The Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin) is one of the world's leading art universities with a long tradition. It is an important partner in Berlin’s network of culture, art and science and artistic activities in Berlin. More than 200 professors, around 250 employees in the arts and sciences, and around 300 employees in administration, libraries, service and technology work at the UdK Berlin. More than 4,000 students (30 % of them international) are enrolled in over 70 degree programmes at the four colleges of Fine Arts/Architecture, Media and Design/Music, and Performing Arts, as well as at the Central Institute for Further Education (ZIW), the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) and the Jazz Institute Berlin (JIB). The UdK Berlin offers teacher education programmes in the subjects of Fine Arts, Music and Theatre/Performing Arts. The UdK Berlin is one of the few art colleges in Germany with the right to confer doctorates and post-doctoral qualifications.
Through the diverse activities of its members, the institution contributes to a culture of exchange with Berlin’s civil society and the global audience that is both artistically and academically guided. Its institutional understanding of a relevant practice within the arts and sciences draws upon a dialogue with the social, political, technological and artistic challenges of the 21st century.
The UdK Berlin, as part of the NOMIS Foundation-funded research project "Site Complexes. Models of Responsive Practices for the 21th Century/Ortskomplexe. Modelle responsiven Handelns für das 21. Jahrhundert", based at the Institute for Art History, Art Theory and Aesthetics (College of Fine Arts) and at the Institute for History and Theory of Design (College of Architecture, Media and Design), is seeking to appoint a:
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE (m/f/d)
– Salary group 13 TV-L Berliner Hochschulen –
Full-time, fixed-term employment ending 31 May 2026
Position available from: 1 June 2024
Reference number: 2/1992/24
The project, conducted in collaboration with the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna, where a further vacancy for a post-doctoral position is open, focuses on works of art and architectural designs and how their analysis in relation to specific sites gives rise to visions for the future. The phenomena under discussion draw the consequences of the changed understanding of the relationship between space, nature, technology, economy and society, which crystallized in the late 20th century and plays a decisive role in current debates on globalisation and the climate crisis. The focus is therefore on positions in art and architecture that depart programmatically from modernist utopian thinking and instead develop site-specific work methods, which we see as models of responsive practices. The project deals with approaches that use the natural, technical, economic and social conditions and limitations of artistic and architectural processes as resources for positive transformation, instead of aiming to overcome them with technical solutions or rethink them entirely; approaches that take what already exists into account instead of removing it or abandoning it for a new set-up. These practices are based on the understanding that their respective sites are a complex of locally effective, but often globally far-reaching and variously interdependent (cultural, social, economic, ecological) factors.
The research project will examine the development of site-specific practices in art and architecture since the 1970s in case studies, the emphasis being placed on artistic and architectural methods and techniques in order to identify models of responsive practice with specific (social, political, ecological) impact. A particular focus will be placed on the differences and interferences between the two classic spatial arts, consistently function-oriented architecture and the often emphatically experimental visual arts. The focus of the Berlin sub-project will be on architecture, that of the Vienna sub-project on the visual arts.