Counter-Monuments

In the context of ongoing debates about memory practices in the public sphere, monuments and the collective processes around them are part of an increasingly dynamic engagement with efforts to decolonize public space, museum collections, and public institutions. In scholarly and artistic works, the contributors to this volume suggest new aesthetic conceptualizations that challenge the static features traditionally associated with the commemorative function of monuments. Emerging from research on the Skulptur Projekte Archives, they examine the relevance of the imaginary and the potential of the archive within such processes, exploring the diverse contemporary practices that give access to the blind spots of public memory.

Maria Engelskirchen is an art historian and researcher at the Center for Advanced Study »Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change« (KFG 33), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), at Universität Münster. From 2017-2020, she was a doctoral student in the research project »The Skulptur Projekte Archives in Münster. A Research Institution for Scholarship and the Public«, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Her research interests include art and the public sphere, digitization and reproduction of art with a focus on sculpture, as well as collection studies. Ursula Frohne (Prof. Dr. phil.) is a professor of art history at Universität Münster and co-chair of the DFG-funded Center for Advanced Study »Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change«. She also taught at Universität Köln, Brown University, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, as well as Universität Bremen, and she worked as chief curator at ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe. In 2014, she was awarded the Leo-Spitzer-Prize for Arts, Humanities, and Human Sciences by the University of Cologne for excellence in research. Her research focuses on contemporary art and technological media, the political dimensions and socio-economic conditions of art and visual culture, and the entanglements of art, public sphere(s), and cultures of debate. Corinna Kühn (Ph.D.) is an art historian and research associate in the Department of Art History at Universität Münster. Her dissertation, which was published in 2020, is a comprehensive study of the medialization of performance and action art in Central Eastern Europe during the 1970s. Her research interests are the history of art in Central Eastern Europe, art under totalitarian circumstances, the medialization of performance and action art, theories of film and video art, artists' networks and archives, the feminist avant-garde, exhibition history, memory culture, praxeological approaches to art history. Marianne Wagner (Ph.D.) is a curator for contemporary art and head of the Skulptur Projekte Archives at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur. Together with Kasper König and Britta Peters, she curated the Skulptur Projekte 2017. Her dissertation, titled »Lecture Performance: Speech Acts as Performance Art since 1950« was awarded the Joseph Beuys Research Prize in 2014. She has developed and realized exhibition projects at the Kunstmuseum Thun, the Aargauer Kunsthaus, and the Nidwaldner Museum and has taught at Universität Bern, Hochschule der Künste Bern, Kunstakademie Münster as well as at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.