Spring semester 2024: Three classes within the framework of the course “Visual Cultures of Commonality” (course conducted together with Sarah Samira El-Taki)
MA and BA level, art history, comparative literature, modern culture, visual culture, media studies
Course title: “Visual Cultures of Commonality”, titles of the classes taught by D.I.:
“The Exhibition as Experimental Space”
“Thought Exhibition 1: The Role of Images (for Curating)”
“Thought Exhibition 2: The Status of Objects (for Curating)”
“Concluding session: individual or group presentations”
Course Description:
How do we learn to see in common? What can visual culture teach us about community? What can visual practices offer in an ever-changing world where meaning and difference are never stable? How can visual representations foster commonality or, in other words, activate common matters of concern? Exploring the intersections of visual culture, art history, curatorial studies, and activism, this course focuses on the transformative potential of images.
The course will examine such questions from four different perspectives:
In an analytical perspective, we will discuss how to approach forms of representations in a way that also encompasses their modes of production and forms of reception. In a theoretical perspective, we will discuss how to expand and amend aesthetic theories to better understand the relationship between visual culture and social forms of commonality. In a historical perspective, we will examine some of the different ways in which visual practices, i.e. political posters and art exhibitions, have been working actively with (and on) social relations and interactions. And in a political perspective, finally, we will look at how the relation between visual culture and politics can be assessed in this perspective, and also discuss more concretely how cultural policy debates and initiatives have framed the question of social relations.
Introductory classes will provide a critical examination of representation, a key concept in cultural studies. Texts will cover the influential work of Stuart Hall, bell hooks and Raquel Gates. Their contributions offer an understanding of how meaning is constructed and conveyed in various forms of media and culture. Later in the course, the notion of representation will be expanded via theoretical positions in science studies, posthumanism, and curatorial studies (s. below). Also, the second part of the course will be structured along two case study groupings.
One case study grouping suggests a reexamining of the history of Black photographic practices as the lens to examine contemporary forms of visual material/communication. For the second half of the course, students will delve into the history and theoretical groundwork of Black photographic practices in the United States and the United Kingdom. Through a critical lens, students will learn more about the relationship between “movement and medium” and engage with anti-racist campaign material. By the end of the course, students will have a nuanced understanding of the role of visual culture in shaping societal perceptions and the potential for imagery to drive positive social change. The course encourages students to critically assess the impact of imagery on public perception and policy, fostering an understanding of visual culture’s role in shaping social consciousness.
The second case study grouping will focus on exhibitions, framing curatorial practice in an extended sense as a specific aesthetic and collaborative form of investigation into social or relational modes of existence. Equipped with reflections on current theoretical discussions on “curatoriality” (Beatrice von Bismarck) and “the curatorial” (Maria Lind, Irit Rogoff) we will approach two landmark exhibitions curated by Bruno Latour – in collaboration with various co- curators – at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), “Iconoclash” (2002) and “Making Things Public” (2005). The exhibitions examined disagreements and frictions inherent in forms of representation (in science, religion, art, and politics) – but also their potential for knowledge production, the assembling of actors, and the fostering of commonality.
Session 5: The Exhibition as Experimental Space (DI) March 6, 2024, 08:00–12:00
Despite the “image flood” in popular media, accelerated through digital user-generated (and now AI generated) images, the museum or exhibition remain the space where new forms of representation (including but not limited to images) can be developed and tested, while others can be questioned and challenged. This class – as well as the following two – will examine the exhibition as such a “space for experimentation”. We will begin with current debates about the state of the museum, shifting from a place of display of “original objects” to spaces of mediality and discourse. This connects to an expanded notion of curating: Framing the exhibition as an experimental and collaborative space of commonality, the term “the Curatorial” became hotly debated in curatorial, visual, and art studies (among other fields) with the work of, i.e., Beatrice von Bismarck, Irit Rogoff, and Maria Lind. Early on, Lind articulated the term’s implication for experimenting or testing: “The curatorial involves not just representing but presenting and testing; it performs something here and now instead of merely mapping something from there and then. It is serious about addressing the query, ‘What do we want to add to the world and why?’”
Following Lind’s question, we will ask further: What are the functions of the museum today, now that one can discover uncountable digital images from the comfort of one’s home or the familiarity of one’s mobile companion? What role do (historical) landmark exhibitions play in investigating those functions? And what does this have to do with the, a little odd-sounding, notion of “Thought Exhibition” (which we will further investigate in the following class)?
Session 6: Thought Exhibition 1: The Role of Images (for Curating) (DI) March 13, 2024, 08:00–12:00
Catching up with the topic we have left the last class, we will discuss the term “Thought Exhibition”, developed by the French philosopher Bruno Latour in collaboration with various co-curators during four exhibitions at the ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany). The term’s implications can be broadly interpretated, as the four exhibitions were centered around widely differing topics, from the significance of iconoclasm in contemporary societies, to a political assembly of “things”, to the limitations and biases of the epistemes produced and fostered by European Modernity, to the relations between these epistemes and the upheavals of the Anthropocene. In this class we will focus on the “proto Thought Exhibition”, curated by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput at Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1985 – as well as on the first Thought Exhibition, “Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art”, curated by Latour and Peter Weibel, in collaboration with a larger group of co-curators (ZKM, 2002).
Besides discussing the exhibitions and curatorial concepts, we will also try to contextualize its topics into the wider academic debate around “postmodernity and immaterialization” (Les Immatériaux) and an “iconic or pictorial turn” (Iconoclash) in the humanities at that time. How do the exhibitions deal with the tensions arising from various phenomena of postmodernism and “iconoclashs” (or iconoclasm)? Which epistemic status do they assign to the objects and practices they show? Why might “Les Immatériaux” be considered an early Thought Exhibition? How does “Iconoclash” create an analytical framework from a disputed function of the image as representation?
Session 7: Thought Exhibition 2: The Status of Objects (for Curating) (DI) March 20, 2024, 08:00–12:00
This class will discuss the second Thought Exhibition shown – or “conducted” at ZKM: “Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy” (2005). It is based on, albeit no simple illustration of, Latour’s well-known engagement with the political agency of “things”, which includes objects as well as forms of representation, ideas, places, and the assemblies they enable. We will discuss the curatorial concept in the light of contemporary discourses in science studies, new materialism, and posthumanism – the continuation of the later discourse, in particular, would then go on to inform the third and fourth Thought Exhibitions at ZKM. “Making Things Public” also demonstrated how the “curatorial constellation” is by no means limited to human beings but involves many non-human actors, their relationship and juxtaposition. How can we expand the notion of politics to assemblies that not only include human actors? What role does such an object- or thing-oriented scope on exhibitions as political assemblies play for curatorial theory?
We will conclude the class by revisiting the previous two sessions to ask again: What are the functions of the exhibition space – for experimenting with new forms of representation and ideas in interdependence with a variety of actors?
Session 14: Concluding session: individual or group presentations (SET & DI) May 15, 2024, 08:00–12:00
Students present ideas for their exam (15–20 minutes). Peers and course conductors will provide feedback.