Franziska Koch
Franziska Koch is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in Transcultural Studies (TKU) at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte of Heinrich-Heine-Unisversität Düsseldorf since April 2023. She is a graduate of Staatliche Akademie der Bildende Künste Stuttgart where she studied fines arts (with a major in painting/graphics and two minors, one in performance art, the other in German literature and language studies) with a 1st Staatsexamen Degree in art education, followed by an art historical doctorate (completed in 2012 at Philipps-Universität Marburg). She worked as assistant professor of global art history at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS, Heidelberg University) from 2009-2023.
Her Habilitation project “The artist works (trans-)culturally: Nam June Paik and other Fluxus artists negotiating collaborative authorship” is supported by a post-doctoral scholarship of the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung. The project examines a series of Fluxus collaborations regarding transcultural conditions, practices and limits of collaborative authorship.She is co-editor of the anthology “Negotiating Difference. Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context“ (VDG Weimar 2012) and author of “Die ‘chinesische Avantgarde’ und das Dispositiv der Ausstellung. Konstruktionen chinesischer Gegenwartskunst im Spannungsfeld der Globalisierung” (transcript 2016). She co-founded both the “Research Network for Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art” (ReNetMoCoCA) and the “Research Network for Transcultural Practices in the Arts and Humanities“ (RNTP).
She co-leads Heidelberg University's team of the Transnational Platform Project "Worlding Public Cultures. The Arts and Social Innovation" (BMBF/DLR 2020-2023). Her teaching and research interests include art history/-ies and historiographies in transcultural perspective, artistic collaboration, a focus on modern and contemporary art in China, South-Korea, Western Europe and Northern America.
Address: Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400
Heidelberg University
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
Her Habilitation project “The artist works (trans-)culturally: Nam June Paik and other Fluxus artists negotiating collaborative authorship” is supported by a post-doctoral scholarship of the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung. The project examines a series of Fluxus collaborations regarding transcultural conditions, practices and limits of collaborative authorship.She is co-editor of the anthology “Negotiating Difference. Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context“ (VDG Weimar 2012) and author of “Die ‘chinesische Avantgarde’ und das Dispositiv der Ausstellung. Konstruktionen chinesischer Gegenwartskunst im Spannungsfeld der Globalisierung” (transcript 2016). She co-founded both the “Research Network for Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art” (ReNetMoCoCA) and the “Research Network for Transcultural Practices in the Arts and Humanities“ (RNTP).
She co-leads Heidelberg University's team of the Transnational Platform Project "Worlding Public Cultures. The Arts and Social Innovation" (BMBF/DLR 2020-2023). Her teaching and research interests include art history/-ies and historiographies in transcultural perspective, artistic collaboration, a focus on modern and contemporary art in China, South-Korea, Western Europe and Northern America.
Address: Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400
Heidelberg University
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
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Books
ISBN 978-3-96558-061-9 (open access)
artist Jung Yeondoo (b. 1969) presents a creative, metainstitutional
reflection on how (art) history is, and should be told, in
Korea today. It consists of two HD color film sequences, which Jung
realized in 2009 for the exhibition Platform in KIMUSA in the
section ‘Void of Memory.’ Crucial for the two films is a sequential
spatial display that allows viewers to see only one film after the
other, since the second sequence reveals the making of the first and
is intended to work as a kind of punch line in response. The article
explores the ironic ‘framings’ that Jung uses to expose the multilayered
ways heritage is constituted in South Korea given the
colonial and authoritarian roots of the art museum. The analysis
here follows and contextualizes the esthetic revealing of the art
museum’s most contemporary instantiation built on the former site
of the Defense Security Command (DSC) in Sogyeok-dong Seoul as a
‘hanging garden’ that is ambivalently suspended between official
efforts to establish national ‘heritage’ and citizens’ memories about
conflicted pasts, in which the site saw the torture of civilians.
Keywords:
Jung Yeondoo; framing heritage; institutional critique;
transcultural perspective; National Museum of Modern and
Contemporary Art (Seoul)
Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions, by Jane Chin Davidson, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, 224 pp., 54 illus., hardback, £80
Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic, by Hentyle Yapp, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021, 288 pp., 38 illus., paperback,
$26.95
The book features 20 essays written by a select group of international junior and senior scholars engaged in ambitious and methodologically innovative research on contemporary Chinese art. Their multi-faceted, in part interdisciplinary approaches are complemented by four contributions by distinguished practitioners in the field, who - as art curators and critics - are located in China and explore key developments within Chinese art and the changing art scene of the last three decades.
