Dissertationen

Based on several exemplary strands—including the magazine’s organisational structure, its positioning in the critical discourse of the time, and Isabelle Graw’s writing praxis—the dissertation investigates the Texte zur Kunst magazine in its formative phase in the 1990s. From these strands, the dissertation extracts the specificity of a praxis of art criticism that considers the discussion of art and its critical reflection to be form of situating the object of critique rather than judging art from an elevated, detached point of view.  

Primary supervisor: Dr Beate Söntgen PhD of Leuphana University Lüneburg,
co-supervisor: Prof Rachel Mader PhD of the Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art.

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Linda Neukirchen promoviert seit Oktober 2020 an der Kunstuniversität Linz im Rahmen des vom SNF geförderten Forschungsprojektes "Flüchtiges Sammeln. Voraussetzungen und Möglichkeiten der Aufnahme von Performancekunst in Sammlungen"

In ihrem practice-based PhD untersucht sie das emanzipatorische Potenzial von Performancekunst in der (Um-)Gestaltung von Alltagsprozessen. Aus der persönlichen Perspektive - Performance Künstlerin, junge Mutter und Frau - erfolgt eine künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit Grenzerfahrungen und transgressiven Reizen im Alltag. Die Dissertation geht unter anderem der Frage nach, wie performative Taktiken zur kritischen Reflexion von Alltagshandlungen motivieren können.

Erstbetreuerin ist Prof. Dr. Amalia Barboza, Kunstuniversität Linz, die Zweitbetreuung wird von Prof. Dr. Rachel Mader, Hochschule Luzern – Design Film Kunst übernommen.

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collective imagination of dark matter in new physics and the arts
onto-epistemologies in dark matter research

My PhD thesis is based on the assumption that dark matter interacts in a much more multilayered fashion than physics would have us believe. I therefore understand dark matter to be more than simply a hypothetical particle as predicted by physics, but as a performative matter from which ambivalent-constructive forms of knowledge emerges. In the MADMAX experiment, I explore the research on QCD axion dark matter, namely its connection of physical matter and the collective imagination. Using post-disciplinary methods, I specifically aim to gain knowledge in the field of performative materialities at the intersection of art and new physics.

Project approved for dissertation at the Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU) Cottbus-Senftenberg. Primary supervisor: Prof Astrid Schwarz PhD, BTU Cottbus, Faculty 5, Chair of General Technical Science. Co-supervisor: Prof Rachel Mader PhD, Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art. 

Publications: Essay (unpublished to date) 
Rossel, O. (2022). Multi Player Physics – Diving into the puddle of agentic dark matter.

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Image media are increasingly shaping our perception and our worldview. Considering these developments, visual literacy is becoming an indispensable necessity to orient ourselves and to stay in touch with reality.
In my practice-based PhD, I develop photofilmic strategies that suggest that knowledge and thinking about images can be promoted through images themselves. I observe, how artistic acts of 're-imagination' can inspire agency regarding images and explore how critical image practices can serve as tools to establish an emancipated gaze. By transforming images through various formats and through a performative, physical handling, I develop strategies to literally take responsibility for (digital) images into one's own hands and thus initiate a reflective and empowering relation to images. The physical manipulation and the translation of figures of speech into performative gestures lead to the multiplication of depictions, visual layers and perspectives. Such complex, photofilmic assemblages reach beyond their respective framing in order to question the relationship to the image and demand individual and social responsibility towards images. 
With the intention of complementing the discourse on the power of images with critical image practices and agency towards images, I develop discursive and curatorial formats in collaboration with researchers, artists and the public.

^{Corresponding supervisor: Dr. Isolde Vanhee, LUCA School of Arts, Research Unit Image 
Co-supervisor: Prof. Dr. Rachel Mader, HSLU Hochschule Luzern – Design Film Kunst, Forschungsgruppe Kunst, Design & Öffentlichkeit} 

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As disciplines, both the history of art and art criticism are faced with the growing complexity of their subject. This makes delineating and defining it properly increasingly challenging. Using Renzo Martens’ Institute for Human Activities (IHA) as a case in point, the dissertation inquires to what extent contemporary artistic practices can be discussed as complex phenomena without undue focus on a predominant theme and without introducing constricting categorisations. How can contradictions intrinsic to the work be included in its analysis without resolving them? This dissertation develops a transdisciplinary methodology grounded in cultural science which it then uses to analyse Renzo Martens’ IHA from the point of view of art itself. The approach is therefore not predetermined by a specific theoretical perspective or question; the work of art becomes itself the interlocutor. Following a theoretical rather than empirical approach, the dissertation is interested in how the art project presents itself, what it represents, and what the discourse around the project is.

