| Project management | Dr. Birgit Haehnel |
| Collaboration | Hanna Büdenbender, Christina Leuchten |
| Supervision | Prof. Dr. Alexandra Karentzos |
The project sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Foundation) examines the historico-cultural significance of the white fabric in the visual culture of the 20th century in the context of gender and critical whiteness studies. White fabrics can be perceived as a means to substitute the human body and its surface.
A significant field of research opens when white textiles are examined as a visual signal for being white, i.e., as a symbol defined in a racist manner, rather than by their function as clothing. Thus, latently showing off the “not cleaned” as the problematic other. In anthropology and medicine, whitewashing the world is a very dangerous metaphor of long standing and fatal consequences.
Why do today’s emigration museums show white laundry in suitcases of European migrants while current press photographs shows asylum seekers in tattered clothing?
The project examines white fabrics in their various metonymical presentations as image and (art) object critically using a history-based discussion analysis focussing on white as an icon for the European modern age. These myths question artistic interventions, such as a men’s shirt as a bull’s eye (Niki de St. Phalle) or light-coloured fabric as a straitjacket on a black body expressing the terrors generated by a white supremacy culture (Rodney McMillian).
In this project, the white fabric is recognised in its culture political dimension and in doing so, its art historic relevance is re-evaluated.
