Faculty of Humanities

Postcolonialism and Gender in Art

The project Aesthetic Proper Times in the Transnational Negotiating Space of the Black Atlantic searches for the relevance of aesthetic proper times in the transnational chronotope of the Black Atlantic. It refers to artefacts and works of art as well as concepts of aesthetic theory and their relational dynamics, action and time potentials. Ascriptions of temporality are understood as concepts of identity/alterity and their boundaries. Beyond dichotomous concepts of race and their anthropologically defined temporality – like, for example, in the concept of primitive Africa – the idiosyncratic, present aesthetic potential of objects of art and their relevance for Modernism and the world of today has to be made clear to newly construct their impact on the creation of knowledge systems (Prof. Gabriele Genge, Art and Art History, sponsored by DFG-Priority Programme 1688 “Aesthetic Proper Times. Time and Representation in polychronic Modernism”).

Until today the multifacetedness of the work of painter and collage artist Hannah Höch is a great impetus for currents of contemporary art. The exhibition Hannah Höch. Art Revolutionary in Mülheim/Ruhr’s Museum of Fine Arts was dedicated to the artist’s little examined work after 1945, showing the whole range of Hannah Höch’s artistic skill. Art theory still discovers ever new perspectives, such as Höch’s ironic refraction of gender-constructions or colonialist representations of the strange. This was the issue of a symposium that took place in December 2016 (conception: Dr. Alma-Elisa Kittner, Art and Art History, with Dr. Beate Reese, Director Mülheim Art Museum). International guests discussed the de-constructed body in Höch’s work or postcolonial perspectives on it. A very successful first collaboration.