Julia Gelshorn

photo

 julia.gelshorn@unifr.ch
 +41 26 300 7488
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7806-3170

 

  • Modern and contemporary art
  • French art and art theory of the 18th century
  • Processes of artistic appropriation, repetition, and translation
  • Concepts of artistic subjectivity and authorship
  • Artists' writings and interviews
  • Realisms
  • Relationships between art, politics, and economics

Professor
Department of Art History and Archeology

MIS 05 bu. 5141
Av. de l'Europe 20
1700 Fribourg
MIS 05, 5141
+41 26 300 7488

Biography

Julia Gelshorn has been a Full Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Fribourg since 2013. She studied Art History, Theatre Studies, and Italian Language and Literature at the universities of Cologne and Bern. From 2001 to 2008, she was a research assistant at the University of Bern. She earned her PhD in 2003 with a thesis on "Strategies of Appropriation and Repetition in the Works of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke" (Lazarus Prize of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bern). From 2005 to 2010, she was a research assistant at the University of Zurich. From 2006 to 2008, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre allemand d'Histoire de l'art in Paris. From 2008 to 2010, she was a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Art History and Media Theory at the State Academy of Art and Design (HfG) in Karlsruhe. From 2010 to 2011, she was a University Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Vienna, and from 2011 to 2013, she was a Professor of Art History at the University of Hamburg.

Research and publications

  • Publications
    67 publications

    Expériences invisibles. Julia Gelshorn s’entretient avec Anna Konik , in Figures de la faiblesse
    Julia Gelshorn, Hunkeler, Thomas, Soulet, Marc-Henry (2024), ISBN: 9782889156078 | Book chapter

  • Research projects

    Real Abstractions. Reconsidering Realism's Role for the Present
    Status: Ongoing

    Start 01.04.2023
    End 31.03.2027
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet
    This project investigates artistic conceptions of reality against the backdrop of social processes of abstraction. It has become a commonplace in both popular and scientific discourse that our world is becoming increasingly abstract. Numerous phenomena accompanying the post-industrial capitalist dynamics of cultural production – financialization and global digital connectivity, but also cloud computing and information disorder – seem to confirm such intuitions. Various social theories – Marxist and other – have shown, however, that processes of abstraction have always been essential to the world as shaped by capitalism. They understand abstraction not so much as abstraction from material reality but rather as abstraction operative in, or productive of, material reality: as social practices of real abstraction. If abstraction is constitutive of reality, this must have serious consequences for the notion of artistic realism. This observation is the point of departure of our project. We see its specific significance in redefining artistic realism by confronting the latter’s history with theoretical accounts of social abstractions. Although questions of realism are currently on the agenda of artistic practice, art historical research and philosophy, a systematic inquiry into realist approaches to social processes of abstraction remains a desideratum. Whereas realism has traditionally been understood in opposition to conceptual, aesthetic and social abstraction, we seek to establish a methodological framework that allows us to demonstrate the various historical and systematic forms of their mediation. The overall aim of the project – a much-needed revision of art historical narratives of realism in the light of social abstraction – will be achieved through five case studies, looking at different geographies, artistic media and historical moments from the 1920s to the present. Rather than considering art as a merely imaginative approach to a reality that is always beyond cognition (as it happens recently in speculative realism), we argue that art deals with abstract and intangible forms of the real by means of a set of operations including processes of visualizing, documenting and authenticating, fictionalizing and constructing, reproducing and simulating. In an innovative perspective on realism, our project will systematize and analyse these operations on a synchronic level, while also displaying their historicity on a diachronic axis. Two PhD projects, one practice-based, will be dedicated to the current formations of such realisms. They will investigate artistic modes of documenting, simulating or reproducing economic, ecological and computational processes of abstraction as manifest in contemporary forms of corporate culture and surveillance capitalism. The historical dimension of a realism of abstraction will be articulated in subprojects on political constructivism in the late Weimar Republic (post-doc), fictions of a decolonized world in social and magical realisms from the 1930s to the 1960s (PI 1) and the relation of realism to versions of authenticity in performance art from the 1970s to the present (PI 2). Shedding light on these historical occurrences of a realism of the abstract will inform our understanding of the present and help articulate both the continuities and ruptures of its trajectories. These historically specific case studies will be complemented with a number of workshops dedicated to the discussion of the synchronic set of operations in order to differentiate and locate the selected terms in transdisciplinary discourses.These workshops will provide opportunities to discuss the broader question of social abstraction and realism with colleagues from other disciplines while also contributing to that discussion from an art-historical perspective. Such an undertaking currently appears as challenging as it is timely. Issues of art’s criticality, responsibility and productiveness for the social realities of the present are of specific relevance not only for academic research but also for broader public debates. By analysing the aesthetic operations by which art positions itself in the abstract social realm, and by situating the concerns of contemporary art on a historical trajectory, we aim to contribute to this highly topical discussion. Our project sets out to renew the art historical narrative of realism by questioning the dichotomy of abstraction and realism; the aesthetic narrative of art’s role in accessing reality; and the narrative of art criticism by discussing the significance of realism for the state and direction of contemporary art. Dissemination of our research results will be achieved through the publication of two monographs, scholarly articles, an artistic research project, a scholarly online platform addressing a wider public, as well as a traveling exhibition developed in cooperation with partners outside our institutions.

    Das Medium Film/Kino im Reflex von Literatur und Kunst / Le cinéma dans l’art et la littérature
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.10.2016
    End 31.12.2016
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet
    Cinema in Art and Literature