Cultures of Critique

THEORY IN/AS PRACTICE – PRACTICE IN/AS THEORY
CELEBRATING CULTURES OF CRITIQUE | Flyer | Poster

June 19 (Thursday), 2 – 8 p.m., C40.501 Central Building

Our closing event will be devoted to reflecting on the initial question of the "Cultures of Critique" Research Training Group: What is the relationship between the theory and practice of critique?

Over the past nine years, our program has focused on critical practices, analyzing their instances, subjects, frameworks, claims to validity, and modes of effectiveness both in their specific situations and in their global interdependencies.
Our research has shown that critical practices cannot be separated from the forms and media of their representation, as they constitute the object of critique and shape its societal effects. Post- and decolonial as well as transcultural perspectives have challenged fundamental assumptions about critique rooted in the Enlightenment, particularly the fact that theoretical models have often emerged from intervening, protesting practices.

During our event, (former) graduate students and guests will reflect on the relationship between theory and practice in their research in short presentations.
A concluding panel discussion with Gertrud Koch (FU Berlin/Leuphana Universität Lüneburg), Premesh Lalu and Maurits van Bever Donker (University of the Western Cape, Cape Town), moderated by Erich Hörl, will examine the societal role of the university.

The workshop is hosted by the DFG Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique“ (Leuphana University Lüneburg) and will be held in English.

The Art of Organizing Work: Structures, Procedures, and Economies of Craft Workshops in Early 20th Century | Flyer

Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Paris, 26.-27. Juni 2025

Concept: Léa Kuhn (ZI München) and Beate Söntgen (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg)

How do artists and craftspeople work together? How do these collaborations affect their respective statuses and the value of their products? How are decisions made during the processes of design and execution? What effects do the particular geographical, political and economic conditions have on the production process, reception and marketing of the art objects created?

These are some of the questions the conference will consider in relation to the period starting from the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, which also took stock of the state of arts and crafts production at that time, until the beginning of the Second World War. This period is characterized by the increasing mechanization and automation of the production processes of arts and crafts objects, with established artists increasingly becoming involved in their manufacture. Discussions on the collaboration between the so-called “fine arts” and craft often revolve around the influence of art on craft. Our focus is on the reciprocity of exchange within this cooperation and the discursive intermingling between these two fields. How is work structured and what kinds of organizational forms are found in different types of workshops? How are these related to artistic demands, or to the use and functions of the manufactured objects?

In many avant-garde movements the applied arts played an important socio-cultural and political role. The economic side was often ignored however, for the sake of the requisite social interventions. In what ways do economic and political conditions determine the production processes and the cooperation between art and craft? What role do educational ideals and programs play? How does the educational training in workshops differ from that in art academies, beyond the orientation towards sales? What avant-garde practices found their way into the workshops and how does this affect production? And conversely, how does the knowledge of materials, techniques and processes generated in workshops influence forms of artistic expression?

The conference addresses a diverse range of disciplines including art, design and cultural studies, sociology, and in particular organizational sociology, and the economic sciences, and seeks new perspectives on artistic production at the margins of “classical modernism”.

„Unlikely Allies: Middle-Aged Women and the Trans Camera” - Jennifer Evans

Tuesday, 24.06.2025, 6:15 pm, C40.704

This paper takes up the parallel lives of two Jewish middle-aged women photographers, one in Italy, the other in Brazil, and the role of their photographs of the Genoa and Sao Paolo trans scenes for the way they presaged the visibility politics of the gay, lesbian, and feminist social movements of the 1970s and 80s. Lisetta Carmi and Madalena Schwartz, refugees who fled the Nazis in the 1930s before working their way into photography late in life, built relationships of intimacy and trust with the trans sex workers and performers they photographed in Italy and Brazil. In the process, they created a new visual language and emotional register for how to think about gender non-conformism long before Robert Mapplethorpe or Nan Goldin turned the camera on their own worlds. Working in the shadow of neo fascism in Italy and dictatorship in Brazil, these stories of kinship and solidarity ask us to consider the connections between the afterlives of the Holocaust and the Sexual Revolution. They unveil new points of contact, new sources of trust and allyship, and new visual and emotional regimes of ethnography and truth telling in a moment of resurgent authoritarianism. Most compellingly, they cast light on new and different actors - on both sides of the lens - whose stories have been undervalued or perhaps, never been told, stories that are all the more vital for us today.

