Ying Sze Pek, Dr.

Projekt

Schooling Vision in Postwar Germany (AT)

Projektbeschreibung

“Schooling Vision in Postwar West Germany” excavates the country’s media histories of film pedagogy and exhibition to explore the aesthetics and aestheticization of instruction. The interdisciplinary project emphasizes the educational contexts of key filmic and artistic debates around documentary and realism between the 1960s and 1980s. How did experiments in film form and spectatorial engagement draw on and contribute to ideas of “re-education,” learning, and unlearning? Might the staging or documentation of social realities on film give the spectator access to a form of Erfahrung or experience lost under capitalist modernity? Examining the images and tropes of pedagogy in canonical and understudied experimental films and video works, this research studies the activities of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin and the Abteilung Film—Institut für Filmgestaltung at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, as well as pioneering West German moving image exhibitions. The project’s axes of investigation include the documentary as a film-historically minded form of counterpublicity, how education films addressed ideals of cybernetic learning and internationalist concerns, and the emerging conventions of a mobile and mobilized spectatorial subject. The current phase of the project focuses on the early films of Skip Norman (1933-2015).

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Wissenschaftlicher Werdegang

• Seit 3/2023 | Postdoc am Graduiertenkolleg „Das Dokumentarische. Exzess und Entzug“, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
• 09/2022 | PhD, Princeton University, Department of Art & Archaeology. PhD Dissertation: “Reality Expanded: The Work of Hito Steyerl, 1998-2015”
• 2017–2019 | Gastforscherin am Graduiertenkolleg „Kulturen der Kritik”, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
• 2016–2017 | Helena Rubinstein Fellow, Critical Studies track, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York
• 2016 | MA, Princeton University, Department of Art & Archaeology
• 2013 | MA, University College London, Department of History of Art
• 2011–2012  | DAAD Graduate Scholarship, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• 2011 | BA, Yale University, New Haven. Major: art history

Publikationen (Auswahl)

Journals and Edited Volumes

• “Through the Digital Looking Glass,” in Why Art Criticism?: A Reader, eds. Beate Söntgen and Julia Voss (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022): 357–358.
• “Screens, Layers, Algorithms: A Conversation with Ho Tzu Nyen,” Rosa Mercedes 4 (May 2022). https://www.harun-farocki-institut.org/en/2022/05/13/screens-layers-algorithms-a-conversation-with-ho-tzu-nyen/.
• “’Posthuman Documentary’?: Speculation and Critique in Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun” in Critique and the Digital, eds. Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt(Berlin: Diaphanes, 2021): 185–204.
• “Design, Abstraction, and Photographic Art: Max Weber at the White School, 1914-1918,” in Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925, ed. Anne McCauley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017): 287–298.
• “Diplomatic Camp.” Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 7(2), 2023: 151-162. muse.jhu.edu/article/916551.

Encyclopedia Entries

• “Hito Steyerl,” Oxford Grove Art Online, 2017.

Book and Exhibition Reviews

• “Review of Ho Tzu Nyen, ‘The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia,’ 2017–ongoing,” in “No Template: Art and the Technologies of Race.” Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 18 (1), Spring 2022: 157–160. DOI:   https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v18i1.865.
• Review of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, by Genevieve Yue, Konturen: Interdisciplinary Journal for German Cultural Analysis 12 (2022): 128–133. http://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/konturen/article/view/4918/5038
• Review of Toward Fewer Images: The Work of Alexander Kluge, by Philipp Ekardt, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 94 (3), 2019: 264–267. DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2019.1627711.

Vorträge (Auswahl)

• July 2022 | Studientage für Fotografie 2022: “Medienbeziehungen der Fotografie,” Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Philipps-Universität Marburg | Project presentation: “Reality Expanded: The Work of Hito Steyerl”
• May 2021 | College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference 2021, conference panel “Techno-Politics and Art in the 1990s: Film, Video, Image” | Paper title: “’Traveling Images’: Hito Steyerl and the 1990s Documentary Turn
• November 2019 | Program in Media and Modernity Doctoral Colloquium, Princeton University
• Paper title: “Duration, Discursivity, and Experience: Moving Image Works at the Global Art Exhibition”

Lehrtätigkeit (Auswahl)

• Winter 2022/23 | “Berlin Global: Toward the Contemporary Art of Postmigration”, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Winter 2022/23 | “Approaches to Global Contemporary Art”, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg