TC – Seite 2

Cosmopolitan Rhapsody – Transcultural Tendencies in the Music Video Genre

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

Transculturality in the Arts

Lecture by Roger M. Buergel

Curator (Curator Documenta 12, Director Johan Jacobs Museum Zurich)

The migration of form

Certain things can be regarded as prisms in which the world reveals itself in the play of their global refractions. Seventeenth-century Persian ceramics, for instance, which imitate Chinese porcelain. Or the „Black Madonnas“ that travelled to Haiti with Polish mercenaries at the end of the 18th century.

Objects like these need to be regarded in a way that places less emphasis on their discreteness than on their place in the design of things: they are parts of a historical and political network of relations. This relational network – a tableau comprising colonial wars, Oriental fantasies, a genuine love of special items and trading monopolies – has still to be examined in depth.

Tuesday, September 01 – 7pm
Jacobs Museum Zurich

Artist – Subject – Politics

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jörg Huber

Cultural Theory

One of the most unsettling challenge in the experience of transculturality is the task of self-awareness. As a consequence quite a number of fundamental questions and problems arise concerning the terms and phenomenon of the individual, subject, person, artist or author… in the context of global politics. The lecture will expose some aspects and questions as “the subject between west and east”; “the self and identity”; “the individual, power and politics”; “the artist as a migrant” etc.

Prof. Dr. Jörg Huber studied art history, literature, modern history and philosophy in Berne, Berlin, Paris; professor for critical theory and asthetics; head of the Institut of Critical Theory and professor at the Master of Arts in Fine Arts at the Zürich University of the Arts (till october 2013). Publications in the fields of critical theory, theory of art, aesthetics, theory of viusal culture.

Autor: TC