists such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt or Anthony Caro.
Proseminar: Raum, Zeit, Materie. Eduardo Chillida und die Herausforderung der modernen Skulptur
Haupt-/Masterseminar: Die Bedeutung des Ortes für die Kunst. Vom Ausstellungsraum zu Chillidas Orten der Begegnungen
Abendvortrag: „Stets nie verschieden, doch niemals immer gleich“ – Eduardo Chillidas Werk und seine Suche nach Einheit und Dialog