Rose-Anne Gush is an art historian, theorist and educator. Her research interests include theories of ‘global art’, the spatial politics of capitalism and form, and the relationships between colonialism, fascism and capitalism. Her research and teaching are oriented towards anti-racist, feminist, and emancipatory horizons.
Gush's first book length project (in progress), Artistic Labour of the Body builds on her PhD, exploring the place, use of, and meaning of the body in postwar art and literature in relation to Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics. Her current (post-doctoral) research project, Instability of Form after the Global Turn, brings together a body of work by women artists associated or adjacent to surrealism (from Europe and the Caribbean) to consider a pre-history of ‘global art’, or art under the conditions of globalisation, both in relation to art’s formal navigation of the border, frontier and boundary, and in conjunction with a spatial analysis of the combined and uneven development of capitalism. This project has been supported by a 2020 Juliane and Franz Roh Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, and is supported by a Research Grant at the DFK in Paris in 2021. Her research is published in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft (2020); Third Text (2019); Performance Research (2018); Objects of Feminism (Helsinki, 2017), and AWARE (2017). Her essays and art criticism have been published in Radical Philosophy; Art Monthly; Mute Magazine; Flash Art and art-agenda among others. Gush completed her doctoral dissertation, ‘Figuring Austria’s Repressed Violence: Artistic Labour of the Body in the work of Elfriede Jelinek and VALIE EXPORT’ during the winter of 2018. This research was supported with a University of Leeds 110 Anniversary Scholarship between 2014-2017, and a Zantop Travel Award from the Coalition of Women in German in 2016.
Before joining the IZK, Gush has lectured at the school of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, as part of the Critical Studies Lecture Series at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands; at the Centre Prospéro, Langage, image et connaissance at Saint Louis University, Brussels, Belgium; the University of Art and Design and VALIE EXPORT Center for Performance and Media Art, Linz, Austria, and the School of Fine Art, University of Reading. During Spring 2019 she was Teaching Fellow in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and between 2019 and 2020 she was a lecturer in Art Theory and Art History at the University of Applied Arts (Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien) in Vienna.
