ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF VISUAL CULTURE

The Department of VISUAL CULTURE brings together comprehensive professional and methodological competencies at the interface between contemporary art, architecture and theory. The central focus of our work is an extensive engagement with the plethora of forms and practices with which culture is produced, negotiated and put to use along historical, political, social and economic processes. Our interrogation of the different manifestations of these processes combines the analysis of the political dimension of spatial production and pictorial representation with the investigation of visual constructions of social phenomena. The starting point for this research is the lived and mutually shared practice of culture.

Our team is an inter- and transdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners, working together in the production of text, visualisations, videos and discursive events. We are interested in detecting research phenomenona that embody ongoing entanglements between technology, politics, economy and aesthetics. The researchers in our department engage these theoretical and methodological analyses at the interface of contemporary art, architecture and political theory.

With a perspective orientated towards actual everyday experiences, the Department of VISUAL CULTURE opens up a repertoire of approaches, methodologies and theoretical tools for the investigation of the great challenges of today in terms of their historical contingency and malleability:

▶ increasing influence of digital technologies,
▶ varied forms of global migration,
▶ growing levels of social and economic inequity,
▶ informalisation and precarity of work,
▶ neo-liberalisation of the city and its institutions,
▶ new modes of political and social regulation,
▶ global effects of environmental destruction and climate change.

In all these areas we provide critical knowledge that brings together artistic, architectural and planning considerations with a range of historical, theoretical, experimental and interpretive approaches.