Expressionism Revisited
Workshop 1: Wie kann eine historische Kontextualisierung des Expressionismus heute aussehen? (DE)

The following workshop is held exclusively on-site and will not be streamed online. Participation in the hybrid Workshop 4 is possible via Zoom after registration.

Workshop 1: Wie kann eine historische Kontextualisierung des Expressionismus heute aussehen? (DE)
With Veronika Nahm (Anne Frank Zentrum) and Prof. Dr. Julia Voss (Deutsches Historisches Museum)
Hosts: Prof. Dr. Aya Soika (Bard College Berlin), Prof. Dr. Isabel Wünsche (Constructor University)

In recent years, research contributions and exhibitions on expressionist art have sparked controversial debates that engage with historical contexts such as colonialism or National Socialism. The workshop addresses new approaches to presenting historically complex content in exhibitions and explores the question of how to do justice to artists and their works while critically reflecting on the historical context from a contemporary perspective.

Veronika Nahm is the Director of the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin. Her areas of focus include historical learning in elementary schools, accessibility in museums, and educational work against anti-Semitism in the context of other forms of discrimination. She studied history and law in Munich, Berlin, and Paris. From 2004 to 2007, she worked in the education and outreach department of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. She leads the Youth Education Commission in the Association of German Educational Institutions.

Prof. Dr. Julia Voss is an art critic, art historian, curator, and staff member in the board of directors of the Deutsche Historische Museum in Berlin. Until 2017, she headed the art department at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2021, she was a co-curator of the exhibition documenta: Politics and Art at the German Historical Museum, and in 2013, she co-curated 1938: Art, Artists, Politics at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt. Her book Amazement: Hilma af Klint/Biography (2020) was shortlisted for the non-fiction prize at the Leipzig Book Fair. Voss serves as an honorary professor of art history at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Prof. Dr. Aya Soika teaches art history at Bard College Berlin. Her research interests are in the field of 20th-century modernism, in particular German Expressionism. In 2019 she was co-curator of Emil Nolde - A German Legend. The Artist during the Nazi Period (Neue Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof) and „Escape into Art?“, a show on the Brücke artists during the Third Reich (Brücke-Museum Berlin). As the author of the catalogue raisonné of Max Pechstein’s oil paintings (2011) and a Handbook on the genre of the catalogue raisonné (2023), she is interested in the intersection between art history and its practices.

Prof. Dr. Isabel Wünsche is Professor of Art and Art History at Constructor University in Bremen. She studied Art History, Classical and Christian Archaeology in Berlin, Moscow, Heidelberg, and Los Angeles and received her PhD from Heidelberg University. Her research interests are European modernism and its global dissemination, the avant-garde movements, abstract art, and émigré networks. She has received numerous grants and fellowships; her most recent book publications include The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context (2018), Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture (2019), and 100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922 (2022).