This research project is part of the “Zeichenwerkstatt” (ICS/ZHdK), a research group consisting of junior researchers working at the interface between artistic practice and cultural analysis. PhD candidates Noëmie Stähli and Julia Wolf are pursuing their respective projects based on artistic practices of collecting images and the artistic and cultural-analytical investigation of the collective use of images and cultural image archives.
The zone between subject and collective, individual and community, which cultural analyst and filmmaker Mieke Bal has called ‘culture’ for want of a better term, is a transfer zone. It is shaped by concrete and metaphorical image transmissions, shifts in meaning, effects and influences, media-based transfers, traditions, and their potential alterability and negotiability.
„“ Insert Citation contributes to understanding how this transfer zone can be explored by artistic and scientific means. The project inquires how far this zone might be conceived and displayed as a cultural image archive that produces and regulates (social) visibilities and invisibilities, and how far the semantic processes of transmissions taking place therein might become the subject of reflection through critical explorations. Comprising two related, yet independent PhD projects and an evaluation of their interfaces, the overall project investigates the social uses of images and the possibilities of employing these images for artistic work:
- Images and Action: Audiovisual Re-Readings (working title) [Bilderhandlungen: Filmische Relektüren (AT)] (Noëmie Stähli), January 2016 – December 2020 (including 12 months interruption)
- Re-Visioning Histories. Contemporary artistic practices of displacing history(ies) (working title) [Re-Visioning Histories. Zeitgenössische künstlerische Praktiken der Verschiebung von Geschichte(n) (AT)] (Julia Wolf), October 2017 – July 2020 (including 10 months interruption)
- Wandering Gestures: An Artistic and Cultural-Analytical Exploration of Migrating Images (Working title) [Wandernde Gesten. Eine künstlerisch-kulturanalytische Untersuchung von Bildmigrationen (AT)] (Irene Chabr), termination: 31.08.2017
Within cultural analysis, artistic and scientific approaches have seldom been linked to date. The two projects exemplify how far self-reflexive aesthetic practices dealing explictly with various phenomena of everyday and media culture are capable of analysing cultural constructions, their policies and modes of operation.