The Department of Visual Culture brings together comprehensive professional
and methodological competencies at the interface between contemporary art,
architecture and theory. The central focus of our work is an extensive
engagement with the plethora of forms and practices with which culture is
produced, negotiated and put to use along historical, political, social and
economic processes. Our interrogation of the different manifestations of these
processes combines the analysis of the political dimension of spatial
production and pictorial representation with the investigation of visual
constructions of social phenomena. The starting point for this research is the
lived and mutually shared practice of culture.
With a perspective orientated towards actual everyday experiences, the Department
of Visual Culture opens up a repertoire of approaches, methodologies and
theoretical tools for the investigation of the great challenges of today in
terms of their historical contingency and malleability
- the increasing influence of digital technologies,
- different forms of global migration,
- growing levels of social and economic inequity,
- the increasing informalisation and precarity of work,
- the neo-liberalisation of the city and its institutions,
- new modes of political and social regulation,
- the worldwide effects of environmental destruction and climate change.
In all these areas we provide critical knowledge that brings together
artistic, architectural and planning considerations with a range of historical,
theoretical, experimental and interpretive approaches.