Dr. Hanna Barbara Hölling

Profile

Dr. Hanna Barbara Hölling Forschungprofessorin

  • Address Berner Fachhochschule
    Bern Academy of the Arts
    Forschung
    Fellerstrasse 11
    3027 Bern

Activities

Teaching

  • Y Module | Bern University of the Arts

  • Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA) Harvard Art Museum | Havard University

  • MA & BA History of Art, Materials and Technology, University College London, 2016-2022

  • MA & PhD Cultures of Conservation, Bard Graduate Center New York, 2013-15

  • Theory, philosophy and history of conservation

  • Museums, collections and archives

  • Subjects in art history and theory and in American and European Art created since the 1960s

  • Media and technologies of the moving image

  • Subjects in critical heritage studies and museology

  • Critical conservation, transversal practices and experimental preservation

Research

  • Art, culture and materiality since the 1960s

  • Conservation, care and practices of preservation

  • Critical conservation and conservation theory

  • Museums, collections, and cultures of collecting

  • Institutionalisation and infrastructures of art and culture

  • Performance, performativity, and live practices

  • Time-based, media, and electronic art

  • Film, video, installation, and expanded media

  • Material culture, objects, and their changing lives

  • Heritage, memory, and processes of transmission

  • Naturecultures, landscape, and environmental humanities

  • Environmental politics and practices of care

  • Decolonial and transcultural approaches to conservation and heritage

  • Trans- and interdisciplinary methodologies

  • Art, materiality, and cultural practices since the 1960s, with particular attention to performance, film, video, installation, and time-based media
    • Conservation as a critical, epistemic, and transformative practice shaping objects, knowledge, institutions, and communities
    • Material culture approaches that move beyond ocularcentric understandings of art and cultural heritage
    • Museums, collections, and the institutional frameworks through which art and culture are preserved, transmitted, and valued
    • Care, naturecultures, and environmental humanities, addressing contemporary ecological and cultural challenges

CV

  • Hanna B. Hölling is Research Professor and Principal Investigator at HKB Bern University of the Arts, where she leads research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research and teaching span art history and theory, material culture studies, museology and conservation, with a particular focus on art since the 1960s, time-based and performative practices, and the changing material and ecological conditions of cultural objects and heritage.

    A central strand of her work reconceptualizes conservation as a critical and epistemic practice concerned not only with the preservation of objects, but with questions of time, change, identity, materiality and care. More recently, her research has expanded towards naturecultures and the environmental humanities, investigating conservation in relation to interconnected cultural and ecological challenges.

    Hölling is also Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum/ETH Zürich and Honorary Fellow in the Department of History of Art at University College London (UCL). Previously, she was Associate Professor of History of Art, Materials, and Technology at UCL, Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor at Bard Graduate Center in New York, and Head of Conservation at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. She received her PhD in Art History and Cultural Studies from the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

    Her books include Paik’s Virtual Archive: Time, Change, and Materiality in Media Art (University of California Press, 2017) and Revisions—Zen for Film (Bard Graduate Center, 2015). She has also co-edited and edited numerous volumes, including Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation (Routledge, 2026), Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (Routledge, Vol. 1 2023 / Vol.2 2025), Object—Event—Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s (Bard Graduate Center, 2022), Landscape (Vexer, 2020), and The Explicit Material: Inquiries on the Intersection of Curatorial and Conservation Cultures (Brill, 2019).

Projects

  • 2025-26 Collegium Helveticum | ETH Zurich: Caring for Naturecultures

  • 2024 BFH Bern University of Applied Sciences, Network Grant, Caring Society

  • 2019-23 Global Engagement Fund, University College London

  • 2019-2020 Terra Foundation for American Art Fellowship, Smithsonian American Art Museum

  • 2016-2017 Getty Conservation Scholarship | Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

