Teaching Portfolio
Assistant Professor, IZK – TU Graz (2020–present)
Postgraduate
MA annual lecture series – Spatial Concepts and Spatial Experience (Raumkonzepte und Raumerfahrungen), ‘Postcolonial Studies and Space’ and ‘Spatial Experiments’
Assembly! Towards an Infrastructural Commons.
Specialization Module: Art and the Social, MA, Summer 2026
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush with Olia Sosnovskaya
Why assemble now? In today’s climate dominated by polycrisis - climate crisis, economic crisis, war - forms of public assembly can be understood as modes of cultural resistance. This semester, the course Art and the Social takes the assembly – a political form of gathering together, (un)learning, protesting, or for processes of deliberative democratic decision-making – as a frame to explore art’s relationship to society. Focusing on assemblies ‘from below’, we will begin by asking: what underpins an assembly? What infrastructures enable speaking, gathering, surfacing materials, showing histories, and amplifying marginalised voices? In short: what kinds of infrastructures make assemblies possible, and what social effects do these infrastructures produce? A core element of the course is a three-day field-work assembly at Museum Persmanhof, located at the Austrian-Slovenian border. Once a home to families who hosted partisans who resisted Nazis during WWII, the site later became a Nazi crime scene at the end of the war. Today, this unique museum functions as form of social infrastructure, a place of both remembrance and anti-fascist learning. During this intensive research assembly, students will engage directly with the site, its location in the mountains, and its histories, thereby developing field-work methodologies including oral history, sound recording, sketching, site writing, to engage with and uncover hidden, or overlooked narratives within the landscape.
Theoretical foundations for the course will include feminist, ecological and decolonial perspectives, as well as Lauren Berlant’s ‘infrastructural commons’, Marina Vishmidt’s ‘infrastructural critique’, Henri Lefebvre’s ‘production of space’, Kristin Ross’ idea of political memory and the ‘commune form’, and Andreas Malm’s notion of ‘partisan nature’. Through these frameworks, we will move beyond viewing art as a static object, instead approaching artistic practice as a living social process – one centered on the assembly and the infrastructures that activate it. This is a collaborative course built on research, critical discussion, and the development of individual artistic practices within a larger group project. It will culminate in a student-developed assembly, for which students will determine what is needed – conceptually, socially, and materially – to bring it into being. Materials for the physical site of the assembly may include wood, metal, textiles, cardboard, lights, projection, film, photography, sound, drawings, readymade or found objects. These elements should be brought together to form a spatial, performative, and discursive structure – one designed for collective engagement with the findings of the fieldwork – the histories, documents, stories, and lived experiences produced during the Peršmanhof Assembly.
Memory is the Struggle for Justice in the Present. On Reading and Exhibiting the History of Sites.
Specialization Module: Art-Based Investigation MA, Winter 2025/26
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
How do art and architecture confront sites of historical atrocity, and can they contribute to contemporary struggles for justice? This course investigates the dynamic relationship between memory and history, exploring how artists and curators mobilize the past to engage with urgent present-day struggles, often within public space. We will ground our inquiry in specific examples from Graz and the surrounding region, including the Steirischerherbst exhibition "Bezugspunkte 38/88", as well other examples across geographies, drawing connections between global histories and considering the paradoxes of presence and absence at historical sites. The course introduces forms of knowledge production that confront these hauntings, drawing on spectral methodologies to uncover the traces of what has been erased, forgotten, or silenced. Central to our investigation are core questions of method and positionality: how do we conduct historical research on a site? From where do we sit or stand when we think and write about history? We will critically engage with the archive - analyzing its limitations, its power to elevate certain perspectives while silencing others, and its role in defining who is considered a historical actor. We will also explore strategies to resist, rupture, or disrupt its authority.
Through close readings of texts by theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Avery Gordon, Marina Vishmidt, Robert Meister and others, alongside the analysis of artworks and exhibitions, students will develop critical skills in art research, interpretation and production. A combination of theoretical study, archival research, site visits, and artistic research will allow us to collectively explore key questions: What is the difference between "history" and "memory," and how do they collide in the public sphere? What infrastructures make art and memorialisation possible, or hinder it? How can art think through history and memory, and how might it contribute to transformative social and political processes?
Moving beyond the idea of art as a static object, we will frame artistic and curatorial practice as a living social process - a means to interrogate inherited narratives, give voice to subjugated histories, and "work through" the trauma of past and present atrocities. Students will develop research rooted in archives, exploring disciplined and undisciplined methodologies to map and plot counter-narratives. This is a collaborative course that emphasises critical discussion, research, and the development of your own artistic or exhibitionary projects using mediums of your choice. Through this process, you will be encouraged to think critically about the spectral dimensions of history and memory, and to develop appropriate methodologies.
Tools for Infrastructural Critique. Incisions. Flows. Delays. Folds. Blockages.
Specialization Module: Art-Based Investigation MA, Summer 2025
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
‘Broken infrastructure is loquacious.’ - Marina Vishmidt
How do art and architecture relate to infrastructure? In its common meaning infrastructure denotes large scale constructions such as power grids, server farms, bridges, highways, dams and mines. It is often, ‘critical’ or ‘broken’. But infrastructure also refers to smaller scale feminist infrastructures of care and ecology, to the function of making something ‘operational’, of moving one thing or idea from one place to another, and of langauge itself.
