From 3 July to 5 September 2025, the Centre for Advanced Study presents the exhibition “case study #2: Re:Set: From Slide to Database – Media Change in Art History” – an exhibition by students of the Institute of Art History. It takes media change in art history as its starting point to illuminate the historical, aesthetic, and epistemological dimensions of art-historical image practices. Among other things, poster presentations and an installation by artist Dr. Philipp Goldbach featuring historical glass slides are on display.
Opening hours: Monday–Friday 9 am to 7 pm (during lecture period until 18 July 2025) and 10 am to 6 pm (during lecture-free period from 21 July 2025).
Venue: Library Foyer Philosophikum, University of Münster, Domplatz 23, 48143 Münster

From 3 to 5 September 2025, the Centre for Advanced Study will hold a workshop entitled “Digital Restitution: Bridging Access, Conservation, and Ethical Challenges.” The workshop will engage in rethinking restitution in the digital age—where heritage, ethics, technology, and sustainability converge to shape the future of cultural preservation. It will bring together scholars, museum professionals, heritage practitioners, and digital technologists to participate in this interdisciplinary discourse on digital heritage preservation and the ethical dimensions of cultural digitization in the field of restitution policies.

Since January 2025, the German Documentation Center for Art History – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (DDK) has been offering free access to 1.2 million photographs from its collection in the “Bildindex Kunst & Architektur” (Art & Architecture Image Index). Prof. Dr. Hubert Locher, Director of the DDK and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study, emphasizes: “With the implementation of this groundbreaking recommendation, the DDK is positioning itself as a pioneer for open scientific practice.” The picture archive is thus following the global OpenGLAM initiative (GLAM = Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), an initiative in Hessen, and the opportunities offered by a reform of German legal protection of works in 2021. When using the images, the image archive relies on personal responsibility in accordance with fair use rules, which include, for example, naming the author and source and treating culturally sensitive content with care.

Prof. Dr. Ossi Naukkarinen will become the new vice rector for research at the University of the Arts (Uniarts) Helsinki (Finland) on 1 September 2025. He was vice rector for research in 2018–2023 and the vice dean for the School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2012–2018, both at Aalto University Helsinki. In his own research, Ossi Naukkarinen specializes in questions of everyday aesthetics, environmental aesthetics and the nature of aesthetics as an academic discipline. He has also written about visual arts, artification and aesthetic footprints. Currently, he is interested in the possibilities offered by digital humanities.

A week of researching and teaching, learning and living in (the middle of) the museum: from 21 to 26 July 2025, the Institute of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology organizes a one-week practical course on current topics and tasks of museums together with the LWL Open-Air Museum Detmold (“Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Alltagskultur”). Participants will gain in-depth insights into the museum as a field of practice, as a place of research, as a collection and educational institution and much more. The Summer School is headed by Prof. Dr Lioba Keller-Drescher, In-house Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study. Guest curator is Dr. Birgit Johler, Senior Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study.

On 14 July 2025, Dr. Christopher Nixon (Hamburg) gave his Fellow Lecture on the topic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Bild und Soziale Gerechtigkeit in digitalisierten Konsumgesellschaften” (“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Image and social justice in digitalized consumer societies”): In his lecture, he discussed the relationship between social movements and audiovisual images, which shaped the Black civil rights movement in the US with its protest images and image protests. However, their struggle for social justice was not reflected in contemporary theory, as demonstrated by Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills’ critique of John Rawls’ theory of justice, which was outlined in the lecture. Nixon also explored the question of whether digital capitalism today promotes deficient forms of society that make the success of social transformation movements impossible.

On 7 July 2025, Dr. Susanne Thurow (Sydney) gave her Fellow Lecture on the topic “Reimagining Access: Immersive Media for Transforming Cultural Engagement”. The lecture explored the impact of digitalisation on the frameworks of engagement, representation and epistemology within cultural institutions using the example of the experimental installation Victorian Reality. The installation combined interactive 3D visualisation and spatial sound with the physical representation of historical objects and was the centrepiece of a research project by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and the iCinema Centre at the University of New South Wales on new, multi-sensory forms of storytelling in cultural institutions.

On 2 July 2025, the workshop “Droste Digital – A New Approach to Literature?” (for members and fellows only) of the Centre for Advanced Study took place at Burg Vischering (in German). The workshop was a joint project with Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature. The exhibition “Droste Digital. Manuscripts – Spaces – Installations” („Droste Digital. Handschriften – Räume – Installationen“) makes the digitized manuscripts of the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff accessible for the first time. Using the example of “Droste Digital”, the workshop focused on the specifics and consequences of digital access to literature in the context of exhibitions.

What does it mean when a piece of history is missing and cultural identity has been stolen? The film series “Access and Return: Restitution in films” investigated the struggle for cultural self-determination, dealing with continuing colonial power relations and the question of what restitution means and can mean today, focusing on “Restitution as an Act of Recognition” (17 June 2025), “Counter Voices and Rhythms of Resistance” (24 June 2025) and “Reparative Practices of Remembrance” (1 July 2025). It aimed to look at where objects are absent – and thus understand restitution not only as a gesture of reparation, but also as a social challenge. The film series was a cooperation with the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur).

Leonie Spielbrink has been a new junior fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study since 1 July 2025. She studied philosophyas well as cultural and social anthropology in Münster and has been working as a student assistant at the Centre since March 2024. In her dissertation project, provisionally titled “Cultural Practices and the Constitution of Cultural Goods”, she examines the connection between previously established social patterns of action, attribution and reference practices, and the ontology and sematization of cultural goods.

On 30 June 2025, Prof. Dr. Ludger Jansen (Brixen) gave his Fellow Lecture on the topic “Making access FAIR: What are reference ontologies and what can they do?” (in German). Based on the observation that working with digital data often leads to a Babylonian confusion of languages due to different file formats and differently coded descriptions, the lecture examined reference ontologies as a way of giving data a semantics and making access to data reliably FAIR – i.e. Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-Usable.

From 26 May to 22 June 2025 the exhibition “case study #1: Access to Curatorial Networks – Postcards from Kasper König” was presented by the Centre for Advanced Study. The exhibition was designed by students of the colloquium course taught by Ursula Frohne and Berit Hummel. It featured collaged cards that Kasper König (1943–2024), co-founder and long-time artistic director of Skulptur Projekte Münster and director of the Museum Ludwig, sent to artists, colleagues and companions. The personal messages are a unique testimony to his curatorial practice.

On 16 June 2025, the Centre for Advanced Study welcomed Dr. Susanne Thurow as new Senior Fellow. She is a theatre scholar with a focus on immersive media, interactive visualisation and the artistic examination of social challenges of the 21st century. She currently heads the “Climate Aesthetics” research programme at the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at University of New South Wales, Sydney (Australia), whose strategic development she also coordinates as Associate Director Research.
 

On 16 June 2025, Prof. Dr. Henry Keazor (Heidelberg) gave his Fellow Lecture on the topic “Gästebücher digital – Ein bislang vernachlässigtes Kulturgut?” (“Digital guest books – A cultural good that has been neglected until now?”): Guest books are a genre that so far has been left virtually unstudied. What can be gained by analysing them can be illustrated by the example of a planned project that aims to deal with the guest books of the brothers Nicola (1886-1967) and Franz Moufang (1893-1984). Over the decades, a large number of prominent representatives of art, culture and politics signed the guest books, often leaving behind previously unknown works of art. The project sees digital cataloguing in particular as an integral part of the editing process, as it is the only way to enable comprehensive analysis and exploration of the guest books.