Jennifer Evans is Professor of European History at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada, where she teaches about the history of sexuality, photography, and memory. Her books include Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (2011) and The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism published in 2023 and recently awarded the German Studies Association Prize for Best Book in Literature and Cultural Studies. She has also co-written Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape with former Carleton students Meghan Lundrigan and Erica Fagen. Her next book, Full Frontal: a New History of the Sexual Revolution, traces the role of image making in this period of social and legal change. In 2026, she will deliver the George Mosse lectures at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on the postwar history of German drag, which was funded by the Humboldt Foundation’s Adenauer Prize.“

This public lecture is organised in the context of the Duke University - Leuphana University Gender, Queer and Transgender Studies Workshop for Doctoral Candidates. It is hosted by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS), the Gender and Diversity Research Network, and the DFG Cultures of Critique research training group.

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments of a Sexual Life - Juana María Rodríguez

Tuesday, 24 June, 2025, 4:00 pm, Kunstraum

Written as a deconstructed memoir centered on autotheoretical reflections on the erotic, this presentation engages the tropes of queer quotidian practices that constitute a sexual life. As it traffics in the voyeuristic pleasures offered by a glimpse into the erotic life of another, it probes changing sexual cultures across a lifespan.

Juana María Rodríguez (she/her/ella) is a cultural critic, public speaker, and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics, and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. She is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014); and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003) and served as a co-editor of the special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Studies en las Americas.” Her research focuses on aesthetics and sexual labor; racialized sexuality and gender; affect and activism; embodiment and technology; and the politics of kink. A recipient of The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies’ prestigious Kessler Award in 2023, Rodríguez is a Professor in Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. 

This public lecture is organised in the context of the Duke University - Leuphana University Gender, Queer and Transgender Studies Workshop for Doctoral Candidates. It is hosted by the Center for Critical Studies (CCS), the Gender and Diversity Research Network, the Kunstraum, and the DFG Cultures of Critique research training group.

CFP: Lebenswelten schaffen: Künste im Gebrauch

Berlin, 6.–8.11.2025

Eingabeschluss: 30.04.2025

DFG-Sonderforschungsbereich Intervenierende Künste (Freie Universität Berlin / Leuphana Universität Lüneburg) & Brücke-Museum, Berlin

Die Tagung widmet sich der dynamischen Beziehung zwischen sogenannte „angewandter“ und „freier“ Kunst im frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Es formierten sich international künstlerische Bewegungen, welche die Kunst in den Alltag integrierten und die Grenzen zwischen Kunst und Leben auflösen wollten. Ausgehend von der Arts-and- Crafts-Bewegung in Großbritannien und der Werkbund-Debatte in Deutschland wurde in diesem Zuge das Kunsthandwerk um- und aufgewertet zu einer genuin künstlerischen Praxis.

Auch in gegenwärtigen Kunstdiskursen finden wieder verstärkt Diskussionen um das Kunsthandwerk statt, die sich, aus verschiedenen Perspektiven, entschieden gegen Hierarchisierungen wenden, wie u.a. die jüngste Biennale di Venezia, nicht zuletzt durch die Weitung des Blicks über europäische und US-amerikanische Horizonte hinaus. Theoretische Auseinandersetzungen wie etwa die “Craft Theory” grenzen sich wiederum von dezidiert künstlerischen Praktiken, vom Kunstbegriff und von der Zuordnung zur “High Art” ab und fordern einen eigenständigen Bereich.