This semester’s Art-Based Investigation takes Marina Vishmidt’s concept of ‘infrastructural critique’ as its starting point to consider artistic research, methodologies and tools, to develop practices of artistic production and exhibiting. In Vishmidt’s conception, infrastructural critique develops beyond institutional critique – seen in works by Michael Asher and Andrea Fraser – to examine the hidden infrastructures sustaining institutions more broadly. Focusing on how artistic practices critique and reimagine the systems underpinning contemporary life, the course begins with the theoretical foundations of institutional critique before shifting to infrastructural investigations such as Cameron Rowland’s work on histories of racial capitalism and Timothy Mitchell’s theorization of infrastructure’s temporal and spatial dimensions.
Through close readings of texts by Vishmidt, Mitchell, Fraser, Rowland and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, alongside analyses of artworks, students will investigate what infrastructure ‘makes possible’. Tools for Infrastructural Critique examines how artists and architects use gestures like incision, flow, fold, delay and blockage to reveal and disrupt these systems. Case studies, from local lithium extractionin the Koralm, to tenant struggles in New York, to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, explore how infrastructure is represented, contested, and rethought in art and architecture. Students will develop their own artistic strategies for investigating, critiquing and transforming infrastructural systems.
Finding the Shape Described by an Absence. On Reading the History of Sites.
Transdisciplinary Art Based Research: Seminar MA, Summer 2025 – WINNER OF MIND THE GAP AWARD
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
How do we do historical research on a site? From where do we sit or stand when we think and write about history? How does our location shape our understanding of the past? What spaces, objects, barriers, or divisions inform or obscure our view? What remnants of the past persist into the present? How do we engage with the archive – its limitations, its power to elevate certain perspectives while silencing others, and its role in defining who is considered a historical actor? How can we resist, rupture, or disrupt its authority? Finding the Shape Described by an Absence invites students to work with the paradox of presence and absence in the history of a site. It conjures the ghostly and haunted dimensions of history, where what is missing or suppressed lingers as powerfully as what is visible. This course introduces forms of knowledge production that confront such hauntings, drawing on spectral methodologies to uncover the traces of what has been erased, forgotten, or silenced. Through close readings of texts by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Avery Gordon, Michael Taussig, Saidiya Hartman, and Donna Haraway, as well as analysing and interpreting artworks, students will develop skills in transdisciplinary, art-based research. The course emphasizes radical social histories, ‘beautiful experiments’ (Hartman), and ‘history from below,’ as well as situated knowledges that challenge the violent and dehumanizing legacies of capitalist modernity. Students will develop research excercises rooted in their chosen archives, exploring methodologies that map and plot counter-narratives. By considering for whom research is developed, the course invites students to explore the merits of both disciplined and undisciplined approaches. Through this process, the course encourages students to think critically about the spectral dimensions of history - how the ghosts of the past inform the present, how they might be summoned or reckoned with. By integrating the spectral into their research, students will develop methodologies that not only uncover hidden histories but also disrupt the authority of traditional archives, creating space for new ways of knowing and being in relation to the past.
We Sit in a Room with History.
Transdisciplinary Art Based Research: Seminar MA, Summer 2024
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
From where do we sit or stand when we think and write about history? How does our location affect our view on the past? What do these spaces mean? What kind of objects inform our view? What barriers, walls or divisions obscure it? What from the past is not past? How do we grapple with the archive, its power and authority, how it limits what can be known and whose perspective it elevates, who it deems an historical actor? How do we resist, rupture and disrupt this authority? Guided by such questions, and considering for whom we develop our research, in this course we will explore the merits of discipline and becoming undisciplined in our approach to research. Drawing on work by authors such as Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, Donna Haraway, Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh, as well as artistic and field research, we will explore radical social history made of ‘beautiful experiments’ (Hartman) and history from below, as well as situated knowledges, as methodologies that engage in plotting and mapping narratives that struggle against the violent and inhuman history of capitalist modernity. Within this course, students will develop projects based on their chosen archives, traversing the limits of art based investigation.
An Atlas Below the Surface, On Extractive Zones
Worldbuilding: Seminar MA, Summer 2024
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
The current conjuncture is dominated by environmental crises spurred by planetary heating and the degradation of ecosystems, AI mechanised wars that expand through skies and across territories, as well as ground swells of struggle and open rebellion for global liberation. This course takes Macarena Gomez-Barris’ The Extractive Zone as the starting point to explore the social ecologies of the extractive paradigm by critically engaging with its traumatic historical roots and its implications for the crisis ridden present. Within the context of Gomez-Barris’ research, the extractive zone refers to a colonial paradigm, worldview and technologies that map a region and its biodiversity in order to convert its life into a capitalist resource. This course will explore the history and meaning of these terms in order to understand their relevance in the present. Central to our inquiry will be Gomez-Barris’ decolonial femme methodology, which propels porosity and undisciplined analysis of the objects and places that she works with. We will think with these methods, while acknowledging our own standpoints and positionalities, aiming to develop sustainable modes of practice that might, in her words, lead out of the ‘deadening impasse that is extractive capitalism’. Starting with The Extractive Zone the course introduces interdisciplinary methods including critical inquiry and questioning; embodied knowledge; field research; artistic methods that aim to shift our view and perception; sitting with difficulty; thinking multiple perspectives at once; close reading objects and texts and their contexts.
https://izk.tugraz.at/semesters/summer-semester-2024/an-atlas-beneath-the-surface/
(Re)production and its Discontents.
