International scientific committee

Julia Gelshorn has been Ordinary Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Fribourg since 2013. She studied art history, theater studies and Italian literature at the Universities of Cologne and Bern, where she obtained her PhD doctorate in 2003. She has held doctoral and post-doctoral positions at the Universities of Bern and Zurich, as well as at the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art / Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris, and was a temporary professor at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. In 2010, she became Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Vienna and, in 2012, Ordinary Professor of Art History at the University of Hamburg. She has published numerous texts on modern and contemporary art, in particular on strategies of appropriation and repetition, (including Aneignung und Wiederholung. Bilddiskurse im Werk Gerhard Richters und Sigmar Polkes), on artists’ writings and interviews, as well as on new realism and the network metaphor. She is also interested in French art and 18th-century theories of “grâce”. She currently directs (together with Wolfgang Brückle) the SNF project Real Abstractions. Reconsidering Realisms Role for the Present.

Tom Holert studied art history, philosophy and German literature in Hamburg and received his PhD (with a thesis on notions of artistic knowledge in eighteenth century France) at Goethe University at Frankfurt in 1995. In the 1990s he worked as an editor of Texte zur Kunst and Spex in Cologne, later he taught at various universities and art schools such as Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Holert authored and co-authored various books and has curated a number of exhibitions (most recently, Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930, together with Anselm Franke, and Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, both at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin). In 2015 he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin (harun-farocki-institut.org). Current research interests and projects pertain, among others, to the histories of spatial and educational politics during the Cold War, the knowledge politics of contemporary art, the function of navigation in contemporary visual cultures, the performativity and aesthetics of the flag.

Laura Iamurri is a Contemporary Art history professor and a member of the Doctoral School of Roma Tre University. She primarily works on the relations between the production of Contemporary Art and the rhetoric of history and art criticism. Her later researches have been focused on the visual culture and the artists’ networks, reviews, critics and galleries of the 20th century. She is also working on Modern Art historiography, feminism and the arts in Italy and on the memory of the Shoah and the anti-fascist resistance. Her last book is dedicated to Carla Lonzi (Un margine che sfugge: Carla Lonzi e l’arte in Italia, 1955-1970, (Quodlibet, Macerata 2016) for whom she already reissued Autoritratto, Milan 2010 and collected with L. Conte and V. Martini, the Scritti sull’arte, Milan 2012.

Hélène Jannière is a professor in Contemporary architecture history at the University of Rennes 2. After several publications about architecture journals, her latest researches deal with history of urban planning after 1945 and with architectural criticism of the 20th century, especially in France from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. Her last publications about this topic include Architectural Periodicals in the 1960s and the 1970 (Montréal, 2008) with F. Vanlaethem and A. Sornin. She also directed with Kenneth Frampton the issue 24/25 of Cahiers de la Recherche Architecturale et Urbaine, « La Critique en temps et lieux » (2009).

Klara Kemp-Welch is Reader in 20th Century Modernism at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on the cultural Cold War, countercultures, and experimental art. She is the author of Antipolitics in Central European Art 1956-1989 (IB Tauris, 2014), Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1968-1981 (MIT Press, 2018), and co-editor of the open access online publication A Reader in East-Central-European Modernism 1918-1956 (Courtauld Books Online, 2019). She is currently working on a monograph on art, labour, and migration in the EU.

Antje Kramer-Mallordy, originally from Germany, is a lecturer in contemporary art history at Rennes 2 University since 2011. She directed the Archives de la critique d’art from 2019 to September 2023. Her research focuses on art and art criticism in Europe after 1945, with a particular emphasis on transnational issues and the relationship between avant-garde and neo-avant-garde.

Małgorzata Kaźmierczak is a leading scholar, curator and researcher in the field of performance art, born in Kraków, Poland. With a PhD in history, her career is characterised by a passion for exploring the intersection of art, society and political contexts. Since 2004, she has worked as an independent curator on performance projects both in Poland and in the United States, leading exhibitions and festivals that highlight the many facets of contemporary performance art. As a researcher, her publications cover topics such as improvisation, documentation of performance art and performance activism, having contributed articles to academic journals and art criticism in several countries. In addition, she has lectured at prestigious institutions and events in more than a dozen countries, including Brazil, South Korea, Argentina, Spain and the United States. Kaźmierczak has held important leadership roles, as President of AICA International since 2024 and Vice President for the period 2021-2023. Her work also includes leading key editorial initiatives related to art history and curatorial projects in collaboration with renowned museums and galleries. Committed to the advancement of performance art as a cultural and social tool, her professional trajectory reflects an interdisciplinary and global approach, with significant contributions to the development and understanding of this artistic field.

