Joacim Sprung

Currently I'm engaged in a collaborative research project for the exhibition “Myths of Nations. The Clash of Futures. 1914-1945”, organized and curated by Prof. Dr. Monika Flacke at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

My interest in art historiographical matters focus, at the present, on German Art History and how it became influenced by Darwin and Piderit, and later by the racial biology of the 1910-20s. Furthermore I research how Art History was popularized e.g. by Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation" and John Berger's materialstic response: "Ways of Seeing".

During 2012 I was engaged with a post-doc Project called "Visual Ecocriticism". The project focused on how images of nature and climate change manifests itself in science, popular science and fiction. I was and still am particularly interested in the ways how natural catastrophies and apocalyptic scenarios are used and arerepresented in video-animations, charts and illustrations in Nature, National Geographic, Animal Planet and in contemporary film in order to ontodramatize our existence.

Visual education and the visual culture of schools and higher education is a research theme that I touched on in my dissertation. Visual aids, wall charts, experiment-boxes and other didactical aids are investigated in relation to the history of visual education.

Furthermore I work, quite slowly, on a critical commentary on Aby Warburg's unfinished and fragmentary text "Mnemosyne Einleitung", written between March-July