Kerstin Stakemeier (*1975) has been teaching since the early 2000s in the fields of political, art, cultural, and media theory as well as in art history (among others, Freie Universität Berlin, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Universität der Künste Berlin, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg). A continuous focus of her teaching is the question of artistic and political practice, its material, its subjects, its scope, its limits - historical as well as contemporary.
Continued collaboration with others - in practical work within and out of art, in research, in writing, and in teaching is essential to Stakemeier's practice. Her research focuses on historical and contemporary movements, artistic as well as political, that break disciplinary boundaries by practically questioning the ends of their own production. This ranges, among others, from Mannerism as a recurrent phenomenon of exuberant bodies, to Productivism as a labor of perpetual metamorphosis, empirio- and psycho-materialist attempts at de-normalizing modern man, Symbolism as a struggle against all forms of labor and its genders, to the current revenants of these convictions.
The horizon of Stakemeier's research, alone and with others, is therefore always the understanding of the production of European modernity as a form of colonization, in the production of its 'others' and their continued extraction, as well as in the moralization of its authors and their accumulation.
In Stakemeier's work, art theory and art education play the role of an intersection between different disciplines, in whose connection artists and art educators can find indications, exemplary forms and antagonistic realities that help to locate, shape and specify their own practice in the present, to make it their own.
Professional Experience
In 2007/2008 Stakemeier initiated the "Space for Actualization" in Hamburg (with Nina Köller), a non-commercial exhibition space for the actualization and mediation of unrealized pasts with artists*, musicians*, performers* and theorists*. From 2010 to 2012 she produced with Eva Birkenstock and Nina Köller "Beginning Good. All Good. Victory over the Sun (1913)," an exhibition and publication project in Berlin, Bregenz, and Barcelona that launched actualizations of Russian Futurist opera with over thirty artists*, musicians*, architects*, and theorists*. From 2012 to 2015, together with Susanne Witzgall at the cx of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, she organized annual event series with publications (diaphanes) on the themes of "Power of the Material/ Politics of Materiality," "Fragile Identities," "The Present of the Future." In 2014, Stakemeier organized the conference "Psycho-Materialism" with Tim Voss at the Künstlerhäuser Worpswede. In 2017, she launched the journal project "Class Languages" with Birkenstock, Manuela Ammer, Jenny Nachtigall, and Stephanie Weber, with exhibitions at district Berlin and Kunstverein Rheinlande und Westphalen in Düsseldorf.
In 2020, Stakemeier opened "Illiberal Art," an international group exhibition developed together with Anselm Franke, for which a publication designed by Yusuf Etiman was published. In an exchange with the artists, poets and theoreticians involved in the project, "Illiberal Arts" was not least about Lu Märten's call in the 1910s for the dissolution of the boundaries of art practice into an artistic life practice. "Illiberal Arts" will be continued and expanded in 2023 at the Ludwig Forum für international Kunst Aachen.
Since the mid-2000s, Stakemeier has written regularly for magazines including Artforum, Mousse, Springerin, May, Texte zur Kunst, and most recently Art Monthly and October. She has worked as a gallery assistant at the Produzentengalerie Hamburg, Karin Günther Galerie, and carlier I gebauer, as a research assistant at the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2004/05) and at n.b.k. Berlin (2011/12) and as a scientific trainee at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel (2005/6).
In 2000, Stakemeier completed a political science degree at Freie Universität Berlin, began her doctoral dissertation on "Gesamtkunstwerk. An Aesthetic Politics," and from here on studied art history in Berlin and London. In 2010 she completed her PhD on "Entkunstung - artistic models for the end of art" at University College London, in 2009/2010 she was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), and from 2012 to 2015 she was junior professor for media theory and image studies at the cx centrum für interdisziplinäre studien at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Since October 2015, she has been a professor of art theory and mediation at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg.
In 2021, "Universal Receptivity" appeared, an online and print publication Stakemeier co-authored with Bill Dietz, annotated by a group of students at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, and produced by the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. In 2016, Stakemeier co-authored "Reproducing Autonomy" with Marina Vishmidt. Vishmidt and Stakemeier are currently beginning work on a follow-up publication to be released in 2023. In 2017, b_books PoLYpen published her monograph "Entgrenzter Formalismus. Procedures of an Anti-Modern Aesthetics."