1st edition, July 2012, 374 pages, 139 illustrations in b/w., 29 colour illustrations, soft cover.
ISBN: 978-3-89739-717-0
Prize: 59,00 Euro
Papers
ISBN 978-3-96558-061-9 (open access)
artist Jung Yeondoo (b. 1969) presents a creative, metainstitutional
reflection on how (art) history is, and should be told, in
Korea today. It consists of two HD color film sequences, which Jung
realized in 2009 for the exhibition Platform in KIMUSA in the
section ‘Void of Memory.’ Crucial for the two films is a sequential
spatial display that allows viewers to see only one film after the
other, since the second sequence reveals the making of the first and
is intended to work as a kind of punch line in response. The article
explores the ironic ‘framings’ that Jung uses to expose the multilayered
ways heritage is constituted in South Korea given the
colonial and authoritarian roots of the art museum. The analysis
here follows and contextualizes the esthetic revealing of the art
museum’s most contemporary instantiation built on the former site
of the Defense Security Command (DSC) in Sogyeok-dong Seoul as a
‘hanging garden’ that is ambivalently suspended between official
efforts to establish national ‘heritage’ and citizens’ memories about
conflicted pasts, in which the site saw the torture of civilians.
Keywords:
Jung Yeondoo; framing heritage; institutional critique;
transcultural perspective; National Museum of Modern and
Contemporary Art (Seoul)
Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions, by Jane Chin Davidson, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, 224 pp., 54 illus., hardback, £80
Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic, by Hentyle Yapp, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021, 288 pp., 38 illus., paperback,
$26.95
The book features 20 essays written by a select group of international junior and senior scholars engaged in ambitious and methodologically innovative research on contemporary Chinese art. Their multi-faceted, in part interdisciplinary approaches are complemented by four contributions by distinguished practitioners in the field, who - as art curators and critics - are located in China and explore key developments within Chinese art and the changing art scene of the last three decades.
1st edition, July 2012, 374 pages, 139 illustrations in b/w., 29 colour illustrations, soft cover.
ISBN: 978-3-89739-717-0
Prize: 59,00 Euro
"Koreas Kunst revisited: ein Wiedersehen mit der Gwangju Biennale nach 10 Jahren", in: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (ed.), Wege nach Korea. DAAD-Alumni erinnern sich. Ein Lesebuch, Bonn: DAAD, 2014, pp. 166-185.
These exhibitions mark a significant political change in the ambivalent history of the communist state's patronage of art since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Despite the rise of manifold artistic activities during the 1980-1990s in the wake of the Open Door Policy (Gao, 1990; Gao et al., 1991 ; Lü and Yi, 1992; Gao, 1993; Chang et al., 1993; Pohlmann and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 1993; Dal Lago, 1993; Andrews and Gao, 1995; Gao, 1998; Lü, 2000; Köppel-Yang, 2003; Gao, 2005), Chinese officials largely managed to exclude avant-garde and experimental artworks from public museum displays. (Clark, 1992; Wu, 2001; Kraus, 2004) The state run media mostly ignored or even censored articles on unconventional, partly critical artistic positions and the party-controlled art academies prevented these positions from openly featuring in their curricula.
Around 2000 - with China becoming a member of the WTO - the government effectively changed its cultural policy to back-up its increased international economic and political power by promoting the arts as cultural "soft-skills" in international relations. The Chinese government began to recognize and use the great commercial and diplomatic potential of experimental artistic positions, which had already been successfully mediated through a whole genealogy of "non-official" group exhibitions taking place abroad since the early 1980s. (Erickson, 2002; Koch, 2010; Koch, 2011a; Koch, 2011b; Koch, 2013) Germany and France were the first to join the transnational enterprise of negotiating the markedly changed Euro-Chinese relationship through bi-national group exhibitions of contemporary art.
My paper compares and illuminates how the exhibition "Living in Time" at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof 2001 and the Centre Pompidou's show "Alors, la Chine?" in Paris 2003 respectively performed a diplomatic task. It questions the narratives of the main exhibition agents: the European and Chinese curators, the political patrons, and critics writing in the catalogs. The paper also examines how the discourse of these writers runs along or against aspects of the artworks that were on display. It asks how the actual spatial arrangement in these two different institutions fostered certain kinds of reception and suppressed other possible readings of the works by the visitors.