Specialization Module: Curatorial Design MA, Winter 2023/24
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
REPRODUCTION AND ITS DISCONTENTS looked to the question of “reproduction” in feminist and media theory, exploring the performative, photographic and filmic work of artist VALIE EXPORT. This body of work formed a starting point and guide to question how reality is (re)produced within a complex discursive field made up of often fraught social relations. Photography’s history touches on both the changing contours of experience, and its enmeshment with technology, and how a photograph looks. Today, photography claims a paradoxical status. The proliferation of images and their transformation from analogue to digital technologies has led to its displacement by algorithm and data flow. Still, it maintains a representational hold on reality (Dewdney). Thinking with the architectural model of the camera obscura – as a model for the concept of ideology – we explored what might become possible if we shift our view. During the course, students also visited and worked with the VALIE EXPORT Centre in Linz.
https://izk.tugraz.at/semesters/winter-semester-2023-2024/reproduction-and-its-discontents/
When the Dust Unsettles
Specialization Module: Material Relations MA, Summer 2023
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush and Philipp Sattler
This semester we will travel to the exploratory lithium tunnel in the Koralm mountain range in Carinthia, Austria, unfolding refractions of lithium logistics across continents. Starting with this tunnel, we will investigate how lithium is entangled in relations that produce economic growth and growing inequality; how greening energy and environmental destruction go hand in hand. In relation to this site, we will explore notions that counter the treatment of nature as raw material, through what Andreas Malm (2018) describes as a people’s history of the wilderness. Following Malm, we will work on narratives of marronage and ‘partisan nature’ that oppose the current rampant eco-fascism. Learning with the Charging Myths exhibition by the transnational artist collective On-Trade-Off, we will explore how technological innovation is dependent on natural resources and zoom into the global trail of lithium. The artists focus on a “counterbalance to the economic logic of extraction and exploitation. Alongside the critical outlook, they also showcase the magic of energy and electricity, the resilience of man and land, and the belief in a new sun.”
How Does One Get to Own a Mountain?
Specialization Module: Art Based Investigation MA, Winter 2022/23
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush, Anousheh Kehar and Philipp Sattler
HOW DOES ONE GET TO OWN A MOUNTAIN? takes the site of a lithium tunnel on the Koralm mountain range in Wolfsberg, Carinthia, as the object through which to consider processes of extraction, value creation and accumulation that result in climate catastrophe and ultimately the ruination of the world. In the context of this site, students will explore societal and spatial transformations that mining brought historically on the site and the surrounding towns and cities. For example, silver mining began at the end of the twelfth century, in Saxony, Germany. During the Middle Ages, 85% of silver produced worldwide came from mountain ranges in modern-day Austria. With silver and copper, Tyrol, ruled by the House of Habsburg, was one of the richest regions of Europe until the ‘discovery’ of the city of Potosí, and the shifting of mining to South America. Though the silver mines in Austria closed during the mid-sixteenth century, and after coal replaced silver and copper, the region now sees a return of mining with lithium tunnels being built in nearby Carinthia by European Lithium, a company based in Australia - a shift that now sees lithium mining expand from South America to Central Europe. Building towards a collective project, students will consider the meaning of “primitive accumulation”, along a continuum, that stretches from the mining history of the Middle Ages to today in light of the politics of the Green New Deal with its proposals for non- or low-carbon futures and resulting urban and rural transformations.
As a way of reflecting on and interpreting (these) processes of accumulation and extraction, we will ask what ‘art’ is and what it can do. In this line of inquiry/thought, we will consider the practices and productions (from the Land Art of Robert Smithson and Beverly Buchanan to the 2010 exhibition Potosí Principle) that infringe on disciplinary and institutional understandings of art—towards a collective project for the semester. We will engage in a close reading of Another Aesthetics Is Possible (2021) by Jennifer Ponce de León, which brings attention to visual, literary, and performing arts practices against violence and dominant systems such as capitalism, and to art’s contribution to producing glimpses of another world. We will study and analyze artists’ works while focusing on the respective social, economic, environmental, and political relations informing/producing them; and identifying the methods, modes of production, and forms that the array of works take. Through immersion into the site and artistic practices, students will formulate an investigative approach into the traces of the history of mining in the region and their representations. Students will also explore surrealist and absurd forms of critique, as well as performative exercises to approach these propositions. The topic of lithium mining and its impact on bodies and spatial formations is at the core of the module - from cities, to mountains, to human and more-than-human worlds. This course aims to develop collective research formats and artistic expressions that can unpack these complex entanglements. Students will learn about contemporary art in relation to land, soil, and body, the development of the concept of the Anthropocene and its critique, position the case study in a local and global context, and think through the potential of a collective response that also includes more-than-human actors.
