Prof. Dr.
Ilka Becker
Art historian and theorist, art critic, curator
Faculty of Design
University of Applied Sciences Mainz, Germany
Ilka Becker, art historian, critic and curator, is professor of art history at the Design Department of University of Applied Sciences, Mainz, and board member of Temporary Gallery – Centre for Contemporary Art, Cologne. Before, she worked as visiting professor at the Institute of Art History and Theory of Braunschweig University of Art as well as co-applicant and personal instructor at the DFG Post-Graduate Program The Photographic Dispositif at the same institution. She has published numerous books, scientific papers, catalogue essays and reviews on modern and contemporary art and visual politics. Her research on the artistic work on/with mushrooms and mycelium began around 2010. In 2013, she co-organized a conference titled Toxic Media: Mushrooms, Poisons and Troubled Orders at Braunschweig University of Art (with Heike Klippel, Karin Leonhard, Bettina Wahrig). Currently, she is working on a book about fungi and art in 20th and 21st century. In this project, she explores fungi as agential figures of crisis and border regimes between animate and inanimate matter, oeuvre and process, network and decomposition, subject, object and collectivity.
Field of research | Area of activity
Agency theories, materiality and mediality, gender and postcolonial studies
Keywords related to mycelial space
Agential assemblages, distributed agency, mycoaesthetics, methods of attachment, ecology
Related projects and websites
Lecture Filmriss. Experimentalfilm als neuroaktives Trancemedium (Filmic blackout. Experimental film as neuroactive trance medium), annual conference of the Society of Media Studies, University of Cologne, 2019
Lecture Die Crux des Lebendigen. Organische Materialität und (post)ästhetische Objekthaftigkeit (The crux of the living thing. Organic materiality and (post)aesthetic objectness), conference The agency of aesthetic objects, Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz, 2020
Film program Magic Mushrooms, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2015; interdisciplinary conference Toxische Medien I: Pilze, Gifte und gestörte Ordnungen (Toxic Media I: Mushrooms, Poisons and Troubled Orders), University of Art Braunschweig (with Heike Klippel, Karin Leonhard, Bettina Wahrig), 2013
Selected publications
»Pilze und Dekomposition in der künstlerischen Praxis. Zur Heterogenese agentieller Ästhetiken« (»Fungi and Decomposition in artistic practice. On the heterogenesis of agential aesthetics«), in: Annika Schlitte, Markus Verne, Gregor Wedekind (Hg.): Die Handlungsmacht ästhetischer Objekte, Berlin, München 2021, 25–52
»Mediators of Trance. María Sabina – Gordon Wasson – Bruce Conner«, in: Mediality on Trial: Testing and Contesting Trance and other Media Techniques, ed. Ehler Voss, Berlin 2020, 339–369; Field of Codes, ed. with Marcel Hiller, Katrin Mayer, Markus Saile, Cologne 2018; Fotografisches Handeln (Agency in Photography), ed. with Bettina Lockemann, Astrid Köhler, Ann Kristin Krahn and Linda Sandrock, Marburg 2016
»Dead or Alive? Agency des Lebendigen und ›kritisches Vermögen‹ in Mark Dions ›Neukom Vivarium‹« (»Dead or Alive? Agency of the living thing and ›critical power‹ in Mark Dion’s ›Neukom Vivarium‹«), in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 57/1: special issue: Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (2012), eds. Thomas Hensel and Jens Schröter, 103–125