Racist Moving Images

This dissertation project aims to examine the extent to which audiovisual works of artists since the late 1960s draw a contrast to the racist aesthetics that have been manifest in moving images since the beginning of cinematography. Above all in avant-garde film, but also in video art, we find artists who question the visibility of racism in ways that are highly reflective about media, and who critically appropriate and reformulate mainstream white aesthetics in order to assume power over racist modes of representation. The aim is to focus on the degree to which racism is not only a question of representation but also a question that is technological and aesthetic in nature. The intensive engagement with the works examined should serve to formulate a critique, on the one hand, of traditional cinematographic aesthetics and, on the other, of canonized film theories that more or less unconsciously take the white body as the point of departure for their abstraction.

Bachelor’s degree in Scandinavian studies and philosophy and master’s degree in European literatures at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Between 2010 and 2013, research assistant for Prof. Dr. Joseph Vogl in the Collaborative Research Center 626, Partial Project B9, “Poetics of Improbability” and for the Mosse Lectures. Since 2006, work as a film and music journalist. Freelance musician.

j.bauer_ @udk.berlin.de