Hamida Sivac

Hamida Sivac

What first brought me to Vienna, after finishing High School in Bosnia and Herzegovina, were my architectural studies at the Technical University of Vienna. It was there that I gained an interest in the arts and art history, which has since become my main field of research. Upon completing a master thesis on the concepts of interpicturality and collectivity in the Russian Avant-garde at the University of Vienna, I have continued to pursue my interest in art history in my current position as a pre-doc University Assistant at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies at the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna.

Research interests: My main research focus lies in the investigation of cultural and visual developments throughout the 1970s that can be linked to discourses evolving around language, identity, materiality, and feminism. In addition to that, drawing from my architectural background, I am also involved in the study of social aspects of urban spaces.

Current research project: The Feminist Critique of Language in the Visual Arts from the late 1960s until the early 1980s
With my PhD project “The Feminist Critique of Language in the Visual Arts from the late 1960s until the early 1980s” I intend to uncover the neglected category of language-critique in feminist art practice during Second-wave Feminism. Departing from philosophical, linguistic, and psychoanalytical theories, which put language at the center of processes of subject-formation and reality in general, some female artists started to question their status in society and culture as it is being constructed through this very medium of language. In consequence, artists like Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly, Valie EXPORT, Katalin Ladik, and Ketty La Rocca among many others, have produced a significant number of artworks that deal with the problematics of linguistic representation through a multiplicity of artistic explorations of language and communication. The aim of my project is to generate, for the very first time, a synopsis of these different artistic approaches to language by investigating the specific strategies, methods, and media in use. Thereby, my analysis of this phenomenon is also invested in expanding the field of previous art historical research of feminist artistic practice by adding the unattended domain of the critique of language.

Publications:

„Brot", in: Von Honig, Speck und Rübenkrautsirup. Das Lexikon der Lebensmittel als Kunstmaterial, edited by Ina Jessen and Fabiana Senkpiel. (forthcoming)
The Personal is Linguistic. Personal Pronouns in the Art of Mirella Bentivoglio and Ketty La Rocca, Public Art Dialogue 13/1 (2023), 27–54.
12 catalogue entries in: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, edited by Stefanie Kitzberger, Cosima Rainer and Linda Schädler, Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter 2022.
Subversive Syntax. Critique of language as an artistic method in Feminist Art of the mid-1970s, Studies in Visual Arts and Communication 8/1 (2021), 35–47.

Talks:

„Sich schriftlich versprechen. Verräumlichung als sprachkritische Strategie feministischer Kunst der frühen 1970er-Jahre"; talk at the lecture series „Kunst – Forschung – Geschlecht", University of Applied Arts Vienna, March 2023.
Panel „The Modernism of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Artistic Strategies, Context, Networks"; talk at the book presentation of „Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna", University of Applied Arts Vienna, November 2022.
Daniele Karasz, Mark Scherner und Hamida Sivac: "Community and repression in new built neighbourboods: re-discussing social control in engaged neighbourhood communities"; at the European Sociological Association (ESA), RC 37: Urban Sociology, 4th Midterm Conference, Bologna: Talk in the panel "Neighborhoods, communities, neoliberal urbanization and beyond", 2021.