Methodologically, the paper aims to challenge and complicate prevalent assumptions about the global marketing and canonizing mechanisms of large scale and officially supported exhibitions, viewing them as mere spectacles and/or political endeavors. Focusing on crucial intersections between powerful exhibition agents, the mission and display of the respective museum institutions and the local foreign policies, the paper shows to what extent the exhibitionary complex (Bennett, 1988) is not only the result of (limited) knowledge, but literally (in-)forms new knowledge on art in transcultural negotiations. In this case, a problematic notion of contemporary "Chinese" art was coined, one that was paradoxically framed as national and global."
This paper reviews the beginnings of this complex process by investigating the conditions that configured the first large group exhibition of contemporary Chinese art from the PRC in Europe after 1979: the travelling group show China Avantgarde, which opened in Berlin in early 1993.
The first part of the paper explores the wider historical conditions that impacted on the exhibition by contextualizing the event in relation to two important, if very different forerunners: the 1989 shows Zhongguo xiandai yishu zhan. China/Avantgarde in Beijing and Magiciens de la terre in Paris.Yet the important entanglements between the respective curatorial concepts, affiliated art discourses, and the agents involved are also analysed. Constituting a specific network of mediators, mediating factors, and mediating institutions, these forerunners influenced the making of China Avantgarde in Berlin three years later.
The second part of the paper discusses the Berlin exhibition in detail. It argues that the title reflects the contested use of the discursive categories “avant-garde” and “modern art” in Beijing and Berlin at the time, which helped translate and thereby shape a certain image of contemporary Chinese art beyond the actual artworks on display. Of paricular interes are the concerns of the European curators, who had to overcome various political, logistic, as well as conceptual challenges when selecting artists and artworks. Examining the catalogue as an instance where diverging strategies of how to present artworks from thePRC become visible, the paper argues that China Avantgarde was not so much a clear-cut, singular, and–by now–canonical event, but formed as well as informed a complex canonizing process that is still relevant today.
For the ASAP-website see: http://asap9.org/seminars/
The conference “Present’s Disjunctive Unity. Constructing and Deconstructing Histories of Contemporary Cultural and Aesthetic Practices” explores cultural and aesthetic theories and practices in different contemporary contexts around the world and strives to develop appropriate categories for the different historiographical genealogies that shape their concepts of “the contemporary”. With the aim to unpack related power relations and to reconsider epistemological and methodological problems, the conference consciously brings together socio-political, historical and further theoretical perspectives.
The emphasis on exploring contemporaneity in historical perspectives resonates with the agenda of the “Research Network for Critical Transcultural Perspectives on Cultural and Aesthetic Practices” that intentionally includes researchers working on both contemporary as well as historical subjects.
Location: University of Zurich, Institute of Art History, Section for East Asian Art History, Gablerstrasse 14, CH-
8002 Zurich, Switzerland
Deadline: 1st March, 2015
Organization team:
Natasha Fischer-Vaidya, Anna Grasskamp, Anna Hagdorn, Franziska Koch, Sabine Schenk, Wibke Schrape, Nora Usanov-Geißler
Deadline for application extended to 14 June 2015!
Organisers: Cathrine Bublatzky, Isabel Ching and Franziska Koch, in collaboration with the Chairs of Global Art History, Monica Juneja, and Visual and Media Anthropology, Christiane Brosius, and the Research Network “Arts and the Transcultural”
Addressees and Co-organizers are Franziska Koch (koch@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de) and Rui Oliveira Lopes (rui.o.lopes@gmail.com).
Location: Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
Dates: 16–19 March 2015
Deadline for Applications: 7 January 2015
Registration: Attendance of the symposium is free of charge and requires an informal registration addressed to the organisers. See programme in the download "Announcement"
Affiliated websites: See links below.
The concept of "the contemporary" in art and culture has its own history; paradoxically, contemporaneity in itself is historical. It is also determined by the many cultural and regional contexts in which ideas of the present and contemporaneity are negotiated. Hence, there are varying histories of the contemporary, each informed by specific socio-political conditions and geo-political power structures. Historical turning points such as the end of the Second World War in 1945 or the end of the Cold War in 1989 prompted certain narratives of contemporaneity and shaped specific historiographical modes through which people in different places reflect on meanings and patterns of the past in relation to the present and tell stories in different ways.
The conference combines socio-political, historical and other theoretical perspectives, seeking appropriate categories for these different historiographical genealogies.
It is conceived as a kick-off event for the international and cross-disciplinary "Research Network for Critical Transcultural Perspectives on Artistic and Visual Practices" (preliminary title) – a critical, interdisciplinary and international research association of post-doctoral researchers, who study phenomena and processes of cultural exchange.