TRANSMITTED BODIES. On the Journey of Images in Shadow Play, Photography, Animation: in the Work of Hans-Peter Feldmann, W.G. Sebald and William Kentridge.

• Applicant: Dr. Angela Breidbach
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 190169589

The research project explores an inverted evidence of images: Not only images exposed to the clear light of reason are obvious and evident. On the contrary - so my thesis - image-recognition leads into the half-light of the Platonic Cave; it has to do with partial blindness, shadow and scheme. In Hans-Peter Feldmann's Shadow Play I examine the transfer of images, their translation from their material dimension to their representation as shadows and rotating Grisailles on the wall. I consult W.G. Sebald's photographs in his novels Die Ringe des Saturn and Austerlitz, concerning their scheme-like quality and the evidence of their weight as burden, another kind of materiality and resistance. William Kentridge's Refuse the Hour/Dancing with Dada and his contribution to documenta 13 The Refusal of Time/Die Ablehnung der Zeit will be analyzed following the idea that images not only emerge from, but are inherent to the modes of play and pictorial act. In the course of my research some phenomena could only slowly be named. When it was before about Transmediality between material and projection, it became clear now that shadows, while they are the omission of projection, are addressed as their negative in this study. While projections have to do with glance, color and the surface of objects, with popular culture and triviality, shadows focus on the opposite unlit side of things. Their silhouettes form an elision of image, a significant gap of projection. Transference operates in terms of a mediation between both spheres, in which both artist and image appear as physical actors. Transmediality or Transmission here connects literally to weight and the physical resistance of images.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Michael Diers