Dorothea von Hantelmann is an art historian, writer, and freelance curator based in Berlin. After her university studies in Berlin and a job as a researcher at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1999 she became a member of the collaborative research project ‘Cultures of the Performative’ which is based at Berlin’s Freie Universität. As part of this project, von Hantelmann has worked intensively on the meaning of ‘performativity’ for visual art and, consequently, also on concepts of participation, critique, and politics. She has published multiple articles on individual artists such as Daniel Buren, James Coleman, Jeff Koons, and Pierre Huyghe and completed a PhD dissertation with the title “How to Do Things with Art: On the Meaning of Performativity for Visual Art”.
Besides her theoretical work, Dorothea von Hantelmann has curated and co-curated several projects and exhibitions, such as ‘Elective Affinities’, an interdisciplinary art/theatre project for the Vienna Festival in 1999 (together with Hortensia Völckers and others), ‘I like theatre & theatre likes me’ for the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in 2001, and ‘I promise it’s political’ for the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2002.
Function: Embodied Curating