Staff
Head of the center
Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. Sabine Flach
Sabine Flach has been a professor of modern and contemporary art at the Karl-Franzens University Graz since 2014. She is the deputy head of the Institute of Art History and head of the Center of Contemporary Art. From 2011-2013 she was a professor at the School of Visual Arts, New York City and from 2000-2010 head of the research department 'WissensKünste' at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin (ZfL). Her research and teaching focuses are on art and art theories of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, visual and media theories of the 20th and 21st centuries, epistemology and methodology of contemporary art, phenomenology and art; Art and concepts of nature; Aesthetics, aesthesis and media of embodiment.
Research assistant to the head of the center
Julia Robin works as Research Assistant to the Chair at the Center of Contemporary Art. She is currently a master's student in art history at the University of Graz. In addition, she is completing the additional qualification for Art- and Culture-Management at the University of Graz. Her art historical master's thesis deals with the medium of Painting of Minimal Art in New York around the middle of the 20th century. In doing so, she researches the Paragone of the genres of Art and the subsequent art theoretical and aesthetic discourse of that time. Thereby Art History Writing itself gets critically questioned and the new- repositioning of the medium painting gets investigated.
Research assistant to the head of the center
Elisabeth Zuparic BA works as a research assistant to the head at the Center of Contemporary Art and as a student assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Graz. She is currently a master's student in art history at the University of Graz. In her bachelor thesis she dealt intensively with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his connection to early hip-hop culture. Her master's thesis is entitled "Everyone's work is a kind of reflection of identity" The Role of Identity in Art by Tschabalala Self and Lina Iris Viktor. The focus here is on the question of how the identity building elements of Blackness or Black Femininity are transported in their artistic works. In addition, she deals with Southeast European art, in particular with the interfaces between contemporary art from the territory of the former Yugoslavia and the scientific discourse on nationalism and nation.
Project assistance
Madeleine Weber-Mzell works as a project assistance at the Center for Contemporary Art. After her bachelor's thesis on William Turner's New Vision and its impact on later modernism, she is now specializing in contemporary art in her master's studies, and in particular on Robert Rauschenberg and his work in the interwar period. The focus will be on collaborative works with artists from various countries that Robert Rauschenberg sought out to give his work a political meaning.
Associated researcher
Katrin Nahidi is a postdoctoral researcher for modern and contemporary art at the Institute of Art History at the University of Graz and an associated researcher at the Center for Contemporary Art. She studied art history, history and culture of the Middle East, and German literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.
In 2021, Katrin Nahidi received her Ph.D. from Free University Berlin with her dissertation Modernism Revisited - Exhibitions, Cultural Politics, and Modernist Art Production in Iran. Research for her dissertation was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the Sinergia project Other Modernities - Practices and Patrimony of Visual Expression Outside the West at the University of Bern and the Free University of Berlin (2013 - 2017).
In 2023, her monograph, The Cultural Politics of Art in Iran: Modernism, Exhibitions, and Art Production will be published by Cambridge University Press.
Katrin Nahidi's research interests include global art, historiography of modern art, non-Western modern and contemporary art production, art theories from the global South, and postcolonial art history.
Artistic Assistance
Alexandra Hammond was born and raised in rural Northern California and now lives and works in New York City. She holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and BA from NYU’s Studio Art department. Hammond’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, installation and conversational performances. Hammond believes that the imagination has the power to transform reality. She also believes that all things, including perception, arise from a common ground of being and are therefore in constant relationship with what is and what has been.
The seeming poles of her practice, which are painting on the one hand and “relational aesthetics” on the other, are manifestations of an oscillation between idealization, the experience of individuation and the experience of simultaneously being shaped and always in relation to everything else that exists. Hammond’s paintings are portals into other worlds - interior landscapes where the imagination, the unconscious and the “thinking” mind manifest visually.
