Study Focus Visual, Media and Material Culture (VMC)

This focus investigates the production, proliferation, and reception of images and objects as well as their collection, display, and reconfiguration with a view to the human agency involved. A transcultural perspective calls for recovering the ways in which experiences and processes of mobility and braidedness are constitutive for the actors and visual regimes involved in these processes. Transculturality also addresses the enmeshing of visual technologies, institutional practices, placemaking, and im/mobility in ways that cut across bipolar asymmetries. Of relevance is the role of diverse agencies, both local and trans-regional, in the negotiation of power and the production of knowledge. This can range from archival, artistic, and exhibition practice to architecture and urban planning to film and advertising. Interdisciplinary conversations and research-based projects help reach into literary, linguistic, musical, performative or ritual dimensions of creative cultures, whose meanings can be more fully apprehended through a range of experiences centering on the social agents, spaces, and sensoriums.

Study content (selection):

• Curating cultures: art and exhibition practices
• Art, film and migration in the Global South
• Cityscapes in Asia: transcultural placemaking
• Orientalist architecture
• Europe and the arts of Islam