I am an art historian, theorist, educator and sporadic artist and curator. I am interested in political aesthetics and theories of ‘global art’, transnational surrealism, the spatial politics of capitalism, artistic form and geographies of extraction, as well as theories of Marxism, gender, trauma and memory. My research and teaching are oriented towards anti-racist, feminist, and emancipatory horizons.
My first book Artistic Labour of the Body (Historical Materialism book series, Brill 2026/Haymarket 2026) examines VALIE EXPORT's and Elfriede Jelinek's use of the body and psyche as artistic material to explore Adorno’s concept of artistic labour. By deploying the body as artistic material, their works challenge women’s reduction to reproductive function or sexual object, articulating a feminism beyond "innocence". I demonstrate how their art critiqued postwar Austria’s culture of disavowal, where unprocessed legacies of Nazism perpetuated Austria’s victimhood myth, while also exploring the complex identifications within this critique. The book reframes postwar artistic practices that revealed the body as both a site of patriarchal-capitalist violence and of resistance.
My post-doctoral research project, Instability of Form after the Global Turn, brings together a body of work by women artists associated or adjacent to surrealism (from Europe and the Caribbean) to consider a pre-history of ‘global art’, or art under the conditions of globalisation, in relation to art’s formal navigation of the border/boundary, and in conjunction with a spatial analysis of the combined and uneven development of capitalism. This project has been supported by a 2020 Juliane and Franz Roh Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, and is supported by a Research Grant at the DFK in Paris in 2021.
My current (second) project The Work of Art in the Age of the Planetary Mine, critiques extractive capitalism through artistic practice and critical geography. This includes the collaborative investigation How Does One Get to Own a Mountain?! with Philipp Sattler, which uses artisic research to consider lithium extraction in Austria and its planetary imbrications, informing the co-curated exhibition Besessene Berge/Possessed Mountains within the parallel programme for Steirischerherbst 2025 at Forum Stadtpark.
My academic research is recently published in the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics (2025); Camera Austria International (2025); FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur (2024); Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft (2020); Third Text (2019); Performance Research (2018); and AWARE (2017) among others. My essays and art criticism have been recently published in Berlin Review, Art Monthly, Brand-New-Life Magazine and Camera Austria.
Before joining the IZK, I lectured at the school of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds; within the Critical Studies Lecture Series at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands; at the Centre Prospéro, Langage, image et connaissance at Saint Louis University, Brussels, Belgium; the University of Art and Design and VALIE EXPORT Center for Performance and Media Art, Linz, Austria, and the School of Fine Art, University of Reading. During Spring 2019 I was Teaching Fellow in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and between 2019 and 2020 I was a lecturer in Art Theory and Art History at the University of Applied Arts (Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien) in Vienna.
Rose-Anne Gush
(c) Marija Jančić