Federica Martini is Associate Professor HES and head of the CCC - Critical Curatorial Cybermedia master’s program at HEAD - Haute école d’art et de design, Geneva (HES-SO). After studying North American literature and contemporary art at the University of Turin (Italy), she devoted her PhD thesis to the history of exhibitions at the intersection of geopolitics, curatorial debates and contemporary art biennials. Her current research focuses on the perception of art as work, counter-information and exhibition practices as seen through the prism of international artistic networks and coalitions. As a teacher, she has explored the history and methods of research through the medium of art, as well as text and narrative as an artistic medium. She has worked in the curatorial departments of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’arte contemporanea (Rivoli-Turin), the Musée Jenisch Vevey and the MCBA - Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne), as well as being responsible for the Master MAPS - Arts in Public Spheres and the visual arts course at EDHEA/Valais. Her editorial activity often takes the form of monograph series (Sarn Minutes 2013-17, with the Swiss Artistic Research Network; On Words, 2023 - in progress, in collaboration with SIK-ISEA) and reviews (Blackout Magazine, 2017-21 and SEARCCCH, 2024-in progress). Her publications include Feminist Exposure: pratiques féministes de l’archive et de l’exposition (with Julia Taramarcaz, Lausanne, art&fiction, 2023); Pavilions: Art in Architecture (with Robert Ireland, Brussels, La Muette, 2013); Just Another Exhibition: Stories and Politics of Biennials (2011, with Vittoria Martini, postmedia books).

Charlotte Matter teaches contemporary art history at the University of Basel as Laurenz-Assistenzprofessorin für zeitgenössische Kunst. From 2015 to 2024, she was an assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich, where she coordinated the Specialized Master's Degree in Art History in a Global Context. Her PhD thesis, on plastic materials in the 1960s and 1970s art from a feminist perspective, is being published by Manchester University Press. Her current research focuses on the significance of class relations in the production and reception of art. Since 2020, she has been co-director of the research project Rethinking Art History through Disability. She is also co-founder of CARAH - Collective for Anti-Racist Art History and co-editor of Sculpture Journal review (Liverpool University Press).

Pavlína Morganová is an art historian and curator based in Prague, Czech Republic. She is Director of the Research Center of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She specializes in Central and Eastern European art history, performance art and exhibition history. She lectures on Czech and Eastern European art of the twentieth century. Author of Czech Action Art / Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain (Karolinum Press 2014), A Walk Through Prague: Actions, Performances, Happenings, 1949-1989 (VVP AVU 2017), co-author and co-editor of Výstava jako médium. České umění 1957-1999 (AVU 2020); České umění 1980-2010. Texty a dokumenty (VVP AVU 2011); České umění 1938-1989. Programy, kritické texty, dokumenty (Academia 2001). She is currently working on a book entitled Czech Art after 1945: Exhibition Histories. In 2024, she was a guest researcher at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA).

Antonio Somaini is Professor of Theory of Cinema, Media and Visual Culture at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. His main publications include La Glass House de Serguéï Eisenstein : Cinématisme et architecture de verre (Ed. B2, 2017), Cultura visuale: Immagini, sguardi, media, dispositivi (with A. Pinotti, Einaudi, 2016) and Ejzenštejn: Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio (Einaudi, 2011). He has also edited or co-edited collective works such as La Haute et la basse définition des images : cinéma, photographie, art contemporain, culture visuelle (with F. Casetti, Mimésis 2021), Pandemic Media: Notes Toward an Inventory (with Ph. D. Keidl, L. Melamed, V. Hediger, Meson Press, 2020). He is known for editions in French, English and Italian of texts by Dziga Vertov (Le Ciné-Œil de la révolution: écrits sur le cinéma, Les presses du réel, 2018, with F. Albera and I. Tcherneva), Sergei M. Eisenstein (Notes for a General History of Cinema, Amsterdam University Press, 2016, with N. Kleiman), Walter Benjamin (Aura e choc: Saggi sulla teoria dei media, Einaudi, 2012, with A. Pinotti) and László Moholy-Nagy (Pittura Fotografia Film, Einaudi, 2010). He is currently preparing a book on the history of the concept of medium, under contract with The University of Minnesota Press. In 2020 he was the main curator of the exhibition Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities (Palazzo del Governatore; Skira; website www.timemachineexhibition.com)

Alfredo Thiermann is an architect and Professor for History and Theory of Architecture at the École polytechnique fédérale in Lausanne. Through his practice and theoretical research, he explores the intersection between architecture and different media, from sound installations and film scenography to single-family houses, public buildings, and large-scale infrastructures. He has taught and lectured at Harvard University, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and other institutions. Alfredo’s work has been published in Harvard Design Magazine, A+U, Revista ARQ, TRACE magazine, Revue matières, Potlatch, Real Review, Thresholds, Archithese, GTA Papers, and BauNetz, and has been exhibited at the MoMA in New York, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, the Istanbul Design Biennial, gta exhibitions in Zurich, HKW in Berlin, and the Venice Art Biennale among other institutions. He has been the recipient of the Rome Prize of the German Academy in Rome. Alfredo studied architecture, receiving his professional degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile and a Master’s degree from Princeton University. He received his doctoral degree from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. He has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich. He is the author of Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin published by MIT Press in 2024. He lives, works, and takes care of Pedro Tristán and Juan Nataniel between Lausanne and Berlin.

Elvan Zabunyan is a professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, an art critic and a curator. After a PhD thesis on African-American visual arts since the 1960’s published under the title Black Is A Color: une histoire de l’art contemporain africain américain, she is currently working on the relationships between art history, postcolonial and feminist theories in the United-States.

