Khadija Zinnenburg Carroll

Khadija Zinnenburg Carroll is an Austrian-Australian artist and historian specializing in colonial history and visual art. She is the head of REPATRIATES: Artistic Research in Museums and Communities in the process of Repatriation from Europe, an ERC Project that will involve a team of researchers at CEU, around Europe and in the field in Namibia, Nigeria, Mexico and Australia. 

Khadija Zinnenburg Carroll graduated from Harvard University with a PhD in Art History. Before joining the faculty of CEU, she was the Professor and Chair of Global Art History at The University of Birmingham where she is now an Honorary Chair. Khadija is the author of the books The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics between Mexico and Europe, Mit Fremden Federn: El Penacho und die Frage der Restitution, and Art in the Time of Colony and she is an editor of the journal Third Text: Critical Perspectives of Contemporary Art and Culture.

Khadija's art practice involves montaging words and images in films and installations that voice alternate histories through texts and performances. Areas of specialization in her artistic research are in conceptual art and post-colonialism; migration and border politics; surveillance; nineteenth-century and contemporary global histories of art and science; materials and conservation; museum display cultures; architectural history; sensory ethnography and the collecting of material culture; ecology; non-European ontologies, classification and taxonomy. She make videos and writes scripts to tell stories that create interventions in situations where dislocation and conflict lay bare the historical relationships between humans and objects. Khadija has curated various exhibitions internationally including Properties of a Presence, Botanical Drift, and Kranich Museum. Khadija's films and installations have been shown internationally including at the Venice, Marrakech, and Sharjah Biennales, ZKM, Manifesta, Taxispalais, Extracity, HKW, Royal Museums Greenwich, Savvy, LUX, Chisenhale, SPACE, Project Art Centre Gallery Dublin, St Kilda, Melbourne, and the Casablanca Film Festival. Documentation of these can be seen on her personal website: www.kdja.org

Highlights of Khadija’s work include:

• publishing an acclaimed monograph has led to related projects with reviews in the New York Times and exhibiting at the Venice Biennale and other prestigious locations with large audiences.
• translation of her writing into other languages including German, French, Czech and Arabic, and invitations to read at The Hay, Marrakech, and other writer's festivals.
• funding awards from several prestigious, international grants (British Academy Newton Fellowship, Humboldt Foundation, Sackler-Caird, etc.) have enabled large scale, international research that has led to further outcomes such as the Smithsonian Channel / BBC documentary Marianne North: Victorian Plant Hunter (Blink Films 2017).
• advising on and selecting works for institutional boards because of her international reputation for innovative and transnational ideas for cultural heritage.
• editing Third Text journal that has allowed her to foster, shape and publish new scholarship, most recently in British Academy Writing Workshops in Hyderabad India.
• establishing the online Third Text Forum has enabled her to promote new and experimental forms of scholarly co-publishing and artistic collaboration with a growing international network.
• creating major ongoing partnerships with museums that for example published the proceedings of two important co-created conferences in 2018: Exhibiting Empire, following the Tate's Artist and Empire exhibition in a Third Text Forum; Royal Anthropological Institute's annual conference panel on Representing 'Modern' Global, Local and Imperial Histories in Object Centred Museums.
• curation of large exhibitions in prominent international galleries and museums.
• production of a series over ten years of projects in which architectural heritage plays the central part, (i.e. Socialist Afterlives and the Global East). The related exhibitions Embassy Embassy were covered in wide ranging daily and specialist news: Der Tagesspiegel, Berliner Morgenpost, t e x t u r magazine.
• making her own films and exhibitions commissioned with generous support by leading arts organizations like TB21, thereby finding a way to merge research and artistic theories and practices.
• leading the interpretation of Tahitian navigator Tupaia's history, which received international media attention on outlets such as the BBC Saturday morning show, Frieze, ABC Radio, Art Monthly.

