The Chair of Visual Culture Studies in a Global Context
The team of the Chair of "Visual Culture Studies in a Global Context" at the Institute of Art and Music pursues a variety of thematic focuses on research and teaching:
The term "Visual Culture" already makes it clear that we are not only concerned with art in the narrower sense, but with "visual culture" in general. In the subject of art history, competencies in image description and analysis, image comparison and historicisation are taught, which can also be applied to other fields. Accordingly, we also devote ourselves to images, media and things that are not art, but which demonstrate manifold links to the history of art. In the broad field of visual culture, we at TU Dresden focus on the digital image cultures of the 21st century, for example, image phenomena in social media. Especially the worlds of digital images represent a promising field of research, which is imposing itself on visual culture today.
As the addition "in a global context" already suggests, we represent the scientific model of transcultural art historiography. This takes a relational perspective and focuses on the transfer between cultural spaces. Such an approach is based on an understanding of interwoven (art) histories and visual cultures.
We work and teach with a strong reference to current specialist discourses and socio-politically highly relevant topics. The image politics of current protest movements, (post)colonialism, (post)migration, as well as matters of ecology, are part of the profile of the chair in their references to art. In particular, various approaches involving postcolonial, gender and affect theory play an important role in our research and teaching.
Within this context, we also represent modern and contemporary art in our teaching, whereby we go beyond the European area once again. The regional focus is on Africa (especially West Africa, represented by Kerstin Schankweiler) and Latin America (especially Argentina, represented by Lena Geuer).
A selection of our courses in the first two semesters since the chair was established in October 2019 provides an idea of our main areas of focus:
The art of Africa - an introduction; Visual cultures of the digital - practices, aesthetics, genres; Art history and postcolonialism; Video killed the radio star (introduction to video art); The global GDR; Visual art from a transcultural perspective using Latin America as an example; Visual art and ecology - from Beuys to Saraceno.