PUBLIC LECTURE: Subversive Visions: Women Photographers in the GDR

PUBLIC LECTURE: Subversive Visions: Women Photographers in the GDR
Saturday 22nd Feb 2025 at 5pm
Tickets £10. Click here to purchase.

The state of the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990) used many means, overt and subtle, to control visual imagery and art practice. Some things, lives and situations were to remain unseen while, in public at least, positive images of ‘real existing socialism’ were ubiquitous. In this lecture, Dr Deborah Lewer, art historian at the University of Glasgow and a specialist in 20th-century German art, will explore what happened when a few remarkable women took up their cameras and, over decades, documented both private lives and public spectacles, the ordinary, the absurd, and the intimate experiences of life in the GDR in ways often subversive, endlessly creative and uniquely revealing.

Dr Deborah Lewer is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow. She is a specialist in 20th-century German art, focusing on the relationship between art and politics. She also works extensively at the intersection of art and theology. She is a Senior Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Visiting Scholar at Sarum College, and an editorial board member of the leading journal for her discipline, Art History and of Art + Christianity.

She is a published translator of texts from the German. Established as a historian of the radical avantgarde, especially the Dada movement, and the art of the Weimar Republic, she also works extensively outside academia. In churches and theological colleges, at clergy conferences, retreats and festivals, Debbie helps people to explore and broaden their experience of all kinds of visual art.

She is committed to new and innovative ways of doing art history, such as research by practice, making and performance and to promoting access to art for all. She is currently working with sonic and movement improvisors on a funded project, Dada Dynamics, to bring the radical Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire (1916) to new life, on stage, in the city of Dundee. 

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