Afterlives of Empire - Encounters in Art and Academia

Afterlives is a new project developed by Gesa Stedman and funded by Humboldt Universitätsgesellschaft. In its initial phase, eight art students from Oxford and Berlin are invited to work at Lichthof Ost in the main building of HU, turning the room into a temporary studio, before transforming it back into an exhibition space. The art students will show how their interaction with several scientific collections at HU, among them the sound archive, the geographical collections, and the Winckelmann collection has led to a new understanding of some of the colonial legacies at HU. A workshop with pupils from Rosa Luxemburg Gymnasium Pankow, a panel debate with art historians, curators, and cultural studies scholars, and a pop-up exhibition itself will conclude the first phase of the project from 14 August to 11 September 2023. During the winter semester 2023/2024, the second phase of the project will explore the entangled history of the British empire and art history further in an interdisciplinary project seminar as part of the MA British Studies at the Centre for British Studies. The students will be introduced to cultural studies concepts such as representation, cultural exchange, contact zones, and entangled history and learn how to contextualise and read works of art. At the same time, they will be introduced to art works past and present which represent or critique the often covert afterlives of empire.