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Marietta Kesting, Maria Muhle, ...: Editors’ Preface
Editors’ Preface
(p. 9 – 11)
  • art theory
  • ecology
  • contemporary art
  • global ecology

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Marietta Kesting

holds the position of junior professor for media theory at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since April 2016. She studied photography, film, cultural studies and media theory at Bennington College, USA and Humboldt University, Berlin. From 2008 to 2011 she was a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and from 2014–2016 researcher at the interdisciplinary laboratory Image|Science|Gestaltung at Humboldt University. Her PhD Affective Images of Post-Apartheid. Documentary Perspectives on Migration, Xenophobia and Gender in South African Film and Photography (2015) was funded by the DFG and nominated for the Humboldt-Award. From 2015 to 2018 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, in the FWF project ‘A Matter of Historicity. Material Practices in Audiovisual Art’. She curated the photography exhibit ‘Now you see me, now you don’t’ for the National Theatre of Mannheim and directed several essayistic films. Kesting is part of the publishing collective b_books, Berlin since 2004 and has become a member of the editorial board of FKW journal for visual culture and gender studies in 2017. She writes for Texte zur Kunst, Social Dynamics and FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, among others. A recent publication is "Changing Visual Politics in South Africa," in Anne Graefer, Media and the Politics of Offence (2019).
Other texts by Marietta Kesting for DIAPHANES

Maria Muhle

is professor for Philosophy | Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and founder of the August Verlag Berlin. She is a member of the DFG research group ‘Media and Mimesis’ at the International Doctoral Program of the LMU Munich and, in spring 2018, was a fellow at the research group ‘BildEvidenz’ of the FU Berlin. Her main research interests are political aesthetics, media philosophy, mimesis, strategies of reenactment, and biopolitics. Among her recent publications are Black Box Leben (2017, ed. with Christiane Voss); ‘Mimesis und Aisthesis. Realismus und Geschichte 284 bei Auerbach und Rancière’ (2018, in Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus, ed. Joseph Vogl, Veronika Thanner, Dorothea Walzer); ‘“Beweis zu nichts”. Marcel Odenbachs Geschichtsbilder’ (2018, in Marcel Odenbach. Beweis zu nichts, Kunsthalle Wien), and ‘Praktiken des Inkarnierens. Nachstellen, Verkörpern, Einverleiben’ (2017, in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung).

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Jenny Nachtigall

is a professor of art history and theory in interim at the Städelschule in Frankfurt since 2019. She studied art history, cultural studies and philosophy in London and Lüneburg (2005–2010). From 2014 until 2019 she was research associate at the chair of philosophy | aesthetic theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She worked as curatorial assistance at the Tate Modern, London (2010–2011) and has taught at the Humboldt University Berlin and the Art History Department of the University College London (UCL), where she completed her PhD in 2016. She teaches and researches the history and theory of modern and contemporary art, with a focus on questions of mediality, form and mass culture and currently works on the role of vitalisms in art and theory since 1900. Together with Dorothea Walzer she realized the project art and(re)production (HU Berlin/UCL, 2013/14) and, together with Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Kerstin Stakemeier and Stephanie Weber the exhibition and magazine format Klassensprachen (2017). Among her recent publications are ‘The Modern Subject, a Dead Form Living. On the Aesthetics of (a Fractured) Vitalism’ (2019, in Post-Apocalyptic Self-Reflection, ed. by Tanja Widmann, Laura Preston), ‘Vitalism/Living Form’ (2018, in Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930, ed. Anselm Franke, Tom Holert), and Klassensprachen – Written Praxis (2017, ed. with Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Kerstin Stakemeier, Stephanie Weber). She writes among others for Artforum and Texte zur Kunst.
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Susanne Witzgall

has been the academic head of the BMBF-funded cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since 2011. She studied art history, theatre studies, psychology and art pedagogy at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and the University of Stuttgart, where she received her doctorate in 2001. From 2003 to 2011 she taught in the department of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She has worked as a freelance curator, and was a curator at the Deutsches Museum Bonn and the Deutsches Museum München from 1995 to 2002. Susanne Witzgall curated or cocurated Art & Brain II (1997/1998), Das zweite Gesicht/The Other Face (2002), Say it isn’t so (2007), (Re)designing nature (2010/2011) and other exhibitions, and is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on contemporary art, the relationship between art and science, and subjects of current interdisciplinary debates. These include her monograph Kunst nach der Wissenschaft (Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2003) as well as the publications New Mobility Regimes in Art and Social Sciences (ed. with Gerlinde Vogl and Sven Kesselring, Ashgate, 2013), Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, Fragile Identities, The Present of the Future (all three ed. with Kerstin Stakemeier, diaphanes, 2014, 2016 and 2017 respectively) and Real Magic (2018). Since 2019 she is member of the advisory board of the Piet Zwart Institute/Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam as well as of the Institute of Modern Art Nuremberg.

Other texts by Susanne Witzgall for DIAPHANES
Marietta Kesting (ed.), Maria Muhle (ed.), ...: Hybrid Ecologies

The notion of ecology not only figures centrally in current debates around climate change, but also traverses contemporary discourses in the arts, the humanities, and the social and techno sciences. In its present reformulation it refers to the multi-layered and multi-dimensional nexus of reciprocities between living processes, technological and media practices, i.e. to the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents. The book Hybrid Ecologies understands ecology as an ambivalent notion, whose multivalence opens up new fields of action and yet, thanks precisely to this openness and vast applicability, at the same time raises questions not least concerning its genealogy. The interdisciplinary contributions seek to explore the political and social effects that a rethinking of community in ecological and thus also in biopolitical terms may provoke, and which consequences the contemporary notion of ecology might entail for artistic and design practices in particular. The present publication is the result of the fifth annual program of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies, which was conceived in cooperation with the Chair of Philosophy | Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

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