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

Publications

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2026). KEYNOTE: After Permanence: Critical Conservation, Performance, and the Expanded Field of Clay. Permanence/Impermanence: Collecting and archiving contemporary clay practices. V&A & The University of Westminster, London.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2026). Opening lecture: After Permanence: Museums, Critical Ethics and the Work of Care. Immaterial Resistance: Preserving the Living, Tensing the Museal. Organized within the research project Performance and Curating: Performative Transformations of Curating, Collecting and Spectatorship from a comparative Perspective: Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Argentina, 2003–2028, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Teneriffa Espacio de los Artes Tea, October 8.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2026). "Beyond Permanence: Process, Decay, and Museum Futures." Invited lecture, Le Musée palliatif – accueil de la dégradation en contexte de conservation | The Palliative Museum : Welcoming Degradation in a Conservation Context. Concordia University/ University Art Association of Canada, Montreal, October 15.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2026). Critical Conservation. Invited lecture, New Humanities for the 21st Century, with Rosi Braidotti, Swiss Association for Historical Sciences, infoclio, November 20.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2026). La conservation après l’événement: activation, créativité, et soin des œuvres. Invited lecture, UQO | Université du Québec en Outaouais, October 16.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2026). Hand in Hand: Zur Co-Autorschaft der Konservierung im langen Jetzt. Invited lecture, Author:innenschaft Symposium – Farewell to Thomas Gartmann, HKB Bern, September 25.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2026). Conservation after Permanence: Decay, Critical Ethics and the Future of Heritage. Invited lecture, Decay Without Mourning: Future-Thinking Heritage Practices. Institute of Advanced Studies, Stellenbosch, South Africa.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2025). Caring for Natureculture. Invited lecture, Cultivating Sustainable Collections: Regenerative and Community-driven Care Practices. Invited lecture, Agnes Center and Queens University, Kingstone, Canada.

  • Ingold, Tim and Hanna B. Hölling (2026). Activity and Activation: Tim Ingold in Conversation with Hanna B. Hölling. Activations: A Fluxus Symposium. Bern Academy of the Arts HKB and online, February 27.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2026). Flux, Fluxus, Fluxism: Conservation after Permanence: Activity and Activation. Activations: A Fluxus Symposium. Bern Academy of the Arts.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2025). Reassembling Conservation. Invited lecture at IIC/ICOM-CC Routes to Resilience International Conference, December 5, 2025.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2025). Event, Object, Archive: Critical Approaches to the Conservation of Performance-based Works, invited lecture in “Now Recording: Performance—A Symposium by the Skulptur Projekte Archives,” LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur Münster, Germany, December 4-5, 2025.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2025). Critical Issues in the Conservation of the Moving Image. Invited seminar, MAXXI Museum of Contemporary Art Rome, November 18-19, 2025.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2024). “Once Upon a Time." Storytelling as Experience in Florence Jung’s Performative Conceptualism. Art as Experience. Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA).

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2023). KEYNOTE: Can Performance Be Conserved? An Introduction to a Contested Field. VII Congresso ANDA, 2023.

  • Hölling, Hanna B., and Emilie Magnin. (2023). Writing Performance: On Preservation through Documentation in Performance-Based Works. Invited seminar, Center for Heritage Management and Documentation in Museums, University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2023). What Does It Mean to Conserve Performance? Two-day workshop, Musealização da Arte: Poéticas em Narrativas.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (2023). Curating and Conserving Changeability [Invited lecture]. Federal University of Brasília Lecture Series, Brasília, Brazil.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (24 May 2022). KEYNOTE: The Afterlives of Performance. With response by Jules Pelta Feldman, followed by a panel discussion with Mariama Diagne, Shelley Lasica and Felipe Ribeiro. New School, Something Great, Berlin.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (12 June 2022). Transformations and Mediations in Fluxfilm Nr.1 and Fluxus Events. Invited lecture at the symposium of the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (10 June 2022). Introduction to Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge. In Four Perspectives, a panel organized by Hanna Hölling, Jules Pelta Feldman, Emilie Magnin and Valerian Valy within Revolving Documents #1: Narrations of the Beginnings of Performance Art, BANG BANG translocal hi:stories of performance art. Museum Tinguely Basel, Switzerland.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (18 November 2022). Can We Talk Post-Preservation? A letter to Nam June Paik. Invited lecture at the National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Seul, South Korea.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (31 March 2021). The Contingencies of Care: On the Conservation of Video and Media Installations. Invited lecture, international symposium Video Festival Locarno 1980-2001, Lausanne University.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (30 April 2021). Response paper to Salvador Muñoz-Viñas: “The Role of Science in the Conservation World: A Naïve Exploration" delivered on the occasion of Brill-Nuncius Seminar, The Making of Conservation Science at Utrecht University.

