The Professor´s Body. On Academic Affect and Habitus

As bell hooks famously observed in her 1993 essay “Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process”, the professor’s body is marked by both “repression and denial”. Caught up in the long-exhausted Cartesian split between body and mind, teaching in higher education appears to be a predominantly cerebral affair. In such an environment, the language for articulating and intervening in what the professorial body is, remains critically underdeveloped, particularly where it intersects with histories of race and gender.

The public program at Kunstraum will focus on the professorial body as a site of both disciplinary power and radical pedagogical emancipation. As hooks insists, there is a latent transgressiveness to higher university education that demands a critical analysis of both power and pleasure. Such an analysis must begin with the ongoing failure of many universities to address the countless examples of sexual harassment and violence experienced by women-identifying and non-binary/gender non-conforming students.[1] The continuing difficulty of hooks’ appeal, however, becomes clearer when considering the intense discussions in feminist theory and academia about student-teacher relations in cases such as Jane Gallop, author of Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, or more recently Avital Ronell, the NYU professor accused of sexual harassment by a former queer student. Echoing Amia Srinivasan’s recent call for a “sexual ethics of pedagogy”, The Professor’s Body seeks to identify the legal, social and institutional conditions necessary to differentiate discrimination from transgression.

The public program, as well as a corresponding seminar, will take place in a display and exhibition by the artist Leda Bourgogne. Besides a large-scale installation that will simultaneously serve as a classroom, a series of recent drawings and sculptures engender a sense of tactile permeability that register the otherwise invisible desires and sensibilities of students and professors alike.

The exhibition can be visited by appointment. Please register via kunstraum@leuphana.de

[1] A 2022 study found that 66% of women-identifying and 74% of non-binary/gender-non-conforming students had experienced sexual harassment and violence. https://unisafe-gbv.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/UniSAFE-press-release_survey-results_DE.pdf

Leda Bourgogne (born 1989 in Vienna, Austria) studied Fine Arts at the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main under Prof. Judith Hopf. In 2017, she won the Graduation Prize of Städelschule and Portikus Frankfurt am Main and received scholarships from the Hans and Stefan Bernbeck Foundation Frankfurt am Main, the Ernst Göhner Foundation Zug, the and the Foundation of Kunstfond Bonn and Hessische Kulturstiftung. Leda Bourgogne raises questions about the human body in its philosophical, poetic and psychological dimensions and conditions. With object-like paintings, drawings, textual works and performances or installations, the artist brings notions of physicality, violation and healing into a profound field of tension - made of diverse references, connections and arrangements. Her work has been exhibited among others at  Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, the Kunstverein Braunschweig, at Fragile in Berlin, the Istituto Svizzero in Rome (IT), the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, at the Helmhaus in Zurich (CH), and the Vleeshal in Middelburg (NL). Leda Bourgogne lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her works are part of institutional and private collections.