These have been accompanied by other indicators of her specialist expertise, such as  appointment to project advisory boards (UK, Singapore, Austria, Germany, USA, Australia), and as external doctoral examiner (UK, Finland, Norway, Germany, Australia). Khadija has over 60 publications including invited chapters to standard handbooks, specialized dictionaries, biographies and catalogues.

Books

Art in the Time of Colony, (London: Ashgate Press, 2014).

Bordered Lives: Immigration Detention Archive (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).

Mit Fremden Federn. Ein Restiutionsfall (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2022).

The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics between Europe and Mexico, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2022).

Special Journal Issues and Books Edited

Tupaia, Captain Cook and the Voyage of the Endeavour: A Material History, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2022.

Botanical Drift: Protagonists of the invasive herbarium, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017.

Artist and Empire, Third Text journal forum, 2017.

The Importance of Being Anachronistic:  Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations, Discipline journal with Third Text publications, 2016.

The Vienna Zocalo, Vienna: Academy of Fine Arts Press, 2012.

SELECTED ARTICLES IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS 

‘Minor Universality’, in Markus Messling Jonas Tinus, Helene Thierard (eds), Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2022.

‘The Renaissance We Need: Artistic Practices and Critical Dilemmas in the Long Twentieth Century’, Special issue on ‘Connected Histories in the Early Modern World’, Katie Anania, Bobby Brennan, and Andrew Leach (eds.), forthcoming.

‘Framing the Penal Colony: Representing, Interpreting and Imagining Convict Transportation’ in Sophie Fuggle, Charles Forsdick and Katharina Massing (eds), London: Palgrave, 2022.

'Museopiracy: Redressing the commemoration of the Endeavour's voyage to the Pacific in Processions for Tupaia' in Exhibiting the Experience of Empire, special issue of Third Text, Imma Ramos, John Giblin, Nikki Grout (Eds), Vol 33, Issue 4-5, 2019, pp. 541-558.

‘Censorship and X-Ray of Malevich’s Black Square, 1915’, Third Text special issue on Decolonizing Colour, Natasha Eaton (Ed.), with Dina Gusjenova, (2019).

‘NonWest by North: Marianne North and William Colenso's responses to plantlife and the classification of economic botany’, Third Text journal special Issue on 'The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions', Shela Sheikh and Ros Gray (Eds), (2018) pp. 290-310.

'The Senses, Presences and Beliefs in Indigenous Art History: Towards a recognition of non-Western historiography and methodology', with Damian Skinner in Furthering, nurturing and futuring Global Art Histories, special issue of Kunstlicht, (2018), pp. 72-80.

‘The Art of Dissident Domesticity: Julian Assange, King Prempeh and the Prison House’, with Jesse Shipley and Michal Murawski, Social Text, 133: 35, 4, (2017), pp. 113-152.

 ‘Re-membering the Body: J.J. Winckelmann’s Ekphrasis’, Word & Image Journal of Verbal and Visual Inquiry, 21:3 (2005) 261-269.

SELECTED CHAPTERS IN BOOKS 

‘El Penacho, the lack of provenance and the gains of decolonization: Ethical, technical or political reasons for restoration’, Das Museum im kolonialen Kontext, (Vienna: Bundeskazleramt), 2021. 

‘Painting the Political in Oceanian Textile Cultures: Collectivity, syncretism and globalization’, in J. Harris (ed.), A Companion to Textile Culture, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020).

‘The Inbetweenness of the Vitrine: Three Paraerga of a Feather Headdress’, P. Basu (ed.), The In-Betweenness of Things: Materialising Mediation and Movement between Worlds ~ A Cabinet of Curiosities ~, (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) pp. 25-45.

‘Anachronically Archived: Time in Contemporary Art’, in I. McLean and Darren Jorgenson (eds.), The Archival turn in Australian Aboriginal art, (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2016) pp. 342-361.

‘Object to Project: Artist’s Interventions in Museums’, in: Christopher Marshall (Ed.), Sculpture in the Museum, (Farnham, Ashgate Press, 2012), pp. 216-239.