Die meisten avantgardistischen Bewegungen im frühen 20. Jahrhundert fokussierten in ihren Entwürfen für Gebrauchsgegenstände ebenfalls das Verhältnis von Form und Funktion, um auf diese Weise gestaltend in die Lebenswelt einzugreifen. Die Tagung hingegen nimmt Künstler*innen und Gruppierungen in den Blick, deren Arbeiten auch in angewandten Bereichen einem emphatischen Kunstbegriff verpflichtet blieben. Daher schlagen wir die Formulierung “Künste im Gebrauch” vor. Diese gestalterischen Praktiken positionierten sich an der Schnittstelle zwischen “freier” und “angewandter” Kunst und wurden, wie das Kunsthandwerk insgesamt, auch aufgrund ihrer uneindeutigen Position in der kunsthistorischen Forschung wenig berücksichtigt.

Künstler*innen des Jugendstils oder der Wiener Werkstätten, die Mitglieder der „Brücke“, des „Blauen Reiter“, der „Nabis“, der Bloomsbury Group, aber auch einzelne Künstler*innen wie Pablo Picasso oder Gustav Klimt beschäftigten sich intensiv mit dem “Kunsthandwerk”. Allen gemeinsam ist die Betonung einer künstlerischen Ausrichtung der Gestaltung, die nicht auf Funktionalität orientiert ist. Die Arbeiten waren auch nicht für serielle Fertigung bestimmt und sind daher abzugrenzen vom Bauhaus und von jenen Strömungen, die in das (Industrial) Design etc. münden. Formen, Medien und Motivationen unterscheiden sich indes bei den Künsten im Gebrauch. Auffällig ist die Vielfalt an Genres und Medien, von Textilien und Möbelbau über Keramik bis hin zu Schmuck, Gebrauchsgrafik, Bühnenbildern und Kostümen. Die meisten dieser Arbeiten operierten über etablierte Gattungsgrenzen hinweg.

Die Tagung untersucht die Wechselwirkungen zwischen den Feldern “hohe” und “angewandte” Kunst, die sich um 1900 zu verschleifen begannen. Im Zentrum steht die wechselseitige Annäherung der Praktiken und Diskurse. 

Zentrale Fragen lauten: Welche Formen, Medien, Materialien wandern um 1900 zwischen den beiden Bereichen der “angewandten” und der “freien” Kunst und welche diskursiven Verschleifungen gibt es in der Rede über diese Produkte? Wo lernten die Künstler*innen mit Holz, Ton, Metall oder Textilien umzugehen? Und was interessierte sie an dem Umgang mit diesen Materialien? Stammen Entwurf und Ausführung aus einer Hand? Und welche Bedeutung ergibt sich daraus für das Werk? Welche Rolle spielten soziale und ökonomische Bedingungen für die Produktion von Künsten im Gebrauch zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts? Welche Netzwerke und Diskurse prägten das Verhältnis der Künstler*innen wie der Sammler*innen und Mäzen*innen zu den Künsten im Gebrauch? Gab es programmatische Stellungnahmen, etwa zur Einheit der Künste oder zur Verschleifung von Kunst und Leben? Mit welchen künstlerischen Strategien wurde diese im jeweiligen Gebrauchszusammenhang umzusetzen versucht? In welcher Weise leisteten die Künste im Gebrauch einen Beitrag zu ästhetischen oder gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen?

Ziel der Tagung ist es, den Nexus von Produktionsbedingungen, ästhetischen Strategien und angestrebten Wirkungsweisen in diesem Grenzbereich zu beleuchten. Die Tagung findet in Berlin statt und wird veranstaltet vom DFG-Sonderforschungsbereich Intervenierende Künste (Freie Universität Berlin, SFB 1512, TP A06: Künstlerische Lebensform als Intervention, PI: Beate Söntgen, Leuphana Universität) in Kooperation mit dem Brücke-Museum, Berlin (Lisa Marei Schmidt, Direktorin).

