Biography

Academia

Over 10 years of experience as a lecturer in various universities across Germany, 6 years of experience in mentoring and examining BA and MA students from the fields of art, design, art history and media philosophy. Postdoc at HfG Karlsruhe since 2023. Previously, Katharina was a Research Associate first at University of Konstanz and later at HfG Karlsruhe. As a member of the senate and professorial appointments committees, she intensively participated in academic self-governance. In a voluntary effort to improve enrollment numbers at HfG Karlsruhe, she engaged in university marketing and PR, initiated a new department website, discussed introducing an alumni network, represented her department at information days and participated in student appointment processes. Beyond this day-to-day work, she organizes conferences and regularly invites artists, editors and theorists into seminars, workshops and panel discussions (among others: Anna Engelhard, Daisy Hildyard, Monilola Ilupeju, Ann Duk Hee Jordan, Ligia Lewis, Siddharta Lokanandi, Eleonora Milani, Mike Ruiz). To document the vibrant discourses that usually don’t convey beyond the university’s walls, she founded the interdisciplinary research journal UMBAU, for which she implemented infrastructures, managed budgets and a small team.

Beyond Academia

As a student, Katharina interned in the general management of KW Institute for Contemporary Art and in the editorial office of Texte zur Kunst. After graduating, she started as a PR Trainee at Eye Square Marketing Research in Berlin. To complement her theoretical work with practical experiences, she took on various freelance positions: Working as a funding officer at Gropius Bau Berlin; as gallery assistant at Nagel Draxler and Soy Capitan; curating exclusive art experiences for international art collectors and clients like Google Arts & Culture. As studio manager for Arjuna Neuman she gathered hands-on experiences in the production of artistic projects across various media – from concept development to fishing crashed drones out of jungle tree tops in Australia’s Northern Territory. Katharina has curated exhibitions in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, and Los Angeles. She writes art criticism for Flash Art International, Monopol Magazin für Kunst und Leben, and other outlets.

MA – PhD – Postdoc

Katharina studied art history, media philosophy and curatorial practice at HfG Karlsruhe (Prof. Ullrich, Prof. Groys), cultural studies at HU Berlin, and attended seminars in the complementary applied cultural studies program at KIT Karlsruhe. In four formative years as a student assistant for the doctoral program “Image. Body. Medium” (Prof. Belting) she was able to attend lectures with specialists from the fields of art history and visual culture studies.

After completing her M.A. at HfG Karlsruhe, she joined the doctoral program “The Problem of the Real in Modern Culture” at University of Konstanz where Prof. Bernd Stiegler became her doctoral supervisor (second supervisor: Prof. Felix Ensslin). The program enabled research at the Getty Center Los Angeles, as well as exchanges with Yale University and UCLA. Her doctoral thesis “Post-Readymade” tackled tricky appropriations of found objects like unnamed graves of migrant workers and other material witnesses that never quite submit to the fetishizing powers of modernist art. The book, which resulted from this research, recovers the Surrealist ‘found object’ to capture approaches that differ from Duchamp’s historical concept: When artists today appropriate objects from the everyday world, it is no longer just to expand the notion of art. Much more urgent is the desire to negotiate a changing, crisis-ridden material world – and the human destinies entangled with it. “Post-Readymade” is available open access here.

Katharina’s postdoc project “Designing Habits” (together with Matthias Bruhn, funded by the DFG Priority Program “Das digitale Bild”) explores the digital image as social interface and as a site of technological developments, which intertwines patterns of digital interaction, everyday practices, and commercial interests. This project will consider the digital image’s co-evolution with interactive technologies (such as smartphones), social media and app designs that are meant to trigger psychological-physiological effects, while relying on the specific affordance of the visual. It is along these lines that the image will be examined as medium of aesthetic dependence. Technology-related gestures such as scrolling and swiping, for example, drive the acceleration of fleeting image contacts in social media and dating apps and habitualise a certain perception of the image, while ASMR videos extend watch times to a maximum. Although these two examples seem to represent opposing trends, both of them respond to a presumed need for self-regulation that is simultaneously produced and exploited by digital platforms. Theoretically anchored in visual culture studies and media theory, and practically based on specific case studies, this project will analyze how images – through digital interaction patterns – become applications.