Associate Fellow 2024-2025
Kerstin Stakemeier’s work as an art theorist and curator revolves around the ongoing questioning of art as an institution and discipline that is constantly closing itself off to its own inconsistencies. She therefore examines art production and art history not immanently, as if these disciplines were a given, but reconstructs them through political economy and social theory. Consequently, this entails rethinking the practice of authorship. Her work is strongly collaborative: Together with Anselm Franke she curated Illiberal Arts (Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, 2021) and Illiberal Lives (Stiftung Moderne Kunst Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2023). With Bill Dietz Stakemeier she authored Universal Receptivity (2021), and with M. Ammer, E. Birkenstock, J. Nachtigall, and S. Weber, the exhibition series and journal Class Languages (2017–18). In 2017 she published Entgrenzter Formalismus. Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik (bbooks), and with Marina Vishmidt she wrote Reproducing Autonomy (Mute, 2016).
In 2012 she and Avigail Moss published Painting – The Implicit Horizon. Stakemeier writes for many publications including Mousse Magazine and Berliner Review. In the winter of 2024 she will launch a substack titled Obscene Sense/s. With Vishmidt she had been working a second book, now titled Marina’s Cues: Infrastructures of Disalienation, which will be completed in 2025 with the help of Danny Hayward and a group of their friends. Stakemeier works predominantly in long-term collaborations and in March 2025 will co-chair with Devin Fore the conference Fantasies of the People. Historically there were never any others at Princeton University, a first of several formats both dedicate to fantasy’s communal core. In her project at LIAS, together with Danny Hayward, she continues the work of and with Marina Vishmidt, who died in 2024. In their project, they question the category of “artistic production” - a central category of art (history) that is subject to the imperative of productivity.
Abstract
Infrastructures of Disalienation
Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money Crisis and Contemporary Art is a book Marina Vishmidt and I co-authored in 2016. At the time both of us were debating how Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), the insistence on rethinking the terms of systemic production from its material and human forms of maintenance, of care, and of impossible subsistence, could figure within a materialist understanding of art, a more materialist understanding of art. Since then, we repeatedly set out to write a second book, because we felt Reproducing Autonomy fell short in seeing how SRT itself perpetually regenerated the roles that caring for the system instituted. Our catchphrase for these endeavours, which we returned to over the years, was “deproduction”.
Marina Vishmidt went on to fundamentally rethink the categorical necessities for parting from systemic immanence within what she dubbed Infrastructural Critique. The Infrastructural Aesthetics she developed since 2016 offer a much-needed step out of art’s secluded parochialism, sensing art instead through the general social and economic standards that run through and into it. I myself went on to position my work against the shaping of bodies for systemic reproduction, focusing on degenerating the modern mœurs. First, I sought out what is “unsittlich” in and out of art in Entgrenzter Formalismus (bbooks 2017). But since then I have expanded my interest in the unmaking of modern dignities in working from Frantz Fanon’s notion of “disalienation”, understanding it as a necessary departure from the mœurs, from white sensitivity.
Marina Vishmidt died on April 26, 2024 in Vienna. At LIAS Marina and I were planning to finalize our second book, Infrastructures of Disalienation, and upon her insistence, Danny Hayward and I now will. At LIAS, we will host a public workshop in January 2025, that discusses “Marina's Cues”, inviting a group of thirteen speakers to restart their own current work by picking up on Marina’s, to perpetuate Infrastructural Aesthetics. Infrastructures of Disalienation will be published as an extended documentation of the workshop's proceedings.
Education
2010 PhD Art History, University College London
2000 MA Political Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin
Most recent position
Professor of Art Theory and Art Education, Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg
Most recent publications
“Criticism’s Ends”, (ed.) Mousse, four issues on the problematisation of (art) criticism. Milan, 2023. www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/im-with-fantasy-kerstin-stakemeier-2023.
with Bill Dietz, “Universal Receptivity”. In: Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg (ed.), 2021. Online und print, arttheory-collaborations.adbk-nuernberg.de/Universal-Receptivity.
with Anselm Franke (ed.), Illiberal Arts, Exhibition Catalogue Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin: b_books, 2021.
Entgrenzter Formalismus. Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik, Berlin: b_books, 2017.