Entlang von drei geplanten Panels können folgende Aspekte thematisiert werden:

• Wohnwelten: Gestaltung von Möbeln, Textilien, ganzen Wohnräumen; raumbezogene dekorative Malerei.

• Arbeitswelten: Ökonomische und künstlerische Produktionsbedingungen; Erlernen kunsthandwerklicher Fertigkeiten; Arbeitsteilung; Ateliersituationen.

• Beziehungswelten: Künste im Gebrauch, wie etwa Schmuck oder Textilien, als beziehungsstiftendes Tauschobjekt; Auftragsarbeiten für Sammler*innen, Mäzen*innen; Gebrauchsgrafik als netzwerkbildendes Kommunikationsmedium.

Die deutschsprachige Tagung strebt eine inter- und transdisziplinäre Perspektive an und begrüßt Beiträge aus Kunst-, Design-, Theater- und Kulturwissenschaften, aus der Soziologie und den Wirtschaftswissenschaften sowie aus der Entwurfs- und kuratorischen Praxis. Reisekosten und Unterkunft werden gemäß des Bundesreisekostengesetzes erstattet. Wir erbitten Abstracts zu Fallstudien und/oder zu theoretischen Überlegungen. Bitte senden Sie Ihr Abstract (max. 2.500 Zeichen) bis zum 30. April 2025 an Hanna Schwarzenberg (hanna.schwarzenberg@leuphana.de). Die Vorträge sollen 20 Minuten umfassen. Eine schriftliche Skizze (5-6 Seiten) soll drei Wochen vor der Tagung unter den Beitragenden zirkulieren. Die Tagung wird vom 6.-8. November 2025 in Berlin stattfinden. Die Manuskripte (25.000 Zeichen und maximal 8 Abbildungen) für die geplante Publikation werden bis 15. Dezember 2025 erbeten.

CFP: The Art of Organizing Work: Structures, Procedures, and Economies of Craft Workshops in the Early 20th Century

Conference at the German Center for Art History (DFK Paris), Paris, June 26-27, 2025.
Organized by Léa Kuhn and Beate Söntgen

How do artists and craftspeople work together? How do these collaborations affect their respective statuses and the value of their products? How are decisions made during the processes of design and execution? What effects do the particular geographical, political and economic conditions have on the production process, reception and marketing of the art objects created?

These are some of the questions the conference will consider in relation to the period starting from the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, which also took stock of the state of arts and crafts production at that time, until the beginning of the Second World War. This period is characterized by the increasing mechanization and automation of the production processes of arts and crafts objects, with established artists increasingly becoming involved in their manufacture. Discussions on the collaboration between the so-called “fine arts” and craft often revolve around the influence of art on craft. Our focus is on the reciprocity of
exchange within this cooperation and the discursive intermingling between these two fields. How is work structured and what kinds of organizational forms are found in different types of workshops? How are these related to artistic demands, or to the use and functions of the manufactured objects? In many avant-garde movements the applied arts played an important socio-cultural and political role. The economic side was often ignored however, for the sake of the requisite social interventions. In what ways do economic and political conditions determine the production processes and the cooperation between art and craft? What role do educational ideals and programs play? How does the educational training in workshops differ from that in art academies, beyond the orientation towards sales? What avant-garde practices found their way into the workshops and how does this affect production? And conversely, how does the knowledge of materials, techniques and processes generated in workshops influence forms of artistic expression?

The conference addresses a diverse range of disciplines including art, design and cultural studies, sociology, and in particular organizational sociology, and the economic sciences, and seeks new perspectives on artistic production at the margins of 'classical modernism'. We welcome contributions on exemplary cases, as well as methodological insights, particularly from the field of working structures, organization and the intermingling of discourses. Contributions (20 minutes in length) should relate to at least one of the following thematic focuses:
- Working structures and processes, design and realization
- Programmatic approaches, economics and marketing
- Discursive intermingling between art and craft, and between the singular and the serial

This English-language conference will take place at the German Center for Art History in Paris (DFK Paris) from June 26-27, 2025. Travel expenses will be reimbursed. Contribution proposals (300 words) and a short CV should be sent to the address below by February 28, 2025: patricia.fritze@leuphana.de We also request a first version of the manuscript by June 6, 2025, i.e. three weeks before the conference, for the planned publication, which will be circulated among the contributors in advance. The final manuscripts (4000-5000 words and max. 8 illustrations) for the publication should be submitted by August 29, 2025.

