Human Animals. Bodily Dressage and Institutional Critique.
The panel discussion takes place in the context of the Gender Studies II lecture course, “’The Right to Sex’: Practising Feminist Criticism and Aesthetising its Body Politics” (led by Dr. Lisa Moravec).
With:
Manuela Ammer
Chief Curator mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Ludwig Wien)
Dr. Fabian Goppelsröder
Prof. Kunst und Theorie Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe
Dr. Lisa Moravec
Senior postdoc/FWF Project “The Performance of Critique”, Academy of FIne Arts Vienna (IKW)
What do gendered and colonial institionalised practices tell us about how we approach societal dressage? Where do women and animals sit within such classifying and discriminatory processes? And what means does cultural-philosophical work have to critique the historical power mechanisms that have infrastructurally divided animal from human life, such as women from men?
Focused on Manuela Ammer’s exhibition The Animal Within: Creatures in (and outside) the mumok Collection (2022, curated with Ulrike Müller), Fabian Goppelsröder’s expertise in the performativity of verbal language, and Lisa Moravec’s book Dressaged Animality, the three critically debate frictions between bodily (self-)dressage and institutional critique in a panel discussion.
Manuela Ammer is chief curator at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, where she organized exhibitions such as Benoît Piéron: Monstera Deliciosa (2023), The Animal Within: Creatures in (and outside) the mumok Collection (2022, together with Ulrike Müller), Steve Reinke: Butter (2020), Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise (2019), Bruno Gironcoli: Shy at Work (2018), Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age (2016, together with Achim Hochdörfer, David Joselit and Tonio Kröner) and Ulrike Müller: The old expressions are with us always and there are always others (2015). From 2011 to 2014, Ammer was a research associate at the Collaborative Research Center 626: “Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits” at the Freie Universität Berlin and curatorial assistant at documenta 12 in 2006/2007. Ammer has worked as a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Berlin University of the Arts, has written articles for magazines such as Frieze, Texte zur Kunst and Parkett and is the editor and author of numerous art-historical publications. Her survey exhibition on the work of Liliane Lijn is currently on view at mumok.
Fabian Goppelsröder studied philosophy and history in Berlin and Paris and earned his doctorate from the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto on the "Poetics of Circumscribed Space." His projects range from "The Hut as Form and Symbol" and "The Ideology of Feedback" to a "Jazz Theory of Communication." Since October 2023, he has been Professor of ‘Art and Theory’ at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. Fabian Goppelsröder is, for example, the author of "Zwischen Sagen und Zeigen. Wittgensteins Weg von der literarischen zur dichtenden Philosophie" (2007) and the essay "Aisthetik der Müdigkeit" (2018). In 2023, "Kalendergeschichte, Fait Divers, Twitter. Zur Medienästhetik kleiner Formen“ was published.
Lisa Moravec is an art historian-performance scholar, critic, and curator. She works at the intersections of the visual and performing arts, with a focus on human, animal, and machine agency. As senior postdoc at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she leads the FWF research project The Performance of Critique: AI, Bodily Intelligence, and Posthumanist Aesthetics. Over the past three years, she has been a fellow at steirischer herbst and has received several grants for her first postdoc project on Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn, building on her long-standing engagement with the work of Rose English and feminism as a form of societal critique. As a curator, she launched the hybrid, discursive podcast programme and symposium Artists' Archives and Estates for the gallery festival Curated By (2024). She initiated/co-curated the performance exhibition, Suddenly Begin in Splendour: Rose English, Performance, Presence, Spectacle, its surrounding performance programme, and ex. cat. (Museum der Moderne Salzburg, July 2024 – May 2025). Publications include Dressaged Animality: Human and Animal Actors in Contemporary Performance (Routledge, 2024), book translation What is Vienna Actionism? (DVC, 2025), the co-ed. vol. Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy: Dissident Practices (Bloomsbury, spring 2025), peer-reviewed journal articles, and art/performance criticism e.g. in springerin, Texte zur Kunst, and Spike.