Dr. Ina Jessen examines socio-political and -critical questions on the subject of visual arts. In her understanding, art marks a socio-reflexive medium whose relevance is particularly evident in political iconography – both in terms of art history and the contemporary art.
Her academic and curatorial practice focuses on perspectives at the interface of social and political influences and developments in reciprocal relationship to artistic forms of expression and development processes. The genesis of her works and the political influences reflected in them form the main focus of her research. This hinge moment is reflected both in her PhD Ein deutscher Maler. Otto Dix and National Socialism (2019) and the materialiconographically oriented postdoc project, in which food as an artistic motif and processual material is a focal point. Her projects are frequently developed in cooperation with various institutions and protagonists in the art landscape.
Ina Jessen’s current research focuses on Otto Dix in the Mirror of Classical Modernism and political iconography (PhD, 2019) as well as material iconography of the processual and ephemeral in contemporary art since the 1960s (postdoc). With regard to material iconographic attributions and processes, she also deals with socio-critical themes such as gender sensibility, persistent lack of equality in various areas of society, forms of expression in power politics, and the reciprocal relationship to ongoing forms of stigmatization.
