Veronica Bremer

Research interests

My research investigates the intersections of visual and material culture and transcultural artistic exchange, with particular emphasis on how exile experience, gender, and local materialities shape artistic production. The core of my scholarly work is a German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG))-funded project "TransExil: Negotiations of Aesthetics and Community in Post-Revolutionary Mexico." I examine photographer and sculptor Mariana Yampolsky's engagement with clay as a site where discourses of indigeneity, exile, and materiality converge in capturing clay's multiple functions as housing material, sustenance vessel, ritual object, and artistic medium while revealing gendered networks of embodied knowledge transmission. Through archival research and visual analysis, I trace how Yampolsky's work dialogued with contemporaneous exiled artists and fellow Taller de Gráfica Popular members like Elizabeth Catlett, examining their shared investment in clay as a medium of feminist and transcultural meaning-making.

Complementing this material culture focus, my pedagogical research explores experiential learning in liberal arts education, investigating how street art observation, art history didactics, and tactile experimentation with materials facilitate identity formation, collaborative knowledge-building, and critical thinking in undergraduate contexts.

Teaching

As part of my role as a lecturer in the liberal arts Bachelor's program, Studium Individuale, I  am involved in teaching two core modules per semester, including:

• “Collaborative Research Project”
• “Understanding Knowledge”
• “Culture and Critique”
• “Planning, Decision-Making, and Reflection”

Transfer of scientific knowledge

The Urban ARTotale Re:New project, funded by SQM funds, translates theoretical frameworks from visual studies, public art pedagogy, and material culture studies into practical application by positioning students as active knowledge producers who critically engage with street art as both aesthetic object and contested public discourse. Through integrated pedagogical interventions during Opening Week and complementary seminars, the project disseminates research methodologies on embodied learning and collaborative knowledge-building to undergraduate students, enabling them to analyze how public art functions as a site where cultural memory, spatial politics, and community identity intersect. This initiative transforms scholarly insights about experiential pedagogy and visual literacy into a sustained educational framework that extends beyond the classroom, fostering critical inquiry about whose narratives occupy public space while simultaneously training students in documentation, conservation, and interpretive practices applicable across humanities disciplines.