Questions from an Architect Who Reads. A Students’ Inquiry
Seminar: Art Based Investigation MA, Winter 2021/22
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush, Philipp Sattler and Milica Tomić
In 1984, in response to a conference at which Black women had been relatively occluded, Audre Lorde wrote “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Taking gender and its relation to architecture (or architecture’s mediation of gender), as the central concept, Art Based Investigation will inquire into the material conditions of architecture. How do we start unpacking the historical and structural sexism and racism that has underpinned the history of Western architecture, not merely to tokenistically rectify its exclusions, but to question what stands behind such exclusions, to question the premises of a discipline that has thrived on exclusion. In this sense, we will also deconstruct the myth of any great artist/architect, because all qualifiers (woman, POC, queer etc) mean the sedimentation of the norm, the white male. To address gender within the system of architecture will enable us to view feminist approaches to architecture not as peripheral, or as its subset but as a necessary part of the materialisation of the practice. Within ABI we will expand this investigation to consider the role of the architect as worker in the field of architecture. We will follow Peggy Deamer, who writes, “Ultimately, what we are talking about with respect to present-day architecture is a division of labor that exists at a planetary scale, an expanded “construction site” that encompasses all the far-flung but environmentally interconnected actors and factors involved in bringing a building to fruition.” (Peggy Deamer, The Architect As Worker (p. xxiv)). Working with Milica Tomic (through concepts of art) and Angelika Hinterbrandner (architecture) each participant will undertake a “student inquiry”, exploring for themselves the contradictions that are faced (automation of work, climate catastrophe, extraction and forms of ownership) and the kinds of forms, spaces and modes of action that can be cultivated against such totalising conditions. The aim of ABI is that students will develop skills to understand and act within the present crises of architecture, to articulate these inquiries conceptually, and to work collectively to find other models.
Questions from Peggy Deamer’s The Architect As Worker:
How can the architect both represent and embody the historical conditions and contradictions of architecture’s coming into being?
How can the architect think all at once material resources, manufacturing technologies, laboring bodies, the fetish of the commodity, and the production of real, habitable space?
How can the architect give creative and imaginative expression to ideas about how people might live—and the planet might thrive—in the future while also making manifest the collaborative, social nature of all architectural work? If individual signature is a reactionary mark of the marketplace, can the architect be a designer today as well as a designer?
Bordering Forms
Art Based Investigation MA Seminar, Summer 2022
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
Today, in art, architecture and politics, questions of instability and security, containment and dissolution, partition and contagion, and purity and toxicity abound. Borders are manifest between fantasy and reality, interiority and exteriority, between myself and the other. Transgressed borders give rise to feelings of anxiety or overwhelm, compelling acts of compulsion or withdrawal. Borders are drawn within our homes and expand to delimit nations; they are transgressed by acts of invasion or occupation, or maintained by acts of policing; they are permeable or hardened. Temporal borders assign how a past epoch borders the present, or how we can bridge temporal modes within the same space: how modern or highly capitalised forms and traditional or archaic forms mix. If we orient our view through the optics of combined and uneven development, radical artistic exploration of form in the twentieth-century can be understood as mediating art’s entanglements with and resistance to, gendered and colonial forms of capitalism. If all culture is produced within a dialectics of core and periphery integrated within the machinations of global capital, we will ask how art indexes or expresses this.
In this course we will consider forms of bordering and bordering forms in relation to the spatial, the temporal and the self. We will look to practices of art, socio-spatial and political praxes, from the standpoint of “border thinking”, which “emerges in the process of delinking from the colonial matrix and [potentially] escaping from its control” (Tlostanova and Mignolo). We will use our own mediation of boundaries to relate to borders more broadly, both in the sense of historically constructed borders that define geo-politics, and abstract, conceptual notions of the limit or frontier. Bordering Forms asks how art renders objective the crises of a bordered world.
Through the Looking Glass, The Realities We Found There
Seminar: Knowledge Forms MA, Summer 2021
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
Recent discourse has given way to a renewed interest in ideology and a renewed discussion of ideologies. In 2020, the since dethroned President Trump famously declared anti-racist Black Lives Matter, as well as anti-fascists or Antifa, as “the real fascists”; in response, perhaps we asked if we were inside or outside of an ‘upside down version of reality’. And yet, Trump was not sent from outer space. He was elected by a population existing within a social system riddled with social contradiction and devastation. One effect of these recent events has been to show that history did not end. The big ideologies: nationalism, fascism, socialism, communism, liberalism, capitalism, anarchism etc., seemed to crawl from the seabed of a so-called post-ideological world to leap directly into the waves of mainstream discourse.
Ideology exists in many outfits and definitions. T. J. Clark has described it as 'those systems of beliefs, images, values and techniques of representation by which particular social classes, in conflict with one another, attempt to ‘naturalise’ their own special place in history’. Such processes of ‘naturalisation’ have been used to justify the historical violences of imperialism and colonialism, fascism, genocides, apartheids and all of their afterlives that make up our present. Much earlier, in The German Ideology (written, 1846) Marx writes, ‘If in all ideology men (sic) and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process.’ Anna Kornbluh describes Marx’s use of the architectural construction, the ‘dark room’ of the camera obscura as a way to show how a certain formalism in nature instigates processes of social contestation of given forms. These early experiments in projection produced inverted images on the walls of the chamber. Kornbluh continues, ‘Ideology is image-production through physical processes of refracted light and enclosed space; its inversions and distortions arise naturally, socially, and physically.’ In this sense, we encounter the idea that ideology follows a mechanical process, it demands that we investigate how all representations, inversions and projections are mediated and how material reality is, to use Kornbluh’s idea, itself contingent and formed.
