Through the Speaker Series, CCS Bard brings distinguished artists, scholars, and curators to campus to present on their work. Speaker Series talks are held within Classroom 102 at CCS Bard, unless otherwise noted. All talks are free and open to the public.
Tom Holert works as an art historian, writer, curator, and artist in Berlin. In 2015 he co-founded (with Doreen Mende, Volker Pantenburg and others) the Harun Farocki Institut (HaFI) in Berlin. From 1992 to 1999, after (and coinciding with) his academic studies (M.A. at Hamburg University in 1987, Ph.D. at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt in 1995), Holert was an editor of Texte zur Kunst and a publisher of Spex magazine in Cologne; since 1999 he taught and conducted research at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, at ZHdK in Zurich, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at FU Berlin, among others; in 2000 he co-founded the Institute of Visual Culture Studies (isvc) with Mark Terkessidis with whom he co-authored books on the militarization of the public sphere as well as on the impact of migration and tourism on urbanity and geopolitics. In 2012 he was a founding member of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne. Currently, Holert’s work focuses on the dialectics of interwar avantgarde art and thinking, the physical spaces of learning in a global cold war context (c. 1957-1977), and the knowledge politics of contemporary art. Recent publications include: Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (co-ed. with Maria Hlavajova, 2017); Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts (with Johanna Schaffer et al., 2014); and Übergriffe. Zustände und Zuständigkeiten der Gegenwartskunst (2014). In 2018, he co-curated (with Anselm Franke) Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 at House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin. Education Shock, an exhibition curated by Holert at HKW on learning and research environments of the global 1960s and 1970s, is scheduled for 2020/21.