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Susanne Witzgall: In Search of the Future
In Search of the Future
(p. 12 – 26)

Susanne Witzgall

In Search of the Future
Introduction and Epilogue

PDF, 15 pages

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  • art
  • future
  • artistic practice
  • art theory
  • contemporary art

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English

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English

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
Kerstin Stakemeier (ed.), Susanne Witzgall (ed.): The Present of the Future

The current outlook into the future seems to be largely informed by resignation and anxiety. The understandable scepticism which utopian visions of the future are met with today and the crisis ridden present give rise to nostalgic resorts to seemingly reliable ideas. The book The Present of the Future investigates our present relation to the future and asks which means and strategies artists and scholars pursue today, to gain a new scope of action for shaping alternative futures. How do they create potentials for change and for the imagination of possible futures beyond modernistic idealisms and romanticist projections into remote times? The Present of the Future is the result of the third annual theme of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

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