29. April, 17.00 Uhr Kunstuni Linz, Hauptplatz 8, 4020 Linz (Lecture Hall F - H8.05.03)
The Department of Cultural Studies invites you to a lecture from Ulrike Hanstein (VALIE EXPORT Center, University of Arts Linz).
Ulrike Hanstein (VALIE EXPORT Center, University of Arts Linz)
British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen is celebrated for his uncompromising works of moving images, which scrutinize embodied subjects as precarious agents in past and present political life. Probing opacity and the difficult to see, McQueen’s multi-sensory and large-scale installations take up a critical stance towards representation in the visual field. My talk is a response to Bass (2024), an immersive installation and intense composition of light and sound, which was jointly commissioned by Dia Art Foundation New York and Schaulager Basel. Bass might be best described as a durational audiovisual performance: In the huge empty exhibition space a pulsing soundscape of five different bass instruments interweaves with the highly saturated colored light from LED tubes, which moves through the entire visible spectrum from violet to red. Disorienting the beholders’ embodied sense of place and time, the throbbing shifts of hue, luminance, volume, vibration, frequency, pace, timbre, and tone seemingly improvise the beholders’ own acts of perception. How could a history of violence appear in abstract but singular shapes, and reverberate by means of musical forms unfolding in the present? What does it mean for beholders to attune to color, tone, and scale in the vacillating experience of sensing the chromatic? How can light and sound be described as spectral – as haunting and physical – conditions, which link embodied sensory perceptions with social constructions of race?
Ulrike Hanstein is director of the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz _ Research Center for Media and Performance Art and professor for aesthetics and media studies at the University of Arts Linz. She has held academic positions at universities, art academies, and film schools in Weimar, Jena, Vienna, Leipzig, and Cologne. Her research interests include performance art and live art, experimental film and video practices, feminist art, and the materials and methods of art and media historiography.
All Dates of the lecture series “The Senses in Performance”:
11. März 2026
Introduction by OLFAC – Silke Felber, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald
25. März 2026
320 GB im Rucksack – der physische Aspekt digitaler Kunst über Gletscher
Tina Frank (Visual Communication, University of Arts Linz) &
Alexis Dworsky (Media Design, University of Arts Linz)
15. April 2026
Dis_sensual – A crip choreographer’s re-distribution of the sensible
Michael Turinsky (Artist, Vienna)
22. April 2026
Performing Snakes in Modernity and Today
Nicole Haitzinger (Dance Studies, University of Salzburg) &
Christina Gillinger (Tanzquartier Vienna TQW)
29. April 2026
Lingering with Bass (2024, Steve McQueen)
Ulrike Hanstein (VALIE EXPORT Center, University of Arts Linz)
6. Mai 2026
Sinn für Unlösbares
bankleer – Karin Kasböck & Christoph Maria Leitner
13. Mai 2026
Mimi o Sumasu – the Very Act of Listening
Mia Yoshida (Artistic Research and Head of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts Vienna)
20. Mai 2026
Tasting skin. On chilis and chills
Karin Harrasser (Cultural Studies, University of Arts Linz and Director of
ifk – International Research Center for Cultural Studies)
27. Mai 2026
Olfactory Violence and the Freedom to Speak: Stink Bombs in Interwar Europe
William Tullett (Early Modern History, University of York)
3. Juni 2026
Sensing the Atmospheres of Painters’ Studios in Nineteenth-Century France
Erika Wicky (Olfactions, Université Grenoble Alpes)
10. Juni 2026
Hee-Hawing Democracy: Somatic Articulations Beyond the Logos - Inhalt folgt
Bettina Wuttig (University of Marburg)
17. Juni 2026
Greetings from the Swamp
Maria Nalbantova (Artist, Sofia)
24. Juni 2026
A loving ear – toward a poetic ecology of feeling
Brandon LaBelle (Independent Researcher, Berlin)