holds the position of junior professor for media
theory at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy
of Fine Arts Munich since April 2016. She studied photography, film,
cultural studies and media theory at Bennington College, USA and
Humboldt University, Berlin. From 2008 to 2011 she was a researcher
at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna
and from 2014–2016 researcher at the interdisciplinary laboratory
Image|Science|Gestaltung at Humboldt University. Her PhD Affective
Images of Post-Apartheid. Documentary Perspectives on Migration,
Xenophobia and Gender in South African Film and Photography (2015)
was funded by the DFG and nominated for the Humboldt-Award.
From 2015 to 2018 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University
of Applied Arts, Vienna, in the FWF project ‘A Matter of Historicity.
Material Practices in Audiovisual Art’. She curated the photography
exhibit ‘Now you see me, now you don’t’ for the National Theatre
of Mannheim and directed several essayistic films. Kesting is part of
the publishing collective b_books, Berlin since 2004 and has become
a member of the editorial board of FKW journal for visual culture
and gender studies in 2017. She writes for Texte zur Kunst, Social
Dynamics and FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle
Kultur, among others. A recent publication is "Changing Visual Politics
in South Africa," in Anne Graefer, Media and the Politics of Offence
(2019).