Under the title The Geopolitical and Intercultural Boundaries of Visual Culture this conference elaborates on the interplay between the geopolitical designs of the European Union and transnational visual cultures in the region. Taking as a point of departure the strategic expansion and uneven porosity of the Europe’s political and cultural boundaries, this conference will lay out the role that visuality have had in the process of reinvention and postcolonial relocation of the cultural image of the EU. By what means is visual culture participating today not only in the remaking of the idea of Europe, but also in the restructuring of the EU and the Euro-zone? What kind of intercultural visual challenges have emerged within the region during its latest eastward enlargement? Are minority visual cultures experiencing a sort of uneven recognition at EU level in the same way that diverse minority languages have differential or no official recognition, and if so, how many and what sort of non-central visualities are ‘eligible’ for ‘admission’ into the European Union? What is it produced and who manages the image of the renewed, supposedly more diverse, and strategically more comprehensive EU-27? Which countries own the authority to disseminate their ‘native’ visual understanding of Europe and which ones are doomed to be ‘translated’, in order to fit into the communitarian visual hegemonies? What kind of decolonial dilemmas the reinvention and promotion of Europe as a coherent, inclusive, and diverse cultural reality is facing today, both spatially and symbolically? Finally, to what extent the new cultural image of Europe has been contested from within, from abroad and from the border zones?

Speakers

Safet Ahmeti, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje-Macedonia
Herman Bashiron Mendolicchio, Universidad de Barcelona
Petra Bernhardt, Department of Political Science Ι University of Vienna
Andrea Díaz, Universidad de Barcelona
Giulia Grechi, Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome
Marina Gržinić, Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
Ivan Jurica, Bratislava, Slovakia / Academy Of Fine Arts, Vienna
Nina Lager Vestberg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU
Erika Larsson, The Division of Art History & Visual Studies, Sweden
Max Liljefors, Art History and Visual Studies, Lund University
Ivana Marjanović, Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
Helge Mooshammer, Austrian Science Fund
Julia Moritz, Weißensee Art Academy, Berlin
Peter Mörtenböck, Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology
Almira Ousmanova, European Humanities University, Lithuania
Modesta di Paola, Universidad de Barcelona
Andreas Pribersky, Department of Political Science Ι University of Vienna
Kresimir Purgar, Centre for Visual Studies, Zagreb
André da Silveira Rodrigues, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Nadja Stamselberg, Nyx-A Noctournal Journal of Cultural Studies, London
Øyvind Vågnes, University of Bergen, Norway

Safet Ahmeti (Croatia, 1967) is about to finish his PhD in Art History with a dissertation entitled Interdisciplinary Methodological Approaches in History of Art: Contemporary Art and Anthropology at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Between 2003 and 2008 he was affiliated with the South East European University (Communication Sciences Department). He had publishes several articles such as: “Visual Culture of Public Monuments in Bitola” (Monumental Art in Macedonia After 1945, Skopje: Center for Visual Arts,); “Interview with Dusan Dzamonja – In Memoriam”, and “Video Art – Macedonian perspectives: three approaches towards video as an art medium”. He participates in 2010 in the conference The 2010 Visual Culture Studies, organized by the University of Westminster in London.

Herman Bashiron Mendolicchio (Italy, 1979) is a PhD candidate in “History, Theory and Criticism of the Arts” in the Art History department of the University of Barcelona and member of the research group “Art, Architecture and Digital Society” (UB). His current lines of research revolve around the themes of interculturality in contemporary art and the interactions between new media, artistic, communicative and cultural practices in the Mediterranean. He has participated in national and international congresses and carried out projects and research stays in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has taught different classes and conferences at the University of Barcelona and published articles in different international journals. He has collaborated, among others, with Love Difference / Fondazione Pistoletto; the Mediateca del Caixaforum BCN; and the UFO files. Critic and independent curator and co-founder of the Platform on Contemporary Art and Thought.
www.interartive.org

Petra Bernhardt (1980) is a researcher and lecturer in Political Science. Her research interests and publications focus on visual political communication, political marketing, and political iconography. Petra is currently affiliated to the Austrian Academy of Sciences. From 2006-2009 she was a PhD candidate at the Initiative Group “Cultures of Difference – Transformation Processes in Central and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna, where she conducted her PhD project “Imagining the ‘East’: persistence and change of a spatial category since 1989”. Petra lives and works in Vienna.

