Susanne Leeb & Sven Beckstette

Susanne Leeb (University of Basel): »Cycles of Painting and Entangled Histories: Luc Tuymans and Tshibumba Kanda Matulu«

Globalization not only entails an increased engagement with arts worldwide, but also with earlier transnational entanglements. Entanglements that, characterized by colonialism, were determined by radical inequality. A legacy of these conditions are the persisting institutional borders, as manifested in the separation of art museums from ethnological museums. The lecture will focus on artistic works that, through an examination of colonial history, either reflect and transform such institutional borders, museal categorizations as well as the colonial heritage of modernity – or, in spite of their discussion of this entangled history, remain within the established divisions.

Susanne Leeb is an assistant professor for contemporary art at the University of Basel. Prior to this, she was a scientifc assistant in the collaborative research centre »Aesthetic Experience« at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2007, she did her dissertation on »World Art and the Anthropological Configuration of Modernity« (published in 2013). She was co- editor at Texte zur Kunst for several years.

Sven Beckstette (Kunstmuseum Stuttgart): »Abstraction and Reality: Representing History in Abstract Art«

Around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, a new notion of the nature and purpose of art evolved. The emergence of abstraction led to painting losing its narrative potential and thus its task of mediating historical occurrences. Nonetheless, there are examples in the medium’s history of painters responding to past and current events with the means of abstraction. Works by Hans Richter, Asger Jorn, K.O. Götz, K.R.H. Sonderborg and Gerhard Richter are used to elucidate the relationship between artistic abstraction and the treatment of reality. This also results in a different perspective on terms and concepts of realism and representation.

Sven Beckstette is curator at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. He studied art history, German studies and modern and recent history in Münster and Berlin. In 2008, he did his doctorate on history painting of the 20th century. From 2010 to 2012, he was editor-in-chief of Texte zur Kunst, to whose advisory board he belongs. He wrote numerous texts on modern and contemporary art as well as on pop music.

The lectures and seminars are based on a cooperation of KIM, Innovation Incubator at Leuphana University of Lüneburg with Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg. The Innovation-Incubator Lüneburg is an EU major project, financed by the European Regional Development Fund and co-funded by the federal state of Lower Saxony.