Prof. Dr. Liliana Gómez

Liliana Gómez studied philosophy and architecture in Berlin and Paris. She completed her doctorate at the Free University of Berlin with a thesis on modernism in Latin America and habilitated at the University of Zurich with a study on the theory and history of photographic archives. She has been a guest lecturer and researcher at Columbia University, Harvard University, NYU, Universidad del Rosario Bogotá and the Orient Institute Beirut, among others. From 2017-2021, she was an SNSF professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich and has since headed the SNSF research project "Contested Amnesia and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South" (Swiss National Science Foundation). Her research focuses on contemporary literary, cultural and media theory, theory and history of modernity in a global context, theory and history of the archive, aesthetics and postcolonial studies, memory studies, literature, art and human rights, visual cultures and environmental humanities.

Since August 2021, she has been Professor of Art and Society at the University of Kassel with a secondary affiliation at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and the documenta Institute. Since June 2023 she has been Director of CELA (Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos) at the University of Kassel and on the Board of Directors of CALAS Centro Regional Andes (Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies). Since 2024 she is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.

She is currently preparing two publications on "Arts and Extractivism in the Global Present" (Routledge) and "Eco-operations" (diaphanes/Think Art). Both projects examine critical and curatorial approaches in contemporary art to extractivist practices and their various discursive, aesthetic and epistemic contexts, and discuss local epistemologies and embodied knowledge of human and non-human relations - guided by a decolonial understanding - with the aim of stimulating reflection on alternative notions of a posthuman world and its possible historiographies.