Andrea Díaz, studied psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of Buenos Aires and complemented her studies with art direction. He is currently doing his doctorate studies at the University of Barcelona. In 2006 he received the D.E.A. in “History, theory and art criticism” with Honors for their research work. He is currently preparing his doctoral thesis “Sopic systems and contemporary art: video creation in the period 1990 – 2005” under the direction of Professors Anna Maria Guasch (UB) and Marquard Smith (University of Westminster) From 2002 to 2008 he taught in the European Institute of Design of Barcelona. Since 2008 she works as a researcher and coordinator of European projects in D-O-T, from where she collaborates with the universities of Dortmund (Germany), Washington (USA) and Rosario (Argentina), among others. In addition to contributing articles in magazines and art catalogs, she is the co-author of the publications “Immigrant Women, eSkills and employability in Europe” (Univ. Of Washington, 2010), “Integration of immigrant women in the Spanish Society”. UNITAR of the United Nations, 2009) and “e-Facilitation networking in distance co-operation contexts” (Ed. Springer International, 2008).

Giulia Grechi is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology of Communication and Visual Languages at the European Institute of Design in Rome, and professor of Social Photography at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, in Milano. In 2009 she completed her doctoral studies in Social Theory and Research at the University La Sapienza in Rome, with a study on the body’s representation in the works of the Afro-American artists Lorna Simpson and Kara Walker, focusing on colonial representation, the concept of embodiment and emotions as field of knowledge’s production. Her theoretical interests are Cultural Anthropology, Visual and Post-colonial Studies with a specific focus on the representation of body and on the relation between anthropology and contemporary art. She is assistant coordinator and Professor of Visual Anthropology and Contemporary Art at the European Institute of Design IED and is Chief Editor of the electronic magazine Roots§Routes – Research on Visual Culture.

Marina Gržinić is philosopher, artist and theoretician. She works in Ljubljana and Vienna. Grzinic is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Institute of Fine Arts, Post Conceptual Art Practices. She is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art) in Ljubljana. She also works as freelance media theorist, art critic and curator. Marina Grzinic has been involved with video art since 1982. In collaboration with Aina Smid, Grzinic produced more than 40 video art projects, a short film, numerous video and media installations, several websites and an interactive CD-ROM (ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany). Some of her relevant published books are: Situated Contemporary Art Practices, Art, Theory and Activism from (the East of) Europe, Fiction Reconstructed. Eastern Europe, Postsocialism and Retro-avantgarde], L’Harmattan, Avant-garde and Politics: The Eastern European Paradigm and the War in the Balkans, Beogradski krug, Belgrade, Serbia and Monte Negro, 2005.

Ivan Jurica is an artist, he studied the Post-Conceptual Art Practices at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Vienna. He lives and works in Vienna and Bratislava. In Vienna he is also active as art-educator at the Museum of Modern Arts. His work focuses on the East-West relationship, its historical and present conditions, social and political implications and the resulting artistic and cultural production. Currently he finished the research and exhibition project “Der Drang nach Osten – Parallels towards Postcolonialism and Coloniality within the Central European Space,” which took place in Bratislava and Vienna. His work on these topics, departing from the theory of post-colonial studies, he understands as intervention into the collective memory of the post-nazi and post-socialist societies within this space, especially in Austria and Slovakia. These interventions into the institutionalized collective memorial work, concerning the official history writing, culture, art, science and the knowledge production, are significant in dealing with structural racism and nationalisms within this space.

Nina Lager Vestberg is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim. She was educated in the UK, where she studied photography and multimedia at the University of Westminster (BA Hons), and History of Art at Birkbeck College, London (MA and PhD). Nina has published articles on French photography and cultural memory, the indexicality of the photographic archive, and issues of copyright. She is currently writing a book about the digitisation of picture archives and has just been awarded funding for a new project, which will examine the environmental and ecological aspects of contemporary media culture. Selected publications: “Robert Doisneau and the making of a universal cliché”, History of Photography, 35:2 forthcoming May 2011. “Archival value: on photography, materiality and indexicality”, Photographies, 1:1 (2008), 49-65. “Photography as cultural memory: imag(in)ing France in the 1950s”, Journal of Romance Studies, 5:2 (2005), 75-90.

Erika Larsson is a first year PhD student at Lund University in Sweden. She currently based at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul doing research for her thesis on contemporary photographic practices in Turkey. She is particularly interested in how more imaginatively engaged photography relates to certain truths and fictions about identity, belonging and representation in Turkey and Europe today.