This seminar, which is connected to the Integral Design Studio: Flowers (Not) Worthy of Paradise, takes the semester-thema of ‘unlearning’ as the conceit through which to consider ideology today. Ideology, then, stands as a kind of mechanism or dispositif through which all that we aim to unlearn is, on one level, perpetuated. We will inquire into how the image of nature and the nature of the image can enable a deeper understanding of some of the more insidious aspects of the present. We will look to Ariella Azoulay, who writes: ‘Under imperial temporality, the violent processes of impoverishing and dispossessing people (mainly, but not only, nonwhite people) are obscured by the ideology that poverty is a state, an attribute of such people, who require, at best, rescue.’ Here, ideology is filtered through photography, manifest in 'documentary photography', the state sanctioned medium of the ‘news’ and the mediator of the fictitious narrative of rescue.
We will unfold the concepts of ideology and unlearning in relation to each other, asking: can ideology be unlearned?, and, what is unlearning without an adequate concept of ideology? We will also directly relate this to art and architecture, asking how each produces and ‘naturalises’ a system of beliefs and values; we will consider how these relate to the existing material processes of society. What is the topology of ideology? What do surface or depth stand for? Can we differentiate reality from ideology? Finally, can we speak from, or critique from a place outside of ideology, how does non-ideology transform into ideology?
Objects of History.
Seminar: Art and the Social MA, Winter 2020/21
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
In this seminar we will explore why, in times of crisis, there is a tendency not only towards collective struggles for bettering conditions and social emancipation, but also towards political reaction, with all its forms of racism, xenophobia and chauvinism? Structured in three stages, titled, ‘Conspiracy: The Rational and the Irrational’, ‘Fascism and Colonialism’, and ‘Afterlives’, we will trace and contextualise a political, aesthetic and social history of twentieth- and twenty-first century art and exhibition making, oriented around the above question. With acknowledgement of T. J. Clark’s diagnosis of analogies as both useful and treacherous at the same time, we will employ various methods of critical and comparative enquiry to consider how fragments, or ‘objects’ of the past appear to burst into the present. We will look to past theories and practices for assistance with locating the co-ordinates of today’s crises including their attendant fascistic tendencies such as conspiracy theories, denials, amnesia, as well as modes of state violence. Building on this, we will consider how we encounter the varying and distinct notions of temporality and modernity, periodisation and historicity that emerge from the body of work that we will explore.
Aiming to provide students with knowledge and skills to develop their understanding of the history of fascist and colonial culture and anti-fascist and anti-colonial resistance, the seminar will explore theories which elaborate on how racism, misogyny, domination and exploitation intersect, how we can understand this both historically and in the present, and how artistic practices, as well as practices of exhibition making, have addressed and resisted this.
Undergraduate
Conditions of Possibility: Strategies for Infrastructural Critique.
(BA/SE 155.518: Artistic Practice 1), Summer 2026
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush, with Ahmad Darkhabani, Budour Khalil & Frank Wasser
What does infrastructure make possible? What does it conceal? Power grids, server farms, highways, tunnels, dams, and mines are the visible face of infrastructure, but the concept also reaches into smaller feminist ecologies and practices of care, into the movement of ideas, and into language itself. This semester, Artistic Practice 1 explores the infrastructural systems that subtend, or form the conditions of possibility for contemporary life, to consider the transversality of their uses and operations. Students will choose particular sites, develop forms of research and critical questioning of those sites, to develop artistic propositions in relation to them.
Students will gain knowledge in conceptual art and institutional critique, referring to Lucy Lippard’s ‘Escape Attempts’ (1973) and Marina Vishmidt’s ‘Infrastructural Critique’ (2025), and a genealogy of artistic practices that interrogate the structures shaping cultural production. Through lectures, readings, discussions, and case studies from Hans Haacke to Andrea Fraser and Cameron Rowland, the course will explore how critical artistic strategies engage with histories or gender oppression and racial capitalism, to repurpose or modify violent and harmful infrastructures that reproduce our world, inside and outside the institution, reorienting their operations? Can art block or redirect the conditions of reproduction of contemporary life? How far can art reach “out” before it is recuperated by capitalist accumulation? What are the limits to transgressions by means of artistic form and critique?
Students will work in groups to develop artistic projects that engage a materialist critique of infrastructure across scale. By the end of the semester, students will have developed their own artistic strategies for investigating, and transforming the infrastructural systems within sites of their choice—that shape the world around them.
Who is Afraid of Ideology?
(BA/SE Artistic Practice 2), Winter 2024/25
Convened by Ahmad Darkhabani, Rose-Anne Gush, Anousheh Kehar, Philipp Sattler
Much as a tree in growth adds a new ring each year, the social concept of nature has accumulated innumerable layers of meaning in the course of history. Just as felling the tree exposes these rings–before the timber is sent to the saw mill for fashioning into a human artefact–industrial capitalism has cut into the accumulated meanings of nature so that they can be shaped and fashioned into concepts of nature appropriate for the present era.
- Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1984)
In line with our semester theme, contextualisation, the course, WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY?! takes this notion as a prism through which to read, interpret, and understand architecture and its complex histories, practices, and entanglements. We will ask how architecture and art produce and ‘naturalise’ a system of beliefs and values, considering how these relate to the existing material processes of society.
