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anna-maria.kanta.14@alumni.ucl.ac.uk
I received a BA in Law from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, before completing an MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, under the supervision of Irit Rogoff and an MA in Museum Studies at the University of Athens. I completed my PhD, under the supervision of Sarah E. James. My research was funded by the Onassis Foundation.
Thesis
Re-Imagining the Public: West German Intermedia Practices in the 1960s and 1970s
My research project interrogates the inherent ambiguities, ideological frictions, utopian impulses, and broader sociopolitical implications of West German intermedia production in the 1960s and 1970s. Built around three case studies – the work of Wolf Vostell, Ferdinand Kriwet and Klaus Peter Brehmer – the project seeks to scrutinize and problematize the notion of “audience participation”, that formed the crux of media-crossing practices over my period of study. The concern over the reeducation and activation of the public beyond the institutional confines of art features prominently in the work of these three artists. Attending to the extensive transformations that occurred in West Germany from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, I examine how new, diversified, multiple conceptions of the public manifested themselves in these three artists’ intermedial couplings of word, image, and performance.
Teaching Summary
Autumn Term, 2016 - HART2002 Methodologies of Art History, taught by Rose Marie San Juan
Research Activities
Co-editor of Object: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture, no.19, 2017.
Deputy editor of Object: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture, no.18, 2016.
Research interests and themes
Intermedia, Cold war, Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Technology
Publications
Articles
Kanta, A. (2016), 'Décoll/age. Bulletin Aktueller Ideen: a manual for navigating the interstitial spaces between surviving and living', in Object 18: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture, 2016.
Kanta, A. ‘The concept of Museums and Collections as a field of reference in Institutional Critique.’ Archaeology & Arts 122 (2016): 110-117.
Papers
‘Roving Spectators, Mutable Signs: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Com.Mix.: die Welt der Schrift -und Zeichensprache,’ Postgraduate Work in Progress, University College London, UK, 12 May 2017.
'Ferdinand Kriwet in Televisual Space: Mass Media, the Public as Sculpture and the Architecture of a Counter-Public Sphere', in Putting Space into Action, University of Huddersfield, UK, 30 September 2016
'From the concert hall to the kitchen: the unfamiliar sites of sound production in the art of the 1960s', in Sound Acts: Music, Performance, Identity, Athens, Greece, 6 May 2016.
'In the Belly of the Beast: The Museum as a Site for Critical Interventions', in From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum, 38th AAH Annual Conference, Milton Keynes, UK, 29-31 March 2012.