Art*is Logo

*(A)rt and (R)esearch on (T)ransformations of (I)ndividuals and (S)ocieties

*
October 02, 2023

Paper on Ethical Conflicts in the Research Project: ARTIS. Research as ‘Dirty’[1]: On Colonial Histories of Research

The ARTIS project description aims to research ‘how art impacts societies depending on their dominant ideologies’. This excerpt by Anisha Gupta Müller (KHB) hopes to turn the question around: how do dominant ideologies affect research in the first place? From the context of weißensee kunsthochschule, Anisha Gupta Müller writes on the ethical problems that foreground scientific research
*
July 17, 2023

New publication on visitors’ bodily, emotional, and transformative experience with an installation artwork

Installation art, with its immersive and participatory nature, evokes and necessitates bodily engagement and awareness. A new study shows that these aspects are integral to the overall art experience, appreciation, and transformative outcomes.
*
*
December 09, 2022

New Book Publication by Sarah Hegenbart (UOXF)

written by Corinna Kühnapfel

Sarah Hegenbart’s new book “From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso: Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa as postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk?” in which she shows how art can be transformative on the basis of Opera Village Africa, has just been published.

The postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk: Disrupting the Eurocentric perspective on art history and addressing Germany’s colonial history  

Opera Village Africa, a participatory art experiment by the late German multimedia artist Christoph Schlingensief, serves as a testing ground for a critical interrogation of Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Sarah Hegenbart traces the path from Wagner’s introduction of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Bayreuth to Schlingensief’s attempt to charge the idea of the total artwork with new meaning by transposing it to the West African country Burkina Faso. Schlingensief developed Opera Village in collaboration with the world-renowned architect Francis Kéré. This final project of Schlingensief is inspired by and illuminates the diverse themes that informed his artistic practice, including coming to terms with the German past, anti-Semitism, critical race theory, and questions of postcolonial (self-)criticism.
From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso introduces the notion of the postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk to disrupt the Eurocentric perspective on art history, exploring how the socio-political force of a postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk could affect processes of transcultural identity construction. It reveals how Schlingensief translocated the Wagnerian concept to Burkina Faso to address German colonial history and engage with it from the perspective of multidirectional memory cultures.

Reference:
Hegenbart, S. (2022). From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso: Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa as postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk? Leuven University Press.

For further information, read this interview with the author.

*