Dr Jana Scholze

Teaching the MA Curating Contemporary Design in partnership with the Design Museum (CCD) allows me to actively engage in design and curatorial discourse, reflect on current practices and test potential expansions of conventional formats, procedures and structures. Undertaking this process within pedagogical practice allows risk taking, speculating and moving beyond boundaries while offering spaces for reflection and reconsideration.    

With CCD we engage in long and complex research through year-long course projects which we aim to publicly present. Former projects were The Curated Dinner at Stanley Picker Gallery (2017), the exhibitions Reconsidering Canon (2018) and Architectural Radicals, (2019) presented at Design Museum and the Design Film Festival, hosted with Institut Francais and Design Museum (2020), and the exhibition and webinar Visibility of the Invisible at Stanley Picker Gallery (2022).

I am inspired by inter- and transdisciplinary practices and have been fostering collaborations within and outside of Kingston School of Art. For the collaboration with MA Sustainable and MA Art and Design History in 2016-19, we developed a new model for interdisciplinary and collaborate teaching, titled after the Radio 4 programme, the ‘Moral Maze'. This model encourages performative learning processes.  

An example for interdisciplinary teaching was our collaboration Design and Film, Film and Design, a co-taught programme between MA CCD, KU, MA Space and Communications at University of Art and Design (HEAD) Geneva, and the elective Montage at Parsons The New School New York (Parsons) in 2019-2020, leading to the founding and first delivery of the Design Film Festival.

Undergraduate courses taught

• Creative and Cultural Industries: Events and Experiences Design BA (Hons)
• Fine Art & Art History BA (Hons)

Postgraduate courses taught

• Curating Contemporary Design MA (in partnership with the Design Museum)

My research is focused on the curatorial and contemporary design which my monographies confirm: ‘Medium Ausstellung' uses semiotic theory to propose a method for analysing museum displays. The monography of celebrated designers Barber Osgerby uses conversations as tool to interrogate conceptual work. As a curator at the V&A, I contributed to catalogues of major exhibitions such as Modernism, Cold War Modern, Shoes, and Japanese Art and Design.

A current strand of my research is design and the curatorial in its response to ecological, technical, and global challenges. Previous research on curatorial practice covered themes from immateriality to expanded formats. ‘Tables: The School of Expanded Formats' delivered curated dinners for the Istanbul Design Biennial (2018) and informed the book chapter ‘Other Spaces for Curating'. Invitations to speak at conferences such as at ‘Curatorial Things' (2014) in Berlin, lead to the contribution of its proceedings, such as in ‘Cultures of the Curatorial'.

My research and practice are often interconnected, such as the recent co-curation with Penny Sparke and Cat Rossi of an exhibition about domesticity for the Design Biennial at St Etienne (2022). The project developed research around topics such as shelter, identity, health and well-being, technological and social connectedness. We continued our research with a display of four key films by Martha Rosler, Noam Toran, Superflux and Simone Niquille at Stanley Picker Gallery in 2022/23.

I have participated in research projects of different scale and in various countries. An example was the project ‘Material Culture as social memory of a society' supported by Volkswagenstiftung (2013-16). As member of the Modern Interiors Research Centre, I was involved in a webinar (2021) and its publication Interiors in the Era of Covid-19 (Bloomsbury). I am co-leading with Penny Sparke an interrogation of ‘The Exhibition as Interior' concluding in a symposium, conference and publication.

Qualifications and expertise

• PHD Technical University Berlin (2002)
• AHRC Peer Review College (Academic), since 2020
• External reviewer for Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Humanities and Social Sciences division, 2018 and 2019
• Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, since 2016
• External Advisory Board of idea journal, an international, double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal, since 2022
• Exhibition Review Editor of academic journal ‘Design and Culture', 2010-2015
• examining PhD: Camilla Anderson ‘Spaces of (re)negotiations – Norm-critical and Speculative Interrogations in Design, Aalto University, 2022/23
• examining PhD: Maria Aroni: The Aesthetics of Curating: Exhibition-making after the Conceptual Turn', 2017, Kingston University

Areas of specialism

• curatorial
• design theory
• design history
• architecture
• fine arts

Scholarly affiliations

• Modern Interiors Research Centre
• Visiting Professor at China Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing: 2018/19

Research student supervision

Main supervision

• Ms Shai Akram
• Edward Dorrian
• Laura Elliott
• Georgia Ward

Other supervision

• Mr Pete Collard
• Laura Elliott
• Mr Andrea Foffa
• Miranda Vane
• Marco Veneri
• Eleanor Watson

Publications