Curators and Contributors

The Readymade Century
Curated by Dieter Daniels in collaboration with Annette Bhagwati

Dieter Daniels is professor for art history and media theory at the Academy of Visual Arts (HGB) in Leipzig and currently Gutenberg Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College, Mainz. As an art historian, media theorist, and exhibition curator he has published several books on media history and media art as well as on the relation between art and music. He is author and editor of monographs on George Brecht, John Cage, and of two books on Marcel Duchamp and the legacy of the readymade. Selected publications: The Readymade Century (with Olaf Nicolai, 2017). Übrigens sterben immer die anderen: Marcel Duchamp und die Avantgarde seit 1950 (1988), and Duchamp und die anderen: Der Modellfall einer künstlerischen Wirkungsgeschichte in der Moderne (1992).

Annette Bhagwati is project director at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin. Recent projects include The New Alphabet (2017–21), 100 Years of Now (2015–18), Wohnungsfrage (2015), and The Anthropocene Project (2013–2014). After studying social anthropology, art history, and African art, she joined HKW as program coordinator and deputy head of exhibitions. Between 2009 and 2012 she was affiliate professor of art history at Concordia University, Montreal. She has lectured and published widely on topics related to transcultural curating, museum studies and exhibition history, global art, and African art.

Saâdane Afif is an artist based in Berlin. Defined as “post-conceptual”, his work focuses on interpretation, exchange, and circulation. He works in performance, objects, text, and printed matter, and all of his works are subject to a continuous process of alteration. Recent solo exhibitions include The Fountain Archives, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), and Vice de Forme: Das Kabarett, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2016). His work was included the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and in Documenta 12 (2007). In 2009 he was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize.

Inke Arns, curator and author with a focus on media art and media theory, net cultures, and Eastern Europe is the director of the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) in Dortmund. After studying Slavic and Eastern European studies, political science, and art history, she was awarded her doctorate at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin in 2014 for a dissertation which addressed the reception of the historical avant-garde and the concept of utopia in (media) art projects. Her publications include Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel (2004) and Netzkulturen (2002).

To the biography of Kader Attia

Lars Blunck is professor of art history at the Academy of the Fine Arts Nuremberg, prior to which he was a visiting professor (2008–13) and research assistant (2002–08) at the Technical University of Berlin. In 2005 he was awarded the Deubner Prize for contemporary art historical research, in 2007 he habilitated with the postdoctoral thesis Dimensionen des Sehens. Studien zu Marcel Duchamps Präzisionsoptik. His numerous publications on modern and contemporary art include Duchamps Readymade (2017) and Marcel Duchamp: Porte-bouteilles (2014).

Martha Buskirk is professor of art history and criticism at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Massachusetts. She is author of Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace (2012), and The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (2003), as well as co-editor of The Duchamp Effect (with Mignon Nixon, 1996) and The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents (with Clara Weyergraf-Serra, 1990). She is also author of numerous essays and articles that have appeared in Artforum, October, Art in America, and other volumes. Her current research examines the interplay between artistic authorship and legal definitions of intellectual property.

Simon Denny is an artist working with installation, sculpture, and video. He studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Selected solo exhibitions include OCAT, Shenzhen (2017), Serpentine Galleries, London (2015), and MoMA PS1, New York (2015). Selected group shows include: the 9th Berlin Biennale and Hack Space, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (both 2016) and Political Populism, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015). Simon Denny represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015).

Sebastian Egenhofer is professor for contemporary art history at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on abstraction in classical Modernism, the implications of modern pictorial systems for subjectivity theory, as well as the penetration of text and literality into modern visual art. His published works include: “Dispositive der Formgenese. Zwischen Perspektive und Abstraktion,” in Markus Klammer et al (eds), Formbegriff und Formbildung. Das Formdenken der Moderne (forthcoming) and Abstraktion – Kapitalismus – Subjektivität. Die Wahrheitsfunktion des Werks in der Moderne (2008).

FAMED was founded in 2003. In addition to producing art for public spaces the group’s work has also appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include Avantgarde & Desaster (Kunstverein Braunschweig), Revolte, ASPN Galerie Leipzig (2017), I’m Just Here to Say “Hello” at the Center of Contemporary Art, Andratx (2016), Privileg der Umstände, Gabriele Senn Gallery, Vienna (2015), Vor den Dingen, nach dem Affekt, Art Museum St. Gallen (2011), and Exil des Möglichen, Leipzig Museum of the Fine Arts (2010).

Thomas Girst was editor of Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal (nos 1–5) from 1999 to 2003, as general manager of the Art Science Research Library, New York. Since 2003 he has been global head of cultural engagement at the BMW Group. In 2016 he was awarded “European Cultural Manager of the Year.” His publications include The Duchamp Dictionary (2014), The Indefinite Duchamp (2013), Marcel Duchamp in Munich 1912 (2012), and Aftershock: The Legacy of the Readymade in Post-War and Contemporary American Art (2003).