Max Liljefors (b. 1963) is associate professor in Art History and Visual Studies (Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences), Lund University, Sweden. He is currently involved in two research projects. One of them, “Body and Authority in Contemporary Art”, deals with the relation between art and law, and in particular with contemporary art that enacts or creates clashes between societal institutions and individuals. The project revolves around oppositions like writing/body; meaning/materia; sign/object. The other project, “Anatomy in the Expanded Field: Epistemology, Aesthetics and Ethics in Contemporary Medical Imaging”, deals with how medical visualizations like CT, MRI, PET, etc., change the understanding of the human body in science, culture and art. His Research interests, current and previous are: Visualizations of historical consciousness, Holocaust Studies, performativity theory, social ontology, John R. Searle, Giorgio Agamben, video art, media theory, psychoanalysis, medical humanities, the visual culture of intensified experiences, law and art, visual theory.

Ivana Marjanović completed a BA in Art History. Born in 1979, Belgrade, Serbia. PhD candidate at Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Free-lance cultural worker in the field of contemporary arts and theory. Co-founded Kontekst Gallery in Belgrade (www.kontekstgalerija.org). Published articles in books, exhibition catalogues, international magazines and online artistic and theoretical platforms such as Reartikulacija, Mute, eipcp.net, Kulturisse, Malmoe, etc. Lives and works in Vienna.

Helge Mooshammer, PhD, is director of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) research projects Other Markets (2010-2013) and Relational Architecture (2006-2009) at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Vienna University of Technology. In 2008 he was Research Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) Vienna and currently teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research is concerned with new forms of urban sociality arising from processes of transnationalisation, transient and informal land use, and newly emerging regimes of governance. His books include Visuelle Kultur: Körper-Räume-Medien (ed., Böhlau, 2003), Cruising: Architektur, Psychoanalyse und Queer Cultures (Böhlau, 2005), Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space (NAi Publishers, 2008), Netzwerk Kultur: Die Kunst der Verbindung in einer globalisierten Welt (transcript, 2010) and the forthcoming books space RE:solutions – Intervention and Research in Visual Culture (transcript, 2011) and Bauarten von Sexualität, Körper, Phantasmen: Architektur und Psychoanalyse (co-ed., 2011).

Julia Moritz is an art historian and curator. Before graduating from Leipzig University she worked at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst and Kunsthalle Zurich. In 2005 she joined the founding team of European Kunsthalle in Cologne where she co-published “Question of the Day” (with Nicolaus Schafhausen, 2007). Moritz co-organized the German Pavilion of the 52nd Venice Biennale and was Assistant Curator at Manifesta 7 in Fortezza, Italy, in 2008. As a Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program in New York she started her dissertation “Institutional Critique in Spaces of Conflict” that was awarded with several research grants, such as the Centro Cultural Montehermoso in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, and was completed in fall 2010. Her exhibition project “Critical Complicity” opened at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, in November 2010. Moritz lectures at Lüneburg University where she is currently curating a research and exhibition project on critical perspectives of the contemporary art market for Kunstraum, the university gallery.

Peter Mörtenböck is professor of Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he has initiated the Networked Cultures project (www.networkedcultures.org), a global research platform focusing on translocally connected spatial practices. His current research explores the potential of networked ecologies and collaborative forms of knowledge production vis-à-vis the dynamics of geopolitical conflict and urban transformation. He has recently authored or co-edited Die virtuelle Dimension: Architektur, Subjektivität und Cyberspace (Böhlau, 2001), Visuelle Kultur: Körper-Räume-Medien (ed., Böhlau, 2003), Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space (NAi Publishers, 2008), Netzwerk Kultur: Die Kunst der Verbindung in einer globalisierten Welt (transcript, 2010) and the forthcoming space RE:solutions – Intervention and Research in Visual Culture (transcript, 2011). His essays on contemporary art, architecture and visual culture have appeared in international journals such as Grey Room, Architectural Research Quarterly and Third Text.

Almira Ousmanova (Ph.D. in Social Philosophy) is Professor at the Dept. of Social Sciences, Director of MA programme in Cultural Studies at the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania), Director of the Laboratory for Studies of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art. She has published several books and articles on semiotics, Gender Studies and Film Studies, including Umberto Eco: paradoxes of interpretation (2000), Anthology of Gender Theory (ed., with Elena Gapova, 2000); Gender Histories from Eastern Europe (co-edited with Elena Gapova and Andrea Peto), Bi-Textuality and Cinema (ed., 2003); Gender and Transgression in Visual Arts (ed., 2007), Visual (as) Violence (ed., 2008), Belarusian Format: Invisible Reality (ed., 2008.), Feminism and Philosophy (ed., special volume of journal Topos, 2010) et al. Research interests: theory, genealogy and methodology of Visual Studies, Gender Representations in Visual Arts, Soviet cinema, art and politics.

