Kunst­ge­schichte
kommu­nizieren

ed. by Julian Blunk, Hen­rike Haug, Regine Heß, Andreas Huth, Henry Kaap, Franziska Lampe, Kath­rin Rottmann, Yvonne Schweizer

Kritische Berichte.
Journal for Art History
and Cul­tural Stud­ies, 1/2023

Read more about edi­tion 1/2023          Ulmer Ver­ein

Racism in
Archi­tec­ture

ed. by Regine Hess,
Chris­tian Fuhrmeister
and Monika Platzer

Kritische Berichte.
Journal for Art History
and Cul­tural Stud­ies, 3/2021

Racisms, ideo­lo­gies, and power rela­tions have become every­day top­ics of pub­lic debates also in the cul­tural sphere. Within these dis­curs­ive pro­cesses, racism plays a key role: for European and non-European civil soci­et­ies and act­ors, in research and teach­ing, in cur­at­orial prac­tices, in insti­tu­tions and organ­iz­a­tions, in dis­cuss­ing and writ­ing, and in deal­ing with the past and the present.

Against this back­ground, this issue gath­ers con­tri­bu­tions that doc­u­ment crit­ical think­ing and expand our know­ledge and thus (can) con­trib­ute to reflec­tion. By rene­go­ti­at­ing his­tor­ical and cur­rent pos­i­tions, con­structs, prac­tices, and nar­rat­ives, we delib­er­ately engage this debate in the field of archi­tec­ture and pub­lic space: to what extent have racism and struc­tural viol­ence influ­enced archi­tec­tural the­ory? In which areas of archi­tec­ture and urb­an­ism did and does racism leave its mark? How can archi­tec­tural history be decon­struc­ted anti-racistically?

By focus­ing on soci­et­ies, we ask which forces can influ­ence and shape cre­at­ive work in archi­tec­ture. At the same time, we need to address the part that our dis­cip­lines, pro­fes­sions, insti­tu­tions, and organ­iz­a­tions play in struc­tural racism in science and soci­ety: How do our con­scious and uncon­scious can­ons con­trib­ute to these ten­sions and injustices? Which mech­an­isms of inclu­sion and exclu­sion do we reflect, and which do we fail to reflect?

Read more about edi­tion 3/2021          Ulmer Ver­ein

Hous­ing
Regimes

New Approaches to a State-Citizen-Relation, ed. by Yael Allweil and
Regine Hess

Kritische Berichte.
Journal for Art History
and Cul­tural Stud­ies, 2/2020

Hous­ing, unlike wohnen, includes the sense of the German verb behausen, which brings the estate’s and the land’s pro­vider into the pic­ture. That is, the mod­ern state (and its jur­is­dic­tion and build­ing law), and its over­arch­ing goal of nation-build­ing and estab­lish­ing nation­al­ism. Under­stood this way, hous­ing has a double lin­guistic denota­tion and enables one to under­stand the pro­duc­tion of ‹houses› and the sub­jec­tion of its inhab­it­ants to a regime or even com­pet­ing re¬gimes, like that of East and West Ger­many dur­ing the Cold War.

Regime is defined by the Oxford dic­tion­ary as a «sys­tem of gov­ern­ment or ad¬ministration» or as a term to «cover norm-bound inter­ac­tions relat­ing to issues such as the global envir­on­ment or human rights». Under­stand­ing stately subsi¬dised hous­ing this way, the history, soci­ology and anthro­po­logy of urban plan­ning have devoted much research to plan­ning mech­an­isms pro­du­cing a «rule of experts» apply­ing gov­ern­ing prin­ciples via urban and national infra­struc­ture, while archi­tec­ture stud­ies on wohnen com­monly focus on town plan­ning and archi­tec­tural hous­ing design.
The here made shift in ter­min­o­logy has its impact on meth­od­o­logy. The art­icles in this volume reflects it with their new approaches to a broad realm of research fields.

Read more about edi­tion 2/2020          Ulmer Ver­ein

Many art and cul­tural insti­tu­tions are cur­rently under­go­ing a trans­form­a­tion pro­cess and are sub­ject­ing their col­lec­tions, exhib­i­tion con­cepts and arti­facts to a crit­ical revi­sion. This also con­cerns the reappraisal of their ideational and mater­ial gen­esis, which is determ­ined by the per­spect­ive of the Global West. Linked to this is the task to build up a diverse per­son­nel struc­ture that leads to a greater vari­ety of per­spect­ives and positions.

The debate ini­ti­ated by the board of the Ulmer Ver­ein and the edit­ors of the kritische berichte for the year 2022 would like to con­trib­ute to this neces­sary dis­cus­sion about the rethink­ing of institutions.