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), works by women filmmakers in the early dffb years, and the early films of Margaret Raspé.

---

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

• „Diplomatic Camp.“ Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 7(2), 2023: 151-162. muse.jhu.edu/article/916551.
• “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.

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Book and Exhibition Reviews

• Review of Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore, by Jiat-Hwee Chang and Justin Zhuang, Journal of Architectural Education online (July 2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.35483/JAEOR.7.19.2024.
• “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)

• February 2025 (upcoming) | College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference 2025, conference panel “Other Germans and German Others: Questions of Identity in Contemporary German Art” | Paper title: “Exhibiting Migration in 2020s Germany”
• December 2024 | Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Art History Institute, Work Matters series | Paper title: ““Hand- und Kopfarbeit”: Automatism and Experience in Margaret Raspé’s Camera Helmet Films”
• October 2024 | x-ights collective and University of Toronto, Jackman Humanities Institute, Bad Timekeepers: A Temporal Insurgency Across Two Cities public program series in Toronto/Seoul; online roundtable discussion “Dimensional Praxis: Aesthetics of Labor” | Presentation title: “Art of a Postmigrant Society: The Ruhr Region, Labor Migration, Asian Diasporic Traces” 
• May 2024 | Universität Paderborn, online workshop LEHRFILM ERFORSCHEN. | Paper title: “Lehre and Experience in early dffb Women’s and Children’s Films”

Organisation von Workshops und Tagungspanels

• February 2025 | Co-chair, College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference 2025, New York, conference panel “Other Germans and German Others: Questions of Identity in Contemporary German Art”
• January 2025 (upcoming) | Co-organizer, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Workshop “The Elusive ‘Global’: Potential Histories of Art and Media”
• January 2025 (upcoming) | Co-organizer, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Workshop “Gebietsneu? Mediale Resonanz zwischen Ökologie und Migration with Nanna Heidenreich
• July 2024 | Co-organizer, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Screening and Workshop “Documentary Extractivisms”

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