Invitation to the Defense of Veronika Rudorfer
The Institute Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna kindly invites you to the defense of Veronika Rudorfer´s dissertation project “Seeing the void. Forms of visual representation of so-called 'Arisierungen' in contemporary art”.
The Examination Panel is made up of: Ruth Sonderegger (chair), Sabeth Buchmann (supervisor), and Petra Lange-Berndt (external appraiser, University of Hamburg).
Abstract
“To see emptiness means to place into a percept something that belongs there but is absent and to notice its absence as a property of the present.” – Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1969, p. 89.
The main title of the dissertation is based on a quote by Arnheim and addresses its central question: The aim of the dissertation is to examine methodologies in contemporary artistic practices that deal with so-called “Aryanizations” (“Arisierungen”), the National Socialist expropriation of all property from the population defined and persecuted as “Jewish” in Germany, Austria and the occupied territories, and to look at the medializations for the Potentiated Absence of objects, their owners and contexts caused by “Aryanizations”. These complexes are relevant due to the need to reflect on current forms of cultures of remembrance (Erinnerungskulturen), caused by the disappearance of the contemporary witnesses of the Shoah and the transition from a communicative to a cultural memory, by restitution processes of “Aryanized” property, some of which have not yet been completed to this day, and by a necessary reflection on recent discourses on cultures of remembrance. The artistic practices of Anna Artaker, Maria Eichhorn and Arno Gisinger are analyzed in case studies along the central terms, concepts and discourses of “Aryanizations”, absence and void, cultural memory and cultures of remembrance and institutional critique and intertwined with methodological approaches of a social history of art, field theory and discourse analysis informed by the sociology of knowledge.
Short biography
Veronika Rudorfer studied art history in Vienna and Hamburg. She is a curator for modern and contemporary art and lives in Berlin and Vienna. She publishes regularly in Camera Austria, EIKON, springerin und Texte zur Kunst.
The thesis defense will be in German and will take place at the Academy at Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna, room M13a.
We are looking forward to welcoming you.