The course is structured around four themes transversal to the ideology of architecture: the production of nature, the ideology of property, carceral landscapes, and reciprocal landscapes. Exploring the production of nature and thus space as something specific to historical capitalism, we will study the unequal and uneven development of landscapes that combine impoverishment and wealth (Smith, 1984). Looking into questions of how to measure and represent land, the politics of inheritance and its relation to property laws, (Arsanios, 2023), we will learn how property shapes and defines land as an abstract form. Historically and today, violent acts of enclosure sever people from their land and their reciprocal relationships with nature, which sustained civilizations long before the brink of capitalism (Hutton, 2021). The legacies of colonialism and empire have created commodified land that exists as multi-faceted realities of extraction, among them the flow of material and people who produce our buildings and landscapes. This process of architecture is embedded in systems of oppression that make these relationships possible, forming carceral landscapes. While the carceral tells of confinement, it goes beyond the prison. Mike Davis once noted the novelty of the “comprehensive security effort” emerging from unifying urban design, architecture, and the “police apparatus” and its implications for the social-environmental construction (Davis, 1990) – socially and spatially regulating people and their environments.
By taking ideology as the prism or lens through which to understand architecture, students will reflect on their learning and knowledge, reading and listening. We will ask how architecture and art produce and ‘naturalise’ a system of beliefs and values, considering how these relate to the existing material processes of society.
https://izk.tugraz.at/semesters/winter-semester-2024-2025/who-is-afraid-of-ideology/
Another Aesthetics is Possible
(BA/SE Artistic Practice 1), Summer 2024
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush, Anousheh Kehar and Philipp Sattler
Artistic Practice 1 takes Jennifer Ponce de Leon’s eponymous book, Another Aesthetics is Possible (2021) as the starting point this semester. Another Aesthetics is Possible develops a materialist analysis of art’s multifaceted role in the social and collective process of exploring competing social narratives, of art and politics. In her study of artists and collectives working in Argentina, Mexico and the United States who inherit from artistic traditions of surrealism and street theatre, Ponce de Leon explores how artistic practices, experimental and collective in form and expression have merged and intertwined with political leftist, anti-colonial movements and uprisings struggling against the brutal violence of contemporary capitalism, and attempting to figure worlds beyond its grasp. Thus, in this course, students will track these projects, using this book as a lens through which to see the context of Graz, and exploring what they can learn from the book, and how it can aid in developing meaningful, collective, artistic practice today. During the semester, students will research, read, think and write, collectively crafting a zine.
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House: Forms of Feminist Praxis
(BA/SE Artistic Practice 1), Summer 2023
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush, Anousheh Kehar, Milica Tomić and Nour Shantout
Audre Lorde, a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, worked her whole life to speak out against injustices of race, sex and class, in her poetry, as a university scholar and in her broader political life. She did not separate those issues but saw them as forces that require a combined, multi-dimensional answer to challenge them and bring about actual change in the world, naming a position that civil rights advocate and feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw later named intersectionality. By reading one of Lorde’s most important works ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’ (1979) we will explore what intersectionality means and can do. This text was originally a speech that Lorde gave at a feminist conference named after Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, where Black women were underrepresented. In questioning the role of power and who holds it (the master) Audre Lorde wrote: ‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.’ For Lorde, letting go of the master’s tools is the way forward. It is to see how the personal is political, to see how, as she says, personal visions help lay the ground for [collective] political action.
During the semester, working in groups, we will build on this starting point, exploring feminist ideas - artistic, theoretical and political - in space. We will look at the relations between the psychic and the spatial, artistic and architectural. Using methods, including silent conversation and exhibiting, we will work on how Lorde’s words, among many other examples, can help develop our own tools to build different worlds to come.
The Measure of Land
(BA/SE Artistic Practice 2), Winter 2022/23
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush, Philipp Sattler and Nour Shantout
“To travel without a map, to travel without a way. They did, long ago. That misdirection became the way. After the Door of No Return, a map was only a set of impossibilities, a set of changing locations.”
- Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging
“The earth’s surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other—one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects, or what I will call “abstract geology.””
- Robert Smithson, A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects
This semester we will begin our collective exploration by learning with and from notions of land, specifically from what has been historicised as Land Art. From “muddy thinking” (Smithson) to “tentacular thought” (Haraway) we will look at artistic projects that question models of the world under imperial grids, colonial maps and western cosmologies of the Anthropocene. By engaging land itself, shaping and forming it, sometimes devastating it, sometimes fighting for it, sometimes dying for it, and sometimes thriving with it, land art practices are formed. We will, thus, look at how art relates to, and impacts ecology, ecosystems, and environments - past and present. Starting with the work and writings of Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, and by engaging with the theories of Donna Haraway and Kathryn Yussof, we will explore the conceptualisation and critique of the notion of “Anthropocene”. From an anti-colonial and ecofeminist perspective, we will look at the history of land art, and what was omitted from such a history of art, specifically different indigenous practices that dealt with the relationship to land, counter-mapping and counter-archiving. We will ask: on whose land is art realized? And who bears land art’s ecological, economic and environmental costs? These questions aim to entangle both human and more-than-human worlds, in order to understand processes of geology, biology, and social relations developing in the critical zone, the thin layer of the earth’s crust on which life can thrive.
Revealing the Work of Art
(BA/SE Artistic Practice 1), Summer 2022
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush, Philipp Sattler and Milica Tomić
Cabanne: How did you come to choose a mass-produced object, a “readymade,” to make a work of art?
Duchamp: Please note that I did not want to make a work of art out of it. The word “readymade” did not appear until 1915, when I went to the United States. It was an interesting word, but when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a “readymade,” or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn’t have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it, or describing anything. … The word “readymade” thrust itself on me then. It seemed perfect for these things that weren’t works of art, that weren’t sketches, and to which no art terms applied. That’s why I was tempted to make them.
