Prof. Dr. Nina Zschocke and Prof. Dr. Simon Sheikh enrich the HfG's curriculum since the summer semester 2024.

Professor for digital aesthetics

After studying art history, ethnology and classical archaeology at the University of Cologne, Prof. Dr. Nina Zschocke completed her doctorate with a thesis on the aesthetics of effect on the subject of irritation. She then worked as a DFG visiting researcher at University College London and Columbia University in New York. Nina Zschocke worked as a research assistant and lecturer at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich from 2005 and at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich until 2023. Zschocke also taught as a lecturer at the Université de Fribourg and at the University of the Arts Bremen and until 2024 as a lecturer in theory at the Bern University of the Arts.

"If important questions of the present are concretized using examples, they become more tangible and at the same time more complex. With this in mind, one of my first projects at the HfG Karlsruhe in the summer semester of 2024 will be an interdisciplinary symposium that traces the relationships between digital technology and the geological resources of the Karlsruhe region. This will be followed in fall 2024 by a teaching, publication and exhibition project carried out with partner institutions in Zurich and Munich, which will examine interactions between data processing, robotic equipment and raw matter using the example of the visual archive of a digital fabrication laboratory. In the area of promoting young talent, I would also like to get involved in the medium term in setting up a graduate program, ideally a cross-disciplinary and possibly cross-institutional doctoral college," says Zschocke, describing her planned projects and research plans at the HfG.

Nina Zschocke's teaching and research areas include art studies, materialist, feminist and postcolonial media theory, theories of perception and behavior as well as the history and theory of empirical research. Zschocke's current research focuses on philosophical, scientific-historical and artistic approaches to laboratory-like experiential spaces shaped by digital technologies.

Nina Zschocke has published several books, including 'Der irritierte Blick. Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksmkeit' (Wilhelm Fink 2006) as well as co-editing research volumes on the topics of 'Autorität des Wissens' (diaphanes 2012), 'Diversität' (Königshausen & Neumann 2015) and 'Productive Universals - Specific Situations' (Sternberg 2019).

Professor of Theory in Critical Theory and Media Philosophy

Prof. Dr. Simon Sheikh is a curator and theorist. He was Programme Director of MFA Curating, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2012-2024, Coordinator of the Critical Studies Program, Malmö Art Academy in Sweden, 2002-2009. He was director of Overgaden – Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, 1999-2002 and Curator at NIFCA, Helsinki, 2003-2004.

His writings have been published in journals such as Afterall, e-flux journal, Springerin and Texte zur Kunst. Recent books include "Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989", 2016 with Maria Hlavajova, "Curating After the Global", 2019 with Paul O'Neill, Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson, and "Glossary of Urban Practice - Towards a Manifesto", 2021 with Jochen Becker and Anna Scháffler. Curatorial work includes exhibitions such as Capital "It Fails Us Now", in Oslo 2005 and "Kunstihoone" in Tallinn 2006, "Vectors of the Possible" in Utrecht 2010, "All That Fits: The Aesthetics of Journalism" in Derby 2011, "Do You Remember the Future?" in St. Petersburg in 2011, "Unauthorized" in Malmö in 2012 and "Actually, the Dead are Not Dead" in Bergen in 2019.

Simon Sheikh's research follows a number of strands, including the exhibition as medium (including the histories of the so-called exhibitionary complex and the philosophy of the curatorial), and how it can be employed for world-making; a series of investigations into contemporary urban form and practice: thinking between, art, design and the social within post-industrial infrastructural spaces and conditions; and, connected to the above, the central tenet of ruination and futurity: how we can live and act in the ruins of capitalism and the slow cancellation of the future.

He is currently writing a monograph entitled Its After the End of the World, which deals with 6 interlinked thematics, namely zombies and zombie culture, ghostly matters and hauntology, ruination: on how to become former, post-humanity and after-life, the end(s) of (art)history, and the history and culture of the apocalypse. They also reflect his upcoming research project at the HfG: Where are we, and where are we going after the end of the world as we knew it?"