Duke University – Leuphana University Gender, Queer and Transgender Studies Workshop for Doctoral Candidates

Professor Ben Trott (Leuphana University of Lüneburg) and Professor Gabriel Rosenberg (Duke University) have initiated a Gender, Queer and Transgender Studies Workshop for Doctoral Candidates in the humanities working on questions of gender and sexuality at the two institutions. The goal of the project is to facilitate doctoral candidates’ development of their dissertations, provide doctoral researchers the opportunity to present their work to an international scholarly audience, enable access to key international archives, and develop and consolidate international networks and scholarly exchange between both faculty and doctoral candidates.

In a first step, five doctoral candidates from Leuphana University of Lüneburg travelled to Duke University in March 2024 where they participated in a two-day workshop with three doctoral candidates from Duke University and one from the Global History program at the Freie Universität Berlin. The workshop was also joined by Dr. Zavier Nunn, Duke University Postdoctoral Associate in Histories of the Transgender Present. The nine doctoral candidates each delivered 20-minute talks based on one of their dissertation chapters (or another piece of writing) as well as a ten-minute critical response to one of the talks. In a second step in the exchange, participants will develop their talks into a draft chapter or article to be circulated ahead of a workshop in Lüneburg in June for critical feedback and development.

Prof. Trott is a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Philosophy and Art History (IPK) in the School of Culture and Society at Leuphana University, speaker of the Center for Critical Studies (CCS) and co-speaker of the Gender and Diversity Research Network. Prof. Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies and of History at Duke University (Durham, NC, USA). Dr. Nunn is Postdoctoral Associate in Histories of the Transgender Present at Duke University. In summer 2024, he takes up a Mellon Fellowship at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University (NY, USA).

More

We are very pleased to welcome the third generation of doctoral students at Cultures of Critique! Thirteen new members have started work in the winter term 2022/2023 and are making important contributions to the updating of a concept of critique in cultural studies with their projects.

• Kelly Bescherer: Identity as Deportability: On ‘Identitatsklärung’ as a Contested Practice of Control within the German-European Deportation Regime
• Jan-Hauke Branding: Gay Radical Theory Formation as (a Constellation of) Critique
• David Cabrera Rueda: A museum of memory for Colombia: The emergence of a controversial space
• Raphael Daibert: Lifting the Sky: Practices to Sustain Worlds Otherwise
• Volha Davydzik: Re-building Solidarity and Networks of Care Through Art: Political Art Practices in Rebellious Societies
• Felix Leonhard Esch: The Dialectics of the Body Politic - A Study on the Transformation of Modern Concepts of Society
• Jörg Hügel: ‚Primitive Communism‘ as a narrative concept between 1848 and 1940
• Dyoniz Kindata: Poetic and Photographic Practices in the Kiongozi German East African Colonial Newspaper 1885 to 1918
• Stasya Korotkova: Cross-dressing, Sexual, and Gender Dissent in Pre-Soviet Cinema (1908-1920)
• Melcher Ruhkopf: The Logistical Museum – Circulation and Connectivity in Contemporary Museum Practice
• Laura Felicitas Sabel: Praxes of the Transitory: Restitution, Museum Practice, and the (Im)material Cultural Heritage of the Tairona’s Descendants in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia
• Donovan Stewart: The Ecotechnical Community: Hospitality and the Organisation of Locality
• Lukas Stolz: Facing Reality: Between Doom and Cruel Optimism
• Julian Volz: ‚Alger la Blanche‘ becomes ‚Alger la Rouge‘ – On the heritage of the anti-colonial movements in contemporary art