Verflechtung - Aushandlung - Opazität / Entanglement – Negotiation – Opacity
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Edited by:
Margit Kern, Universität Hamburg
The publications in this series examine processes of entanglement from an art-historical perspective. Entanglement is not understood as levelling but as the acknowledgement of difference as a theme, difference becoming topical itself Accordingly, processes of entanglement may also result in the failure of exchange processes, untranslatability, and opacity.
The series discusses the consolidation and dissolution of border-regimes and markers of difference in various fields and epochs. For instance, individual volumes address transcultural negotiations, human-animal relations, or the political and above all postcolonial dimensions of the relation between culture and nature. In addition, religious intermeshing, such as discussions of transcendence, or intersectional shifts between ethnicity, gender, class, religion or denomination, age, etc. are analyzed.
From the perspective of art history and visual studies (Bildwissenschaften), specific questions must also be raised about the media of entanglement. How do visual media drive processes of entanglement on the one hand, but serve to highlight difference on the other? What part can competition between various image media play in this context?
Topics
Die Begegnung der beiden schwangeren Frauen Maria und Elisabet, die Heimsuchung, war ein beliebtes Motiv in der mittelalterlichen Skulptur. Katja Triebe dokumentiert erstmals den umfangreichen Bestand. Exemplarische Einzelanalysen, u.a. von Hauptwerken der Kunstgeschichte wie die Heimsuchungen des Bamberger Doms und aus Kloster St. Katharinental, legen Neuinterpretationen von vieldiskutierten Werken vor. Die Studie zeigt, wie die Skulpturen ihr Publikum intellektuell, körperlich und emotional einbinden, und deckt die vielschichtigen allegorischen Bedeutungen der Werke auf. Die Frauenkörper dienten als Aushandlungsort politischer, theologischer, sozialer und genderspezifischer Themen. Innovative Analysemethoden eröffnen neue Fragestellungen und Perspektiven für die Skulpturenforschung.
- Erste umfassende Studie zum Motiv der Heimsuchung in der mittelalterlichen Skulptur
- Innovative Deutungsmethoden und Perspektiven für die Skulpturenforschung
- Mit einem Katalog von rund 200 Werken
Das Habitat-Diorama – ein Schaukasten, in dem Tierpräparate in einer gestalteten Landschaft hinter Glas präsentiert werden – ist eines der wichtigsten Bildmedien der Naturkundemuseen im 20. Jahrhundert und bis heute prägend für deren Ausstellungspraxis. Authentifiziert durch die spezifische Rezeptionssituation schafft das Habitat-Diorama wirkmächtige Vorstellungen eines idealisierten „Lebensraums“, der biologisch erscheint, aber eindeutig politische, vor allem auch koloniale Dimensionen aufweist. Mit methodisch innovativem Ansatz befragt Theresa Stankoweit dieses komplexe Mediengefüge auf seine ästhetischen Mechanismen hin und diskutiert u.a. den Bildstatus des Tierpräparats. Zentrale Beispiele sind zwei um 1900 entstandene Schaubilder aus dem Frankfurter Senckenberg-Museum, die „Flora und Fauna Deutsch-Ostafrikas“ sowie das „Nordpolarleben“, deren Entstehungsgeschichte erstmals reflektiert wird.
This study focuses on mural paintings, sculptures, picture writings and body images from 16th-century Mexico. Julia Kloss-Weber analyses the extent to which many of the images produced during the New Spain mission address alterity, i.e. identity-creating otherness. At the same time, she investigates the form of alterity assigned to images as fields of tension within an "iconic difference" (Gottfried Boehm). This brings together two areas of discourse that had developed largely independently of each other: Reflections on constructions of the "other" in the context of postcolonial studies, and debates on image theory. Thus it emerges that images not only mediate between cultures, but are also themselves the subject of processes of transcultural negotiations.
The heart had a key position in the visual media of religious women’s communities in the early modern era. Maria Schaller analyzes portraits and image-bearing jewelry created in Catholic nunneries and Protestant women’s convents during the 17th and 18th centuries; these address ideas such as the indwelling, imprinting, or inscribing of the divine in the human heart. This study examines their recourse to the heart visions of late medieval mystics, but also to remarkable new semanticizations such as constructing the genealogy of an ‘eternal wound of the heart’. The primary question is how far the body images and imaginaries of the heart presented here reflect mediation processes in the field of tension between denomination, class, and gender.
- Fundamental contribution to gender research and the history of the body during the early modern age
- Images of the heart in various Christian denominations
The photographic wall-mounted work, the so-called photomural, became an epitome of the USA’s national art in the 1930s; also as a counter-design to Mexican muralism. For the first time, Johanna Spanke analyzes the extent to which the rise of the photomural can be seen as emerging from a process of mediation between Mexico and the United States; one in which national identity constructs and discourses of modernity played a part, as well as negotiated competition between media. This publication makes an important contribution to perspectives on historical entanglements in U.S. art history, bringing to the fore intermedial and transnational debates, as well as gender-related factors.
German Photo Book Award 24/25, Gold in the category ‘Text Volume Photo Theory’
