Dr. Hanna Barbara Hölling

Project Lead • Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge • Swiss National Science Foundation • 2020-24

Project Lead • Activating Fluxus • Swiss National Science Foundation • 2022-26

Y Module, Bern University of the Arts

PhD History of Art, University College London; external PhD examination at Universities abroad

MA History of Art, University College London

BA History of Art, University College London

BA History of Art, Materials and Technology, University College London

Conservation theory, philosophy, and history; experimental and critical preservation; art and materiality since the 1960s, media and technologies of the moving image; land art and environmental art; subjects in museology, critical heritage studies, curatorial studies

Art since the 1960s with particular interests in Fluxus; media and electronic art, film and video art, performance, installation; conservation ethics, aesthetics and philosophy; philosophical aesthetics; landscape and environmental politics

Hanna works on the intersection of art history and theory, material culture studies, and conservation. Her primary research and teaching interests lie, among others, in ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy in and of conservation, contemporary and post-war art, technology-based media, and the concepts of time, change, identity, and archive (as discourse and physical space) both in artworks and in objects of material culture. In conservation, she focuses on the epistemic dimensions of conservation, that is, knowledge derived from, and generated by, diverse practices, theories, and cultures of conservation. Most important outcomes of her research on these topics were published in her sole-authored monographs: Paik’s Virtual Archive: On Time, Change and Materiality in Media Art (University of California Press, 2017) and Revisions-Zen for Film (Bard Graduate Center, 2015). Revisions accompanied an eponymous exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York (17 September 2015–22 February 2016). In addition, her research has led to a publication of edited volumes: Object—Event—Performance: Art, Materiality and Continuity since the 1960s (Bard Cultural Histories of the Material World series, 2021) and The Explicit Material: Inquiries on the Intersection of Curatorial and Conservation Cultures (co-edited with Francesca Bewer and Katharina Ammann; Brill 2019). Hanna’s most recent research concerns the afterlives of Fluxus events, objects and ephemera and the ontology and aesthetics of performance. She is also interested in the critical questions considering the materiality of landscape and land and environmental art, including their ecological and political implications. Aspects of this research materialized in an anthology Landscape 1: Institute for Land and Environmental Art (Vexer 2020) co-edited with Johannes M. Hedinger.

2019-2020 Terra Foundation for American Art Fellowship, Smithsonian American Art Museum: Fluxus and the Material Legacy of Intermediality

2019-21 Global Engagement Fund, University College London

2019 Dean’s Strategic Fund Small Grant for Education and Research Activities, University College London

2016-2017 Getty Conservation Scholarship, Getty Conservation Center / Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

2013-2015 Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professorship, Cultures of Conservation, Bard Graduate Center, New York

2010-2011 The Courtauld Institute of Art, London: The Material Life of Things Research Forum Fellowship

2009-2013 Dutch Scientific Research Foundation NWO PhD Research Fellowship, University of Amsterdam

College Art Association CAA

Vereinigung der Kunsthistorikerinnen und Kunsthistoriker in der Schweiz

International Council of Museums Conservation Committee ICOM CC

Institute of Conservation ICON