Cabanne: What determined your choice of readymades?
Duchamp: That depended on the object. In general I had to be aware of its “look.” It’s very difficult to choose an object, because at the end of fifteen days, you begin to like it or hate it. You have to approach something with an indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good and bad taste.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 64.
The solution to the problem, how to make an artwork that is not art, and thus how art relates to non-art was given by Marcel Duchamp as the “readymade”, a term he coined in 1915 after leaving Paris for New York. The readymade describes a process - a chance encounter - where an already existing object, a commodity, is named, and in this act of naming, it is instituted as art. This act of naming moves the object from its normative function, and puts it in relation to the domain of “art”. Through these acts of negation, the readymade had the effect of transforming art itself, of reducing the artwork to non-art. “Its nomination is a decision, it is a decision that is essentially (not accidentally) indecisive. It is a decision to make art by not making art.” (Kukuljevic, p. 9)
Artistic Practice I will use the “readymade” and its history as an object lesson to understand art’s broad trajectory today. After placing the readymade in its long history, we will explore questions it raises concerning labour, production, skill and deskilling, questions of authorship and nomination. We will look to Duchamp’s Bottle Rack (1914) and in the process of analysing this object through its
· Art-historical and contextual aspects
· Ideological and political frameworks
· Material/Economic aspects (object material investigation and analysis of production)
· Methodologies
we will see how it creates a new constructed image, an image that is not “given”.
This process will help us to see how the readymade itself gave way to a new image. These four registers intertwine and merge into what Wilfrid Sellars described as a “scientific image”. Sellars interpreted the problem of representation, which is based on introducing the difference and relation between the “manifest” and the “scientific image” (of the world). This critiques the view that knowledge can be independent of the conceptual processes which result in perception.) The end product is important, but what seems more important here is the way the ‘readymade’ object enables us to see a shift in the understanding of art itself.
Artistic Practice I will be structured around lectures and praxes; after each lecture students will work in groups of 6, to develop works that respond to the lecture. Please form your groups in the first meeting. Students need to attend each lecture. During the meetings when there is no lecture, the groups will sign up to discuss their works with course tutors.
Why Have There Been No Great Woman Architects?
(BA/SE Artistic Practice 2), Winter 2021/22
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush, Philipp Sattler, Milica Tomić and Simon Oberhofer
During the Winter Semester 2021-22, Artistic Practice 2 sets out to explore the historical, structurally institutionalised sexism within the history of art (and architecture). Starting with an analysis of Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, written during the intoxicating days of the birth of the Women’s Liberation movement in 1970 students will be asked to create a statement using an artistic form, that they stand behind.
Considering Nochlin’s polemical intervention within the emergent feminist movements of the 1970s, where her aim was to show how, highlighting the marginalisation (here of women, but this is not hypostasised), one can reveal the unconscious distortions within a discipline, here art history, and in turn one can address the inadequacies in terms of how the crucial questions of such a discipline are posed, we will focus on how gender is not peripheral, or provincial to the “master discourse” but rather should be used as a catalyst to probe the basic “natural”, ideological assumptions at play. The question should be treated materially, by looking at the historical conditions of production, artistic or architectural rather than looking to the category of “woman” itself to hold the answer. The question “Why have there been no Great Woman Artists/Architects?” should thus highlight the symptom, and create a chain reaction, it can be extended to invisibilised aspects of production and reproduction for example within the gendered and racialised division of labour, and within all processes of urbanisation and extraction.
Artistic Practice 2 brings together the questioning posed by Nochlin, with the propositions made in the exhibition, Live in Your Head, When Attitudes Become Form: works, concepts, processes, situations, information, originally curated by Harold Szeemann in 1969 at Kunsthalle Bern, and restaged in 2013 by Fondazione Prada in Venice with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas. Taking note of the ways that the exhibition has been understood, for example, as ‘a paradigm of the process of mounting an exhibition post-1969, in a way that made it possible to bring together artefacts made by any technique and in any material, in accordance with the view “everything is art”’ (Celant and Costa, 2013), we will explore what is at stake in such a claim on the part of an exhibition. We will consider the forms of artistic criteria that are made manifest, redefined or eroded in When Attitudes Become Form. We will ask what the exhibition included and excluded, and how it proposed new strategies in relation to architecture, the morphology of artworks in a space.
Throughout the semester students will use artistic practice to explore the ways that architecture is gendered, starting in the university. In addition to the statement, and building on Nochlin’s method of questioning, students will also embark on an inquiry into the role of gender within architecture, where they produce a set of material forms and responses, building an exhibition.
Infrastructures of Unlearning: Investigating the Futures Past
(BA/SE Artistic Practice 1), Summer 2021
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush, Philipp Sattler, and Mirela Baciak
What are the connections between contemporary art, architecture, and public space? How can buildings, the law, mode of production and the circulation of goods and services become infrastructures of and in art? How have artists engaged with such questions, and how have such questions appeared in the history of art? These are some of the propositions guiding Artistic Practice One, which will take place online this semester.
