• International contemporary art and politics
• History of museums and institutions and curatorial studies
• Political Iconography
• Art philosophy and aesthetics
• Art politics in National Socialism

Pier Paolo Pasolini in contemporary art. Politics of artistic practice

The project is intended as a first systematic investigation into the fundamental impact of the life and work of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) on contemporary art, and his reception in works of numerous international artists from his lifetime to the present day. Works by approximately 50 international artists are taken into consideration, including artists from a wide range of disciplines such as Francesco Arena, Elisabetta Benassi, Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Alfredo Jaar, Bouchra Khalili, Fabio Mauri, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ming Wong, Cerith Wyn Evans, Hervé Guibert, and David Wojnarowicz, among others, who have used Pasolini's life and work as a source of inspiration to explore meanings of artistic creation in highly politicized contemporary societies. The filmmaker, poet, novelist, theorist, journalist, and critic who commented on the challenges of global economic and political developments in postwar society becomes himself a lens for a reflection on the function of art and negotiations of cultural, social, and political structures, social and ecological consequences of capitalism, and also the position of artistic work in society. Identifiable core subjects of his preoccupations undergo an updating and appear highly topical: processes of modernization and commercialization, forced mobility, forms of communal life, the search for a language for reality, interest in myth, developments of the so-called »Third World«, the relationship between the South and the North both in Italy and Europe as on a global scale. A rootedness in the city of Rome and its historical sedimentations as well as the urban and social aesthetics developed by Pasolini on the one hand, and his international work and reception on the other, to which not least Paris and the theoretical reception of his works that is especially pronounced in France testify, are defining vanishing points of the artistic perspectives, as well as their investigation.