We are delighted to welcome Professor Beate Fricke as our 24/25 Slade Professor of Fine Art.
The lectures will be held in-person at St John’s College, University of Oxford. The lectures are free of charge, but advance booking is required.
Gaps
In writing history, the things that we do not know rarely play a starring role. These gaps in documentation about the past – blank spots in the material record and the archival apparatus – might all too easily be taken as indexes of moments in which nothing much happened. But from another perspective they are the sea surrounding what are truly infinitesimal islands of knowledge or the connective tissue that forms the basis for historical arguments about the fragmented forms of the past. These lectures attempt to recast the gap in this way, reframing assumptions and speculation as the normative condition of history writing rather than its aberration. And it seeks to expand from historical and historiographic notions of the gap to see the chasm, separation, schism, absence, and void within the objects of the past that we study and as central to their visual and material operations.
Beate Fricke is Professor and Chair of European Medieval Art at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern. Previously, she was professor for Medieval Art at the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the history of sculpture, image theory and the objects as archives of a history of applied arts, materiality, knowledge transfer and trade in the global “Middle Ages”. Among her publications are Holy Smoke. Censers across Cultures, 2023, Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conquest and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art, 2015, and together with Finbarr Barry Flood Tales things Tell. Material Histories of Early Globalisms, 2024. She is leading the research project The Inheritance of Looting. Medieval Trophies to Modern Museums (SNF – looting.ch). She is founder and Editor-in-chief of the journal 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und Visuellen Kultur (link: 21-inquiries.eu/en).
This series features in the following public collections:
