Group portrait in exile

In her project Group portrait in exile, Marina is crafting a narrative about feminist artists and activists with whom she worked in Russia in the 2010s, most of whom have been living in exile since 2022. She connects footage of the artists filmed in Moscow in 2018 with the new realities of their lives today, in which the cities and spaces around them have been transformed. Marina is also producing a video that contributes to broader understandings of the global feminist movement and its transformations, foregrounding the experiences of exile.

Words that didn't arrive: women's letters, lost connections and the Red Cross archive as a chronicle of migrant silence

Liliia's project explores letters written by Soviet women to the Red Cross after WWII, seeking lost loved ones. These epistolary traces reveal ruptures, silence and attempts to reconnect. Framed through dis:connectivity, the study links historical trauma to present-day migration and separation. Combining gender studies, post-memory, and archival affect, it recovers unheard voices and proposes new tools for memory research. Her archival work in Munich will focus on Russian and Ukrainian letters, tracing how absence becomes a form of historical presence.

Spectacles of violence: socially engaged arts and dis:connectivity in the polycrisis

This project examines how socially engaged arts respond to the global polycrisis. Considering case studies including art co-created with young people, and festivals and performances involving transnational collaboration, Bobby asks how socially engaged arts function as relational practices to foster solidarity and critical reflexivity. The goal is to identify how socially engaged arts expose and navigate tensions between globalised ideologies and local agency, policy and reality, centre and margin. Disconnection can hinder solidary and change, while offering spaces in which to reimagine power and futurity from the edges.

Sailing out of time: whalers, Inuit and dislocation in the 19th century Arctic

Karen's project examines temporal disconnection at the sites of whaling ships frozen into the Arctic in the 19th century and how the emotional meaning of this dislocation impacted these sailing communities and the world these ships supplied with energy. Temporarily or permanently stranded in the Arctic, these whalers were cut off from the time from which they came and from the marking of time to which they contributed by producing whale oil for lighting around the globe. This stranding and its time-sense was carried to the modern world at the end of the whaling season as an emotional resonance of the Arctic, which impacted the understanding of the Arctic and the consumption of its resources in the interconnected modern world.

UNESCO making cultures. Atlantic diaspora, diplomacy and design history in dispute

The project explores how international organisations have shaped value-systems and views of the built culture. It works across transatlantic migration and architectural heritage as soft power. UNESCO serves as a point of departure to reveal the practices, documents and events that have shaped an understanding of the ‘other’ cultures in the Cold War era. While unearthing the agency’s visual material and narrations related to an Atlantic Global South building culture, this project demonstrates that these narrations, rooted in colonial history, resonate still.

Back and forth like an oscillating pendulum: the story of a regional/transnational artistic lineage across Southern Africa

An artistic lineage connects Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe through some of the region's now defunct art schools. The lineage is sustained by Shepherd Ndudzo, who carries on with a woodcarving legacy passed on from his predecessors. Central to the lineage’s layered story are the reciprocal migration journeys recalling oscillating pendulums among the three countries. Artistic movement in Africa is still understudied and overshadowed by the South-North migrations of African artists to the cultural capitals of Europe and America. Barnabas is trying to make sense of the artists' journeys, employing mobility to reconstruct their fragmented biographies. His research aims to disrupt the absence of such narratives in the canon of art history.

Dis:connected ecologies - art after sustainability

This project investigates forms of dis:connective ecology in the field of art. Extractivist interventions imposed by fossil-fuel capitalism have inscribed themselves into artistic practices both as modes of action and as material politics. On a meta-level, it thus analyses regimes of distribution and institutionalisation under the sign of the ecological. Michael argues that the material demands of extractivisms are inherent to artistic practices, giving rise to ambivalences that can be conceptualised as dis:connectivity. As a comparison with ecology demonstrates, art simultaneously writes a connective history of production as well as a disjunctive history of consumption.

Resistance and interruptions in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area’s tourism activities in northern Tanzania

At gd:c, Nives is studying the nature and dynamics of dis:connectivity and globalisation processes of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) in northern Tanzania. The area has witnessed international enterprises interacting with indigenous people and diverse wildlife. They have attracted resistance and interruptions to the globalisation values of the area. The focus of the project is on the impact of resistance and interruption as factors that disrupted the historical dynamics of globalisation in the area from 1920 to 2000.

Disconnected authority: Islamic religious leadership and legitimacy on digital platforms

This project examines how Islamic religious authority is reshaped on TikTok and Instagram, where algorithmic visibility generates new forms of legitimacy beyond the traditional Ulema. Grounded in interpretive, humanities-based analysis, it explores how online preachers craft persuasive narratives, how audiences negotiate competing meanings, and how globalisation and the dynamics of digital space connect and disconnect contemporary Muslim communities.