Future Bodies from a Recent Past—Sculpture, Technology, and the Body since the 1950s

Museum Brandhorst presents “Future Bodies from a Recent Past—Sculpture, Technology, and the Body since the 1950s,” a large-scale research and exhibition project investigating the impact made by technological developments and changing notions of the body on the medium of sculpture.  

Technology permeates the body, the body permeates technology. What is immediately evident for contemporary art, and especially post-digital practices with their rematerialized avatars and techno bodies, can be traced back to the beginnings of modernity as a hitherto little-noticed history of art and especially sculpture. This history of sculpture is one of hybridization and the dismantling of its purported autonomy, which begins well before the historicized narrative of the dissolution of the medium in the 1960s and continues in sculptural forms up to the present day. In the process, the resilience of sculptural categories—spatiality, plasticity, motion/animation, and form/materiality, but also its intrinsic forms of corporeality—moves into the focus of consideration. 

During the three-day international symposium, leading theorists will explore the lines of reference between technology, the body, and sculpture from the perspectives of art history, philosophy, media and literary studies, sociology, and the history of science. With contributions on individual artistic positions and specific thematic complexes, such as the influence on sculpture of changing production technologies, materialities, and concepts of the body, but also interdisciplinary considerations of body-technology relations, a multi-perspective history of contemporary sculpture will be outlined.  

No registration required, watch on YouTube-Livestream 
For more detailed information, click here.

Timetable 
(all contributions in English) 

Thursday, January 21, 2021

7–9pm CET | Panel 
Transformations in Postwar Sculpture 
Anne M. Wagner: “David Smith: Sculpture as Sign”
Alex Kitnick: “New, Newer, Newest: Eduardo Paolozzi’s Laocoön” 
Namiko Kunimoto: “Tanaka Atsuko: Circuits of Technology and Female Labor”
Chair: Patrizia Dander 

Friday, January 22, 2021

5–7pm CET | Panel 
Hybrid Figurations of the 1960s 
Jo Applin: “Jann Haworth and the Poetics of Softness”
Marta Dziewańska: “The Futurism of the Female Avant-Garde”
Antje Krause-Wahl: “Shiny Matters in/and 1960s Sculptured Figurations”
Chair: Manuela Ammer 

8–10pm CET | Lecture and talk 
Theories of Sculpture in Technological Change 
Ursula Ströbele: “From Body to Machine: Sculpture in Times of Technological Change”
Megan R. Luke: “Sculpture in the Age of Mass Reproducibility”

Saturday, January 23, 2021

5–6:45pm CET | Panel  
Materializing Cyberbodies since the 1980s 
Jeannine Tang: “Subject to Security: Tishan Hsu and Julia Scher”
Marie-Luise Angerer: “Body Options Revised: from Cyborg Enhancement to Sensitive Entanglement”
Chair: Franziska Linhardt 

6:45–7:15pm CET | Intermezzo  
Louis Chude-Sokei: The Desire of Objects: Slavery and the Sex-Life of Machines 

8–10pm CET | Panel 
Posthuman Embodiment and Material Entanglements—a Theoretical Outlook and Review 
N. Katherine Hayles: “Artificial Bodies in Motion: from Top-down Control to Relational Embeddedness”
Josef Barla: “Cutting Technology and the Body Together-Apart: Bodies-in-Technologies and the Haunting Climate of Materializations”
Chair: Maria Muhle 

“Future Bodies from a Recent Past—Sculpture, Technology, and the Body since the 1950s” is organized by Patrizia Dander, chief curator, and Franziska Linhardt, research associate, supported by Lena Tilk. The talks will be streamed and archived on Museum Brandhorst’s YouTube channel. 

The symposium will be held in cooperation with the Study Center for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, and accompanied by online lectures by Christiane Paul and Mercedes Bunz on “Art and Artificial Intelligence,” organized by Ursula Ströbele. 

Generously supported by ERES Foundation and PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.  

For further information please contact our press department:
Anna Woll
presse@museum-brandhorst.de