Andrea Popelka

Andrea Popelka has been a scholarship holder in the project »Gender & Gestaltung« at the Excellence Cluster since April 2015. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Applied Cultural Studies at the Alpen Adria Universität Klagenfurt, where she also studied Media and Communication Studies. Andrea Popelka was a visiting student at the University of Hildesheim, where she studied Philosophy, Arts, Media, Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Practice.

Andrea seeks to connect art theories with practice. She has gathered experience in many independent cultural projects and in exhibition-making. Andrea is currently studying Art and Visual History and Gender Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, two programmes which serve as a trigger and point of reference for critical and practical engagement with art.

Her research project examines contemporary images of emotions, such as music videos. In some cases, these move viewers’ bodies immensely. They even seem to change their audience’s capacity for movement. How else can we explain the way a filmgoer adopts the same nonchalant gait as the protagonist as he or she leaves the cinema? Gilles Deleuze argues in »Spinoza« that a person’s physical capabilities depend on those of whom he or she meets. Can it therefore be said that images also change our physical capabilities?