Judith Sieber and Vika Kirchenbauer

Friday, July 18, 2025, 7 p.m.
BOOK PRESENTATIONS
As part of 200 Years of the Present
Language: English
Judith Sieber on her new book Die Erfindung des Zeitstrahls. Eine Kritik der Sichtbarmachung von Zeit und Handel im 18. Jahrhundert (The invention of the timeline. A critique of the visualization of time and trade in the 18th century)
Vika Kirchenbauer on her new book Compassion and Inconvenience

Judith Sieber, Die Erfindung des Zeitstrahls. Eine Kritik der Sichtbarmachung von Zeit und Handel im 18. Jahrhundert (The invention of the timeline. A critique of the visualization of time and trade in the 18th century)
Where does the timeline in historical representations come from? Judith Sieber takes a deep historical dive into the period of the European Enlightenment in Great Britain. Using specific examples, she works out the contexts of the then new form of representation. In addition to historical diagrams, the analysis also focuses on diagrams of trade relations, which both differ from tabular forms on the one hand and are based on cartography on the other. Their colonial origins in the British Empire show that a fundamental critique of the claimed universalism of linear time is needed.

Vika Kirchenbauer, Compassion and Inconvenience
Compassion and Inconvenience combines artist Vika Kirchenbauer’s 30-minute video work Compassion and Inconvenience (2024)—with its script reproduced alongside stills and audio descriptions—and her essay Instituting Inconvenience and Colonial Relations: The Genesis of European Contemporary Art Institutions in Mid-18th Century London (2025). Both these contributions engage with the historical context of the cultural scene in mid-18th-century London, when the first public presentation of contemporary art took place. In a setting inextricably entangled with early capitalism and British colonialism, an emergent artistic elite fundamentally influenced how, for whom, and under what conditions contemporary art entered the public sphere. As part of this genesis, moral philosophical concepts and artists’ feelings—most distinctly around compassion and inconvenience—played important parts in inserting imaginings of superiority and constellations of dominance into the core of European notions of art and taste. By deepening into the historical roots of contemporary art exhibitions, this reader examines the conditions under which what we now consider self-evident came into being.