The ongoing violence of colonialism has been characterized as a “lethal abstraction” (Denise Ferreira da Silva). Indeed, capitalism has always fed on more or less violent abstractions from existing forms of life through disruptions, expulsions and extractions. The skylines of the world’s financial districts, those monuments to the flows of deterritorialized capital, are built on enslavement, genocide and ecocide—from Potosí to the Atacama, from Congo to Palestine. Yet the association of abstraction with the violence of extractivism and the forced clearing of land raises fundamental questions. What are the alternatives to identifying indigenous and precapitalist societies with pure concretion, and turning abstraction as such into a mere handmaiden of imperialism? Discussing a number of artistic, theoretical and activist practices, this lecture seeks to sound out alter-abstractions: ways of abstracting otherwise.

Sven Lütticken is an art historian. He teaches at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he coordinated the Research Master’s track Critical Studies in Art and Culture, and at Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, where he supervises practice-based PhDs in the PhDArts programme. He is the author of History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image (2013), Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (2017), Objections: Forms of Abstraction, Vol. 1 (2022), and States of Divergence (2025). He is currently working on the second volume of Forms of Abstraction.

Participation via Zoom link

Part of the International Lecture Series 

Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary

From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.

Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series “Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary” is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.

Further Program

December 16, 2025
Kim Albrecht (Information Design, Folkwang University Essen): “Data Visualization as Abstract Realism”

January 13, 2026
Birgit Schneider (Media Studies, University of Potsdam): “Making Climate Data Graspable through Visualization and Sonification in Art and Science”

January 20, 2026
Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths London): “A Practice of Abstraction: Race in the Field of Vision”

January 27, 2026:
Crystal Z. Campbell (Art, University of Buffalo): “Abstraction, Pareidolia, and the Underloved”

For any updates see https://www.medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de/lehrveranstaltungen/abstraction-today-1 

Organized by Svea Braeunert (Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam & University of Bonn), Birgit Mersmann (Art History, University of Bonn), Jens Schröter (Media Studies, University of Bonn).

With the support of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM), the Gielen-Leyendecker-Foundation, and Studium Universale at University of Bonn.