Doctorate awarded by the HafenCity University Hamburg. Primary supervisor: Prof Gesa Ziemer PhD of the HafenCity University Hamburg, co-supervisor: Prof Rachel Mader PhD of the Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art.

Key words: Art theory, art industry, representation, post-colonial perspectives, economies in art, participation

Pre-releases:
Siri Peyer, Die Regeln der Kunst – Let’s Change the Rules! Die Etablierung einer neuen ökonomischen Wertschöpfungskette in der Demokratischen Republik Kongo, in: Nina Bandi u.a. (Hg.), What can art do?, Zürich: Diaphanes, 2020, 97–106.
https://www.what-can-art-do.ch/user_assets/artikel/WhatCanArtDo_Peyer_Die-Regeln-der-Kunst.pdf

Peyer, Siri, Critical Curriculum. Ein emanzipatorisches Werkzeug für ein Post-Plantagen-System?, in: Nummer 9. Artistic Education, 2019, 72–74.
https://issuu.com/hslu/docs/hslu_1808140_magazin_no9_inhalt_es_

Siri Peyer, Die Kluft zwischen diskursiver Behauptung und den konkreten Bedingungen der Umsetzung. Renzo Martens‘ Institute for Human Activities und dessen Zusammenarbeit mit dem Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise, in: Marcel Bleuler und Anita Moser (Hg.), ent/grenzen. Künstlerische und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf Grenzräume, Migration und Ungleichheit, Bielefeld: Transcript 2018, 157–170.
https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4126-4/ent/grenzen/

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Using the example of a performance, this dissertation by Bernadett Settele explores the formations and entanglements created by situations of art. The experience of a situation of enforced participation brings up the question of whether and to what extent performance art constitutes a dispositif for education and of which theorems and methods are conducive to the description and analysis of the experience. The present examination is considered to be a contribution towards art teaching and artistic arts education practice.

To the extent that it affects, aligns and entangles individual subjects and forces them into a situation in which individual boundaries shift and become permeable, performance art offers an unusual starting point for educational processes. Things become more complex when the emergent sense of the communal is accentuated and challenged through artistic strategies designed to highlight the ambivalences of this communality and to make the community promised the subject of negotiation and reflection. As is often repeated, art operates in a self-reflective manner in such instances. At the level of the participating individual, this generates dis-illusion—a state thought to be conducive to education. 

Settele refers to this pattern as a “collective aesthetic situation” which she considers to have more structural similarities with a deliberate educational setting than other approaches and therefore more relevance for art education. 

How are collective aesthetic situations formative? To what extent can collective aesthetic situations become a starting point for formative processes experienced by individual subjects? How does it manifest and how can it be described? 

The dissertation’s premise is two-fold: It studies a piece of performance art in terms of its reception and from the perspective of a transformational and aesthetic philosophy of education. This places into focus the conditions and relations that emerge in the work, the ambivalent and ephemeral as well as the unpleasant and overwhelming qualities of the situation. The investigation centres on the reception of the performance Prom (2015) by Philippe Wicht as an experienced participation in a collective aesthetic situation. Settele applies the concept of the “collective aesthetic situation” to a space of shared perception and activity—that is, a shared moment—in which those attending are being made the subject of art and in which they contribute to the mediality of the situation through their desires, their feelings, and their being moved around.  

On a theoretical level, this thesis aims to intertwine art- and subject-theoretical approaches. It achieves this over three consecutive stages. The first stage is dedicated to the work principles associated with situations in contemporary art and stage performances, while the second is concerned with subject-theoretical approaches, specifically newer feminist theory and writings of the affective turn with their concept of a fundamentally passionate subjectivity (Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed).  In a third step, the author puts the resulting interpretations in context with the tenets of the philosophy of education with a special focus on transformational education processes and aesthetic education. 

A foundational element of the methodological framework is the indirect empiricism based on Andrea Sabisch, and Karl-Josef Pazzini’s approach which enhances the author’s ability to reflect on their own impressions, to put them to paper, and to enrich them with theory.

Doctorate at the University of Hamburg’s Faculty of Education—Art Education. The primary supervisor, Prof Andrea Sabisch PhD, and the co-supervisor, Prof Karl-Josef Pazzini PhD, are both of the University of Hamburg. From 2015 to 2019, the dissertation was co-funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in the framework of the “What can art do? Zur Relevanz von politisch engagierter Kunst seit 1960” research project.   

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Marina Belobrovaja’s PhD project centres on nine artistic positions from German-speaking Switzerland: the Atelier für Sonderaufgaben, bblackboxx, Heinrich Gartentor, Andreas Heusser, San Keller, knowbotiq, Navid Tschopp, Tim Zulauf and !Mediengruppe Bitnik. Based on conversations with the artists and their circles, Belobrovaja analyses the reception of their artistic production as activist art and traces the societal conditions associated with the term. Her project is an artefact that oscillates between documentation and fiction, between analysis and art, and aims towards a productive destabilisation of the long-standing relationship between artistic practice, theoretical analysis, and art-historical entrenchment. 

Doctorate at the University of Linz, initiated in 2015 as part of the SNSF-funded research project “What can art do? Zur Relevanz von politisch engagierter Kunst seit 1960”. Primary supervisor: Giaco Schiesser of the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK and the Linz University of Arts, co-supervisor: Dr Rachel Mader of the Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art. 

Belobrovaja, M. (2020): The bad feeling to be on the right side. Contemporary Swiss activist art. Zurich. 

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Exploring the spaces, groups, discourses, media and fields of practice produced by the heterogeneous constellation that was Botschaft e.V. in the six years of its existence from 1990 to 1996, this dissertation paints a vivid picture of the production of space in early 1990s-Berlin. The approach adopted in the dissertation is grounded in Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space. It intertwines the themes of urban development, art field, club culture, new media, and education and culture policy. In addition to offering an analysis and documenting a process, this piece of research is also a manifesto of temporary production of space in the context of art and the city.

The doctorate was awarded by the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig’s Institute for Theory with a doctoral grant from the Hans Böckler Foundation. Primary supervisor: Prof Beatrice von Bismarck PhD of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, co-supervisor: Prof Rachel Mader PhD of the Lucerne School of Art and Design. 

Publications:

Maechtel, Annette (2020): Das Temporäre politisch denken. Raumproduktion im Berliner der frühen 1990er Jahre, Berlin: bbook. 

Maechtel, Annette (2020). Children of Berlin – eine Ausstellung und ihr (kultur-)politischer Kontext. In: Birgit Eusterschulte/Susanne Hauser/Christian Krüger/Heimo Lattner/Annette Maechtel/Judith Siegmund/Ildikó Szántó (Eds.), Neuverhandlungen von Kunst (55-72). Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.  
 
Maechtel, Annette: „Children of Berlin“ – Eine Ausstellung und ihr (kultur-)politischer Kontext“, in: ARCH+ 241 Berlin Theorie – Politik des Raums im Neuen Berlin (Dezember 2020), Page 162–171. 
 
Maechtel, Annette (2021). Freiraum. In: Jochen Becker, Anna Schäffler, Simon Sheikh, nGbK Berlin (Eds.): Das Glossar Urbane Praxis (29-31). Berlin: nGbK Verlag. 

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Study, not critique refers to the fine line between self-determined knowledge production and a valorised form of criticism. The dissertation studies three magazines from the 1970s, 1990s and 2010s that represent different political and aesthetic agendas: The Fox (New York, 1975–76), A.N.Y.P. (München/Berlin, 1989–99) and e-flux journal (New York, since 2008). Each of the publications has different approaches to dissolving the boundaries of artistic production and thereby exemplifies the novel forms of disciplining and exploitation associated with it. Lucie Kolb shows how the possibility of a shared intellectual activity in the field of art that is in the field but not of it, is linked to work on the conditions of production.

Kolb, L. (2017). Study, not critique. transversal texts.
10.5281/zenodo.7778600

Doctorate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 2014 to 2016 with a Doc.Mobility grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Primary supervisor: Prof Ruth Sonderegger PhD of the Academy of Fine Art’s Institute for Art and Cultural Sciences, co-supervisor: Prof Gerald Raunig PhD of the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK. 

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