Isabelle Graw, together with Stefan Germer, founded the magazine Texte zur Kunst in Cologne in 1990, of which she is the publisher and editor to this day. She teaches art theory and art history at the State University of the Fine Arts (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main. Her publications include Die Liebe zur Malerei. Genealogie einer Sonderstellung (2017), Über Malerei (with Peter Geimer, 2012), and with Daniel Birnbaum Art and Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism (2011) and The Power of Judgment: A Debate on Aesthetic Critique (2010).

Katja Kwastek is professor for modern and contemporary art at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2012 she assumed the chair for art and new media at the Institute for Art and Visual History at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. Her current research interests address the aesthetics of process and reception with respect to modern and contemporary art, digital and post-digital art, questions of media theory and media aesthetics, as well as the environmental and digital humanities. Her publications include Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (2013) and Computer, Kunst und Kunstgeschichte (with Hubertus Kohle, 2003).

Oliver Laric is an artist living and working in Berlin. He studied at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Solo exhibitions include Oliver Laric, Tramway, Glasgow (2017), Photoplastik, Secession, Vienna (2016), TF, Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo (2015), and Oliver Laric, Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Black Box: Oliver Laric, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (both 2014). Future exhibitions are scheduled at Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland (2017); S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium (2018); and the Saint Louis Art Museum (2019).

Sven Lütticken teaches art history at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and art theory at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) in Arnhem. He studied art history at the Vrije Universiteit and at the Freie Universität Berlin. He publishes regularly in journals and magazines, including New Left Review, Texte fur Kunst, e-flux journal, Grey Room, and Afterall, and contributes to catalogues and exhibitions as a writer or guest curator. His publications include Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (2017), History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image (2013), and Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art (2006).

Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer is professor of “Cultures of the Curatorial” at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, where he also teaches art history and visual culture. His writings comprise a monograph on the artist Dieter Roth (2007) as well as texts and edited anthologies on topics related to artistic practice and the curatorial. Together with the artist Willem de Rooij he realized the project Intolerance, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin (2010/11) and with the artist Clemens von Wedemeyer he curated the exhibition fremd, Ethnological Museum Leipzig (2016).

Olaf Nicolai develops interdisciplinary projects which address the elementary experiences of space, time, and physicality. He received the Karl Sczuk-Award for audio drama as radio art for his contribution to Documenta 14: In the woods there is a bird (2017). His project GIRO featured in the German pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). In 2013 Escalier du Chant was exhibited at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. In 2011 he was appointed professor for sculpture and the fundamentals of 3-D design at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

To the biography of Margareta von Oswald

Matthew Plummer Fernandez is a British Colombian artist who creates sculpture, software, online interventions, and installations, producing as well as reflecting on contemporary socio-technical entanglements and their comical discontents. He is currently conducting a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. He runs the blog Algopop on algorithms in everyday life. His work has been presented extensively, including shows at iMal, Brussels (with JODI, 2016), and NOME Gallery, Berlin (2015). He has been commissioned by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the V&A, London, and AND Festival, Manchester.

Annette Tietenberg is professor for art studies at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK). From 1996 to 2001 she was a research assistant at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Her research interests include authentication strategies, the aesthetics of reception, art, and design in the space age, as well as intercultural transfer of pattern and ornament. She is the editor of Muster im Transfer. Ein Modell transkultureller Verflechtung? and Die Ausstellungskopie. Mediales Konstrukt, materielle Rekonstruktion, historische Dekonstruktion (both 2015).

Gesine Tosin, art historian, managed the Onnasch Collection, Berlin, from 2009 to 2014, curating exhibitions of the collection in international museums. From 2007 to 2009 she was responsible for developing the collection of the Museion in Bozen, Tyrol, Italy. Among other works, in 2009 Tosin published Le Grand Déchiffreur. Richard Hamilton sur Marcel Duchamp, a collection of letters, texts, and interviews which she co-authored as part of the publication series Lectures Maison Rouge. Since 2016 she has managed Saâdane Afif’s Fountain Archives (thefountainarchives.com) and has co-curated a series of exhibitions of the project in various museums.

Tobias Vogt is interim professor for modern and contemporary art at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research interests include the relationship between word and image and between works of art and commodities since 1800, art historical writing, and the authentication of art by means of contracts and certificates. He is co-editor of the handbook Kunst ⇔ Begriffe der Gegenwart. Von Allegorie bis Zip (2013). His postdoctoral thesis Artikel der Kunst. Alltagsobjekt und Wortspiel in den Pariser Bildkünsten des 19. Jahrhunderts will be published in 2018.