Lecture Kristin Marek (in German)
May 6, 2010, 7 p.m.

From the outset, El Dorado, the legendary land deep in the South American interior that featured in reports by chroniclers of the seventeenth century, was a fantasy projected by the Spanish conquerors. Known to this day as a place of myth, it stands for an Old World view of the New World, where it was believed a return to a primal, paradisiacal state would be possible. The lecture focuses on El Dorado. Giessbergstraße, a much-discussed work created by Danica Dakić for documenta 12 and presented at the Wallpaper Museum in Kassel. The museum contains a unique set of scenic wallpaper referring to the myth of El Dorado. But the main characters in Dakić's video work are not from Old Europe: they are teenagers from the post-colonial Third World who are seeking asylum in Germany and for whom, conversely, the modern Old World, with its prosperity and security, represents "El Dorado". 

Kristin Marek is assistant professor at the Institute for Art History of the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum, working on the iconography and art history of the medieval and early-modern period, as well as contemporary art and visual culture. She has previously held academic positions at Kunsthochschule Kassel, the Bauhaus Universität in Weimar, and the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Kristin Marek has published on subjects including the politics of media images as reflected in art, the pictorial history of scenic wallpaper, and the relation between history pictures and their media. A particular focus of her research is the relationship between image and body, on which she has edited two works, Die neue Sichtbarkeit des Todes (ed. with T. Macho, 2007) and Bild und Körper im Mittelalter (ed. with R. Preisinger, M. Rimmele, and K. Kärcher, 2006). In 2009, she published Die Körper des Königs. Effigies, Bildpolitik und Heiligkeit. She is currently working on a study entitled Ästhetik des Leichnams. Kunst, Bildtheorie, Mediale Selbstreflexion.