Modesta di Paola holds a degree in Literature and Philosophy from the Università degli Studi di Palermo (Italy). In January 2008 he obtained a scholarship for the training of researchers (FI) with which he began his relationship with the research group “Art, Architecture and Digital Society” and the Department of Art History of the University of Barcelona. In the same University, she holds a doctorate in History, Theory and Criticism of Arts, obtaining the title of DEA in October 2008, and also the Master in Advanced Studies in History of Art. Col.leccionisme, mercat i difusió de l’art, which ends in February 2009. His research focuses on critical theories that use translation, interpretation and rewriting as a cultural mediation in the processes of transmission and reception of contemporary artistic production.

Andreas Pribersky is since 2003, Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Sciences, Vienna University. Between 1996 and 2003 was head of the Social Sciences Department of the Austrian Institute of East- and Southeast European Studies (OSI). Between 1990 and 1996 was director of the Budapest office of the OSI. Pribersky was in 2007-08 Marshall Plan Chair for Comparative Politics at the Department for Political Science, University of New Orleans and in 2006 Visiting Professor at the Institut d´Études Politiques Lyon. Together with P. Bernhardt, K. Liebhart and L. Hadj-Abdou), he publishes in 2009 the book Europäische Bildpolitiken. Politische Bildanalyse am Beispiel der EU-Politik (UTB wuv). He has published sevaral articles such as: 2010 (mit P. Bernhardt) Designing a EUropean Renaissance? The Rem Koolhaas Projects Adressing the Question of the Public Visibility of the EU. In: B. Drechsel/ C. Leggewie (Eds.), United in Visual Diversity. Images and Counter-Images of Europe. Innsbruck (Studien Verlag). 2009 Cultural patterns of the EU „Eastern“ enlargement. In: J. Eade/ Y. Valkanova, Accession and Migration. Farnham (Ashgate), 11-20. 2006 Europe as a symbol in political image constructions. In: Semiotica Vol. 159-1/4, Special issue “Political semiotics”. 143-150.

Kresimir Purgar specializes in visual studies, interdisciplinary studies related to visual media, film and literature, as well as in the relation between text and image. He was a correspondent for Flash Art and editor Croatian art magazine Kontura. Author of two books: The Neo-Baroque Subject and Surviving Image and has edited Visual Studies – Art and Media in the Times of Pictorial Turn and K15 – Concepts in new Croatian Art. Curator of several art exhibitions and organizer of the conference Visual Construction of Culture, Zagreb 2007. He gave papers in many cities, including Guadalajara (Mexico), Genova, Colorado Springs, Dartmouth College, Manchester, London and others. He is a member of the Croatian section of AICA and winner of the 2009 HS AICA Award for achievements in implementing discipline of visual studies in Croatia. He is a researcher and head of the Center for Visual Studies in Zagreb and teaches communication theories at the University of Zagreb.

André da Silveira Rodrigues is a fellow of the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia as a PhD candidate on Art Theory and member of the investigation group on Theory and Disciplinary Practices in Art History at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He collaborates with the CAM – FCG web site, having written several texts for the museums catalogue, was part of the Arquivo section of the magazine L+Arte and wrote the volume dedicated to Almada Negreiros in the collection Pintores Portugueses. He is currently interested to know if the help of the IMF or the European Fund is going to retain part of his wage and further the Portuguese and European crisis, as the EU crumbles at the feet of non-elected institutions.

Nadja Stamselberg was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina. She read Fine Art Painting at Central St Martins in London followed by an MA in Arts Criticism and a PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently working as a part time lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University in the UK. She is also on the editorial board of ‘Nyx, a Nocturnal’ a journal of cultural studies. Her research interests include practices of exclusion, transnational identities, transgression, art and globalisation, concerns of hospitality and empathy in the political. She is currently editing an anthology on ‘Cross Cultural Identities: Art, Migrants and the Metaphor of Waste’ to be published by I.B. Tauris in June 2012.

Øyvind Vågnes is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen, under the program Nomadikon: New Ecologies of the Image. Among forthcoming publications is Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture, a book that grew out of his PhD dissertation and is due out from Texas University Press in August. With Asbjørn Grønstad he is the co-editor of the newly started Ekfrase: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture which will have its third issue out in a couple of weeks. He has also published three novels in Norwegian, the most recent of which came out in October last year.