Aesthetic Dividuations

Project Directors

• Prof. Dr. Ivo Ritzer (Bayreuth) 
• Prof. Dr. Michaela Ott (Hamburg)

Summary

The project is based on the insight that cultural and aesthetic articulations in the arts of today as far as they strive for global
visibility are necessarily embedded in intercultural and mediatized exchanges, in processes of formal appropriation and recombination, of allusion and parody. In order to highlight their manifold and even contradictory character, they can be called dividuated articulations, according to a term used by Gilles Deleuze, incessantly recombining and transforming their aesthetic elements while nevertheless providing a singular expression. This characterization of time based art productions
seems to be even more true in times of globalized art languages, mediatized intercultural and aesthetic exchanges, mutual perceptions and appropriations. “African” aesthetic production may be considered even more dividuated due to the often criticized extraversion, i.e. orientation of “Africa” towards the “West”, but also because of its involuntary (post)colonial dependencies on “Western” aesthetic norms and concepts, genres and formats, conditions of production and distribution. This observation goes along with the opposite one, namely that “African” artworks do become more and more self-assured in our times deciding themselves on their specific dividuations, criticizing or parodying their dependencies.

Scheduled Project Duration

2019-2023