New at Leuphana: Prof. Dr. Jordan Troeller – Creativity in Contemporary Art

The Virgin Mary with the Christ child is one of the most iconographic representations of motherhood in western art. "The Virgin Mary dominates social expectations around motherhood, aligning it with self-sacrifice and purity, when in fact nurturing another human being is anything but that,“ says Prof. Dr. Jordan Troeller. She has taken over the junior professorship for Contemporary Art History, Aesthetic Practices. The religious idealisation is accompanied by the demonisation of the woman as the "evil stepmother" prevalent in fairy tales, or a strong sexualisation through nudity. Jordan Troeller wants to reverse this binary thinking, as she explains: "Contemporary women artists, many of whom are mothers themselves, are using their work today to question not only what motherhood is today in an age of biotech and climate change, but also how we define the boundary between artificiality and nature, between the production of lifelike images and the production of living bodies," she says. She explores how we can think differently about motherhood and femininity: "The extremes depicted simply do not exist. Social currents today have produced non-normative family models which have been changing longstanding expectations around social reproduction," Jordan Troeller explains.

She will pursue her research initiative "The M/Other Project: Creativity, Procreation, and Contemporary Art“ over the next six years with her own research group. Docked at the Institute of Philosophy and Art History at Leuphana, the research group will also work closely with the Institute of Art, Music and Education. The art historian has been awarded a 1.1 million euro Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation to carry out this research on creativity in contemporary art.

An example of the kind of artistic works Jordan Troeller is researching can be found in Antje Engelmann's "The Great Mother". She has transformed the iconic representation of the Virgin Mary into a strange and unfamiliar image. It is a portrait of Engelmann's aunt Renate, who began earning her living as a prostitute at the age of 16. "Here we are dealing with a profane desecration of an otherwise sacrosanct iconography - instead of the elegant robe of the Virgin Mary, Renate is wrapped in strudel dough, a traditional dessert in the Danube-Swabian region where Engelmann grew up," explains Jordan Troeller and asks: "How does a work like this cause us to expand narrow definitions of motherhood and thus of traditional gender roles? What impact might such an expansion have on how we value reproductive labour?" Maternal care work is among the lowest paid work in the Western world: "Yet mothers have a lot of wisdom and knowledge," says Jordan Troeller.

A goal of the art historian is to build a bridge between the Institute of Fine Arts, Music and Education and the Institute of Philosophy and Art History, primarily through research-based teaching. “There are outstanding artists who also teach in schools,” explains Jordan Troeller: "In my research, I look at artists who take their teaching function very seriously." The art historian will also teach in the major "Lehren und Lernen" and points out the special role of art teaching in schools: "In art, students can experience the world holistically and recognise connections between different fields of knowledge. There is no right and wrong like there is in mathematics. Art is a landscape of different possibilities."

An example of the kind of artistic works Jordan Troeller is researching can be found in Antje Engelmann's "The Great Mother". She has transformed the iconic representation of the Virgin Mary into a strange and unfamiliar image. It is a portrait of Engelmann's aunt Renate, who began earning her living as a prostitute at the age of 16. "Here we are dealing with a profane desecration of an otherwise sacrosanct iconography - instead of the elegant robe of the Virgin Mary, Renate is wrapped in strudel dough, a traditional dessert in the Danube-Swabian region where Engelmann grew up," explains Jordan Troeller and asks: "How does a work like this cause us to expand narrow definitions of motherhood and thus of traditional gender roles? What impact might such an expansion have on how we value reproductive labour?" Maternal care work is among the lowest paid work in the Western world: "Yet mothers have a lot of wisdom and knowledge," says Jordan Troeller.

A goal of the art historian is to build a bridge between the Institute of Fine Arts, Music and Education and the Institute of Philosophy and Art History, primarily through research-based teaching. “There are outstanding artists who also teach in schools,” explains Jordan Troeller: "In my research, I look at artists who take their teaching function very seriously." The art historian will also teach in the major "Lehren und Lernen" and points out the special role of art teaching in schools: "In art, students can experience the world holistically and recognise connections between different fields of knowledge. There is no right and wrong like there is in mathematics. Art is a landscape of different possibilities."

Prof. Dr. Jordan Troeller studied at the University of California, Berkeley and completed a Master's degree at Harvard University, where she also received her PhD in 2018. Between 2009 and 2012 she worked as an art critic for Artforum.com. Further positions took her to the University of Graz and the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2022, she took on a lectureship at Leuphana University Lüneburg and on April 1 begun her appointment as a junior professor for Contemporary Art History, Aesthetic Practices at the Institute of Fine Arts, Music and Education. After a period of parental leave, she will begin teaching regularly in the summer semester of 2024. Jordan Troeller's research focuses on the European and Soviet avant-garde in the early 20th century, post-war art in Europe and America, and the history of photography.