The lectures will examine entanglements of the decorative and of the notion of décor in contemporary
art within the context of early twentieth-century contemporary art installations from the 1960s and
the work of Marcel Broodthaers. A special focus relates to questions and notions of display and
of the exhibition, and — against the backdrop of recent discussions and examples from media
arts theory — in the context of bio art. Both cases will be examined as examples of appropriation
but also as resistance to the idea of “nature as decor”. Emphasis will be placed on artists’ texts
and their own claims in describing their work as well as on aspects of labour implicated in their
practices and the ways in which these two approaches may be seen to come together in one or
not. We will discuss décor as rhetoric, visual strategy, and also as a display and exhibition strategy.
Course policy: Attendance at all of the lectures is compulsory, unless you have a good reason for
your absence. The written assignment is to hand in a 1200-word essay in English at the end of the
semester on a given topic that has been addressed during the workshop.
Asimina Kaniari received her doctorate from the Department of Art History, University of Oxford, under
Martin Kemp. Her thesis looked at the location of the ornamental in nineteenth-century decorative
aesthetics and science. She was an academic visitor at the same Oxford department from 2006
to 2010 and a Scaliger Fellow at the University of Leiden in September 2009. Asimina Kaniari is
currently an assistant professor of art history at the Department of Art Theory and History, Athens
School of Fine Arts. From September to December 2017 she was on sabbatical leave to conduct
research at Princeton University as an associate research scholar (Seeger Fellow). She is the coeditor
of the Festschrift for Martin Kemp Acts of Seeing. Artists, Scientists and the History of the
Visual. A Volume Dedicated to Martin Kemp (London, 2009) and has recently edited a collection
of essays on bio art with contributions, amongst others, by Martin Kemp, Robert Zwijnenberg, and
Ellen K. Levy, Institutional Critique to Hospitality: Bio Art Practice Now (Athens, 2017).
Since the summer semester of 2017, the Athens School of Fine Arts is a cooperation partner of the
Department of Media Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna whereby the two institutions
exchange teaching personnel (ERASMUS+). The aim of this programme is to broaden study
courses by integrating academics from the partner university and thus supporting exchange of
knowledge among institutions. In April 2018 Asimina Kaniari will be the first lecturer to come to
Vienna under this programme.