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Jenny Nachtigall: Toxic Relations: Ecology, Aesthetics (and their Discontents)
Toxic Relations: Ecology, Aesthetics (and their Discontents)
(p. 143 – 152)

Jenny Nachtigall

Toxic Relations: Ecology, Aesthetics (and their Discontents)

PDF, 10 pages

  • ecology
  • contemporary art
  • art theory
  • global ecology

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English

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English

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.
Other texts by Jenny Nachtigall 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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