In Infrastructures of Unlearning: Investigating the Futures Past, students will work with course convenors to address and explore a range of artistic practices and concepts within the framework of the IZK semester-theme: unlearning. While the course pivots around the concept and practice of unlearning, attention will be given to practices that challenge the Euro-centric canon. In particular, students will explore how conceptual art and institutional critique have taken up the legacy of slavery and colonialism in US America and Europe, and how the history of the Readymade can be understood as a global history. Students will be given the opportunity to explore the making of European cities in relation to the notion of the “Afropean”, as well the history of the essay film (looking at works by the Black Audio Film Collective and the Otolith Group) as it has been used as a political tool. Furthermore, considering analogies between art and architecture and using Linda Nochlin’s essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” as a model, students will consider the ways that structurally and historically institutionalised sexism has mediated the history of art (and architecture). Other perspectives and histories, including reflections on photography and computation will also be made available.
Reflecting on the social relations and structures that produce society, as well as one’s role in such relations, students will be asked to develop ways of critically engaging with art and public space in order to deepen their understanding of the history of the present. We will explore how art can be used as a strategy of unlearning the given, for example, by means of a constructed iteration, video or moving images, photography, or installation. In groups, building on the initial questions and thematics described above, students will be asked to develop and engage in a process of investigation that results in a collectively produced work that employs such strategies. While their processes will differ in terms of how they unfold, these investigations will be oriented towards forms of ‘unlearning’ in relation, art, architecture, infrastructure and public space. This process of making art will be treated as an infrastructure of investigation, experimentation and unlearning.
Finally, the course will include various formats of thinking, discussion, feedback, and making, which will expand on collaborative processes of knowledge production. The development of the work is based on the student investigation and group activity, engagement with the course materials and research processes, analyses of the topics, and their translation into media. Each group should decide on how to operate for the duration of the semester. This will include developing a strategy to cover all the course materials. Each group is responsible for initiating an engaged work process, and the role of the course convenors is to guide the student investigation, analysis, and production.
Introduction to Global Art History (MA/SE), Winter 2022/23
Diversity in Arts and Culture (MA/SE), SS 2022
Lecturer, MA Applied Human Rights, University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2022–23)
Representing, Reproducing and Repudiating Violence
(BA/SE), Winter 2019/20
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
What concepts of violence do we have at our disposal today? How do we understand violence expressed as power or force, in relation to economy, law, constraint, repression and trauma? Violence, when considered as a general category evokes multiple concepts, procedures and processes: it is imprecise. Violence has been theorised in ways ranging from political revolutionary violence, to disciplinary techniques imposed as structural state violence. Consider Max Weber’s concept of the state’s ‘monopoly on violence’, where domination is distributed among the state, the economy and religious or spiritual authorities. This concept may also extend to notions of colonial and fascistic violences. From the collateral violence experienced under conditions of war, as well as violence targeted at gendered and racialized people, and sexual violence, we may also consider the residual violence of psychological power plays taking place in the home. In the current fraught and hyper-mediated media environment, questions concerning violence and representation are also urgent: what does it mean to depict images or descriptions of violence, and what does it mean to prohibit such depictions? With Gillian Rose, we ask: is it one’s own violence that one faces in an experience of art? In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’ from 1920, Walter Benjamin pits violence that is foundational to the law, or law preserving and ‘administrative’, mythical and conservative violence, against the destructiveness of a divine, purifying violence. In this seminar, we will first consider the multiple concepts of violence that Benjamin illuminates in his Critique, reading them in alongside his interlocutors. Secondly, we will consider how and why artists, poets, philosophers and theorists have depicted, reproduced, interrogated and represented, or, repudiated, denied and disavowed, violence found in the archive, the home, the prison, the workplace, and on the streets, during the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.
The Body and Reproduction in Art
(BA/SE), Summer 2020
Convened by Rose-Anne Gush
This seminar explores the juncture of the ‘body’ in art and art history in relation to feminism, capitalism and its (non-)reproduction. Tracing recent debates on ‘social reproduction’ struggles and their intersection with art history (Vishmidt/Stakemeier, Dimitrakaki), and addressing the ways in which the body is taken up in contemporary art, this seminar will explore how concepts and discourses of the ‘body’ are situated alongside critical questions of gender and feminism, critical theories of race, and labour. The ‘body’ is taken to be a historically contingent concept, up for contestation. The idea of the body connotes tensions: between inside and outside; consumption and excretion; energy and depletion; life and death. At the same time, the ‘body’ is produced historically. Considering how the 'body' has been theorised within discursive frameworks including (but not limited to) Karl Marx’s description of the commodity ‘labour-power’, Silvia Federici’s historical analysis of the female ‘rebel’ body, Hortense Spillers’ emphasis on the flesh and Saidiya Hartman’s emphasis on the body/objecthood of blackness, in relation to a history of artistic practice that engages the body, the aim of this seminar is to track the social implications of artistic investigation of the ‘body’ conducted through a range of media (performance, photography, video, film, etc.), where feminism is understood as part of an ongoing struggle. Considering such theories including their tendencies and the exigent contradictions between them, as well as artistic practices, in this seminar we will pursue a materialist analysis of art’s enduring imbrication in capitalist social relations, as well as its relative autonomy from such relations.
Lecturer, Art History and Art Theory, University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2019-2020)
Teaching Fellow in History and Theory of Art, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2019)
Re-examining Aesthetics and Politics Today (BA II), Spring 2019
Violence, Appropriation and Contemporary Art (cross level workshop), Spring 2019
Seminar Tutor, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, UK (2015-16)
Elements of Visual Culture I and II (BA I) 2015-2016
Contact
roseannegush@gmail.com
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