Jan Mollenhauer

From 2017 to 2019, Jan Mollenhauer was a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Research Training Group »Configurations of Film« at Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main. During summer 2017, Jan Mollenhauer was a research assistant at the research and teaching area Cultural Theory and Cultural History and Theory of Aesthetics. 2017, he received scholarships from the Humboldt Graduate School and the Getty Research Institute.

Jan Mollenhauers dissertation Spektrale Differenzen im Zwischenraum der Bilder. 8 Fotos und ihre multidirektionalen Bildergeschichten utilizes concepts of »multidirectional memory« in conjunction with a kulturwissenschaftliche reclamation of psychoanalytically informed montages, in order to create a constellation of images of racist violence and the shoah with the eight photographs taken by the African-American soldier photographer William A. Scott, III 1945 in and around the Buchenwald concentration camp. On the one hand, Jan Mollenhauer is concerned with the peculiar (a)visuality of entanglements and relationalities of the eight images with racist history of violence and the Shoah, and on the other with an aesthetic space of possibility of relationalities of racist, African-American history of violence and the Shoah on the basis of such image montages. The invisible, even a visuality without the visible, comes into view. At the same time, the montages emerge in their fabrication, their principle of construction, like the actual sequence of images, is put up for discussion aswell. Connecting the pictures and their montages are operations that can be seen either on or in the pictures. These operations structure the individual chapters, with two of the eight photos at the center of each. The following ideas guide him in the montages: the operationality of the images, more precisely the idea of sending following Jacques Derrida, the »meta-concept« of spectrality, and finally, the concept of avisuality, following on from Akira Mizuta Lippit’s considerations.

 

Publications

»Adorno Noir. Los Angeles und der deutsche Wiederaufbau«, in: ilinx 5: Brachen, upcoming.

»Femmenininisieren«, in: nachdemfilm 17 (2019), online.

»Drehen, Wenden, Senden«, in: Lars Nowak (Ed.): Bild und Negativität, Würzburg 2019, 295–310.

»Was wäre Ethnografie?«, in: Jonas Etten/Julian Jochmaring (Eds.): Nach der ikonischen Wende. Aktualität und Geschichte eines Paradigmas, Berlin 2021, 222–234.

»Liebe stören. Skip Normans Echologik«, in: Philipp Ekardt/Frank Fehrenbach/Cornelia Zumbusch (Eds.): Politische Emotionen in den Künsten, Berlin 2021, 143–161.

»Geben und Nehmen«, in: Beate Absalon/Nina Franz/Andreas Gehrlach et al. (Eds.), Empfangen. Die andere Seite der Gabe, Berlin 2023, 183–186.