Ruth Lang
PhD candidateCurriculum Vitae
Ruth Lang is a Research Associate in the project “Media and Participation. Between Demand and Entitlement – Participatory Critique as Transforming and Transversal With” at the Zurich University of the Arts and is currently a PhD Student in Art History at the University of Basel (Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Markus Klammer / Prof. Dr. Elke Bippus). Since 2020 she is also an associated member of the eikones Graduate School.
Having studied photography at the École d’Arts Appliqués in Vevey and holding a BA in Fine Arts with a Specialization in Theory from the Zurich University of the Arts, she then completed a MA in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her final project, titled “Collaborative Practices in the Intersection of Militancy, Contemporary Art and Knowledge Production. Case Study: Precarias a la Deriva, C.A.S.I.T.A. / Subtramas”. Since 2008 she has been working in the field of cultural production, while focusing her artistic and theoretical interests on collaborative strategies between art and activism and the analysis of new forms of subjectivity in post-Fordist production contexts.
In her doctoral project, Lang analyses the micro-practices of research-based, activist art practices with Latin American origins and their contextualization within the European system of contemporary art. With the aim of clarifying the question of participation in knowledge production as well as the emergence of epistemological frameworks, concrete practices will be examined on an affective-sensory level and with respect to their medial and institutional conditionality.
Current project
Articulations of Critique of Artistic-Militant Practices in 21st Century Contemporary Art
The focus of Lang’s doctoral research is on the analysis of the relation between art, knowledge, and criticism following the second wave of institutional critique. It examines artistic-militant practices within the institutionalized field of globalized contemporary art since 2000. The core of the study consists of two international exhibition and research projects: Ex Argentina (2003–2006) and The Potosí Principle / Principio Potosí (2010–2011), both initiated and co-curated by artists and curators Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann.
One of the central goals of this dissertation project is the analysis of two case studies that, so far, have been discussed in German-speaking countries only in a fragmentary manner, focusing on their partial realizations in Europe. Against the background of the so-called postcolonial turn in European contemporary art, an expansion of traditional concepts of critique requires the definition of new categories of analysis that allow for a further questioning of the nexus power/knowledge/art in the 21st century. The contextualization and comparison of the selected case studies should then also serve as a basis for a renegotiation of critique within this context. The theoretical starting point of the investigation is Michel Foucault’s conception of critique as a critical attitude and the subsequent call to think of critique as practice. The explicit inclusion of selected contemporary approaches of post-/decolonial theories from Latin America is therefore intended to contribute to the critical expansion of European perspectives.
