Lecture by Prof. Jörg Scheller
Curator and Head of BA Photography, Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland
In 1995, Lev Manovich wrote: „The genre of music video has been a laboratory“. While Manovich dealt with music videos as a „constantly expanding textbook for digital cinema“, this talk will focus on transcultural aesthetics, symbols, and narratives in the audiovisual laboratories of pop culture – from sophisticated to decidedly non-sophisticated ones, from underground to mainstream, from American heavy metal to Ghanaian gospel porn rap. In place of an overview, the genre itself, this hybrid of various media – film, music, text –, will be portrayed as a genius loci for transculturality.
Jörg Scheller (*1979), PhD, is an art historian, journalist, and musician. He has been tenured lecturer in art history and head of photography at the Zurich University of the Arts since 2012. In 2013, he was the curator of the Salon Suisse at the 55th Venice Art Biennale. From 2009–2012, he was the coordinator of an international research project on the Venice Biennale (focus Eastern/Central Europe) at the Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zurich. In parallel, he was assistant professor at the University of Siegen, Germany (until 2013). Besides, he had teaching assignments at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, at the Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, at the University of Strasbourg, and at the University of Arts in Poznan, Poland (ongoing). In 2011, he was awarded his PhD for a dissertation on the myth of Arnold Schwarzenegger (supported by a scholarship from the German Research Foundation, 2007–209). His research is focused on bodybuilding, exhibition history, and popular culture. Latest book publications: Anything Grows. 15 Essays zur Geschichte, Ästhetik und Bedeutung des Bartes (2014, ed. with Alexander Schwinghammer); Arnold Schwarzenegger oder Die Kunst, ein Leben zu stemmen (2012); No Sports! Zur Ästhetik des Bodybuildings (2010). He is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines such as Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Schweizer Monat, frieze d/e. www.joergscheller.de
Wednesday, September 09 – 7pm
Connecting Space Hong Kong