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Susanne Witzgall: Human after Man – First Introduction
Human after Man – First Introduction
(p. 13 – 22)

Susanne Witzgall

Human after Man – First Introduction

PDF, 10 pages

  • transhumanism
  • ecology
  • art theory

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English

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Susanne Witzgall

has been the academic head of the BMBF-funded cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since 2011. She studied art history, theatre studies, psychology and art pedagogy at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and the University of Stuttgart, where she received her doctorate in 2001. From 2003 to 2011 she taught in the department of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She has worked as a freelance curator, and was a curator at the Deutsches Museum Bonn and the Deutsches Museum München from 1995 to 2002. Susanne Witzgall curated or cocurated Art & Brain II (1997/1998), Das zweite Gesicht/The Other Face (2002), Say it isn’t so (2007), (Re)designing nature (2010/2011) and other exhibitions, and is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on contemporary art, the relationship between art and science, and subjects of current interdisciplinary debates. These include her monograph Kunst nach der Wissenschaft (Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2003) as well as the publications New Mobility Regimes in Art and Social Sciences (ed. with Gerlinde Vogl and Sven Kesselring, Ashgate, 2013), Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, Fragile Identities, The Present of the Future (all three ed. with Kerstin Stakemeier, diaphanes, 2014, 2016 and 2017 respectively) and Real Magic (2018). Since 2019 she is member of the advisory board of the Piet Zwart Institute/Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam as well as of the Institute of Modern Art Nuremberg.

Other texts by Susanne Witzgall for DIAPHANES
Marietta Kesting (ed.), Susanne Witzgall (ed.): Human after Man

The ideal of the Western white Man as the universal representative of humanity has repeatedly been subject to critique. For several decades the Jamaican author and philosopher Sylvia Wynter – the book’s title refers to her formulation ‘Towards Human after Man’ – has advocated a decolonial concept of the human decoupled from its Western normalized and racialized configurations. Current neo-materialist, post-humanist or ecological discourses see the most pressing impetus for a rethinking of the human above all in climate change, mass extinction, the tightening fusion of the living and the technical and their associated mechanisms of capitalist exploitation. This book interrelates these different approaches and brings them into dialogue with artistic positions projecting alternative forms of the human in radical and sometimes highly speculative ways. The publication is the result of the seventh annual programme of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

 

With contributions by Morehshin Allahyari, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Bracha L. Ettinger, Louisa Gagliardi, Maja Gunn, Luciana Parisi, Istvan Praet, Kathrin Thiele, Alexander G. Weheliye, Zairong Xiang and others.

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