The race for nuclear weapons animated the ideological battles and geopolitical relations of the Cold War. The German Democratic Republic became the third largest uranium producer in the world, supplying the Soviet Union with 220,000 tonnes of uranium: enough, reportedly, for the production of 32,000 Hiroshima bombs. But nuclear radiation also had an afterlife in East Germany’s cultural worlds, within which art, literature and Marxist philosophies orbited around the dreams and nightmares of the atomic age. This paper will explore three sites of nuclearity and artistic production in relation to their contrary cultural worlds – attempting to offer an art history attuned to cosmic time, radioactive half-lives, and the kinds of ultra-violet knowledge Walter Benjamin theorised.
Sarah James is Professor of Visual Culture at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. She’s published two monographs: ‘Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain’ (Yale University Press, 2013), and ‘Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde’ (the MIT Press, 2022). As Senior Curator at Tate Liverpool she curated the 2022 Turner Prize. She also recently co-curated the research-led exhibition ‘Anti-Social Art’ with Prof. Sara Blaylock – a group show at the Tweed Museum in Minnesota on experimental art practices in East Germany, 2022. Over the last 20 years she has produced more than 90 feature essays and reviews for the international art press, writing most regularly for Art Monthly. Her new research project explores eco-socialisms and art in an age of disaster.
Organised by Catherine Grant, Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art and Vice-Dean for Education, The Courtauld.
