PhD Project Presentation: Jordis Lau (University of Hamburg)
Foregrounding the Past – Literary Modernism into Media Art
Frankfurt, 29 May 2018 (12-2 pm, IG 1.414)
Jordis Lau’s project is interested in the afterlives of modernist literature in the audio-visual arts. Video art, experimental film, and moving image installation art frequently appropriate modernist prose and poetry. Yet quite contrary to the etymology of appropriation, media artworks appropriate not by making familiar but rather by making strange: Instead of transparently imitating their source as “a window onto another world,” they employ aesthetic strategies that can be accounted for with the Russian Formalist notion of estrangement. The appropriations open up a dialog between past and present and circulate versions of modernism across national and cultural borders. The project asks about the implications of these repercussions in transcultural memory. Find out more by clicking here.