In the final installation of the 2001-2002 Bonwit-Heine Lecture Series, Barbara Wolbert will speak on May 3 about “Museum Wars: Art and Memory in the New Germany”.
Barbara Wolbert is a cultural anthropologist, working on the anthropology of art and visual culture. She has conducted fieldwork in Germany and Turkey, specializing on the analysis of narration, photography and video practices in the context of migration studies. In this field she has published two books, Migrationsbewältigung [Coping with Migration] (1984) and Der getötete Paβ [Killing the Passport] (1995), as well as various radio documentaries and articles. She is currently pursuing a study on art, politics and alterity.
Her talk will focus on the 1999 Weimar exhibition “The Rise and Fall of Modernism” and forms part of a larger project on art exhibitions in Germany since 1945. She will analyze this controversial show as a case study of nation building processes in the unified Germany. Barbara Wolbert is affiliated with the European University Viadrina at Frankfurt on Oder, where she completed her habilitation in Comparative Cultural and Social Anthropology at the College of Cultural Studies. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cologne and taught at the Free University, the Humboldt University and the University of the Arts in Berlin. Since 1997 she has been a visiting professor in German studies at the University of Texas at Austin.