  • Schneider, Rebecca, and Hanna B. Hölling (30 May 2021). KEYNOTE: Not, Yet: When Our Art is in our Hands. With Antiphonal Interludes by Hanna Hölling. International colloquium Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Care. Bern University of the Arts, Bern.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (10 June 2021). Performance: Vom Weiterleben Flüchtiger Kunst. Invited lecture delivered on the occasion of the Still Alive lecture series. Albertinum Dresden, Germany.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (12 November 2021). Beyond Conservation: Object, Event, Performance in Franz Erhard Walther's Werkstücke. Invited lecture delivered on the occasion of the international symposium Rethinking German Minimalism. Dia Art Foundation, New York City.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. Judit Bodor, Andree Sitt, ]performance s p a c e[ (18 November 2021). Curating as Expanded Conservation. Invited lecture and session co-chair delivered on the occasion of Living Archives: A Scottish Research Council Project. Dundee: University of Dundee, Scotland.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (29 November 2021). Post-Preservation: Paik's Virtual Archive, Potentially. Invited lecture delivered on the occasion of the international symposium The Gift of Nam June Paik at the Nam June Paik Arts Center, Giheung-gu, Yongin, South Korea.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (15 February 2020). Feedback and Feedforth: New Approaches to Nam June Paik – a response paper and discussion within a session organized by Gregory Zinman on the occasion of College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (21 February 2020). Presentation on media conservation, workshop Conservation and Philosophy organized by Tate Modern and Institute of Philosophy, University of London. University of London Institute in Paris.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (26 September 2020). Critical Grounds: Institute for Land and Environmental Art- Introduction to an international conference Critical Grounds: Art and Politics of Landscape. Tenna, Grisons, Switzerland.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (1 October 2020). Ceci n’est pas une Paik: Materiality and Knowledge in the Conservation of Media Art. Invited lecture delivered on the occasion of Paik Soiree, Free University of Amsterdam and Stedelijk Museum (online). Amsterdam.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (1 October 2020). What is Landscape? An introductory lecture, Alps Art Academy International Summer School and Symposium. Tenna, Grisons, Switzerland.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (12 December 2019). Unpacking the Score: Fluxus and the Material Legacy of Intermediality. Invited lecture delivered within the Smithsonian American Art Museum Seminar Series. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (14 March 2019). Über die Begriffe der Zeit, Materialität, und Authentizität in Paiks Medienkunst. Invited lecture, Internationale Tagung zu Fragen und Aspekten der Bewahrung und Restaurierung von Medienkunst. Museum of Communication Franfurt, Germany.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (23 April 2019). KEYNOTE: Time and Memory in Fluxus Films, delivered on the occassion of the 5º Seminário de Artes Digitais (SAD) | 5th Seminar for Digital Arts, State University of Minas Gerais/Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (15 April 2019). On Performance, Archive and Conservation. Invited lecture, think tank on performance, media and archives, VALIE EXPORT Center, Linz, Austria.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (10 May 2019). Unity and Diversity: Discipline Formation & Cultures of Expertise - Session chair and concluding remarks, The Making of Art Experience: Discipline Formation & Cultures of Expertise - Artechne international conference. Organized by University of Amsterdam, NICAS and Rijksmuseum and the University of Utrecht.

  • Hölling, Hanna B., and Saisha Greyson (22 November 2019). Nam June Paik Global Grove. Art Bites Gallery Talk. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (7 November 2018). Die Digitalisierung und Konservierung von Kunst und Kulturgut, seminar delivered in collaboration with Thomas Gartmann, Bern University of the Applied Sciences.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (1 November 2018). Object, Event, Performance: Rethinking Materiality in Fluxus Intermedia. Invited lecture, symposium Kunst und Material: Repräsentation, Stofflichkeit, Prozesse | Art and Material: Representation, Materiality, Processes. SIK-ISEA | Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft | Swiss Institute for Art Research Zürich.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (October 2018). Perpetuating Change, Invited master class on media art and performance, Instituto Moreira Sales, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (June 2018), invited seminar on replication delivered on the occasion of Doctoral Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

  • Hölling, Hanna B. (April 2018). The Medium of Time and Transition, invited master class for MA and PhD students in Technical Art History, Utrecht University.

Memberships

  • Steering Committee • Institute Materiality in Art and Culture

  • College Art Association • CAA

  • Swiss Association of Art Historians • Vereinigung der Kunsthistorikerinnen und Kunsthistoriker in der Schweiz • VKKS

  • International Council of Museums Conservation Committee • ICOM CC

  • Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art • INCCA

Awards

Supervised theses

Language skills and intercultural knowledge

  • English - Native or bilingual proficiency
  • German - Native or bilingual proficiency
  • Italian - Professional working proficiency
  • Polish - Native or bilingual proficiency
  • Russian - Elementary proficiency
  • Brazil
  • United Kingdom
  • United States of America
  • Netherlands
  • Poland