Jakob Schillinger is Research Coordinator at the ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin and a lecturer at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. As a historian of modern and contemporary art, his research focuses on the media-technological and social conditions of art and visual culture and on their connection to gender. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Painting Machines which takes a media- and systems-theoretical perspective on post-conceptual painting in 1980s and early 1990s Cologne, inquiring how artistic processes affected and connected the artists’ bodies that functioned as their media, and how these processes constructed social milieus. His work has been published in the MIT Press journal October, Texte zur Kunst, and Artforum. He has also contributed to several exhibition catalogues, most recently an essay on Martin Kippenberger’s service economy to the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition at Kunsthalle Bonn.
In 2012 he was the Dean of the School for Worldly Companions at dOCUMENTA(13). He has held curatorial positions including 2013 curator of MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 in New York, co-curator of based in Berlin (2011), and Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2009).
“Oswald Wiener on Dandyism,” October 170 (October 2019): 31–50.
“Service Economy,” in Martin Kippenberger: Bitteschön Dankeschön, edited by Susanne Kleine, translated by Fiona Elliott, 154–84. Bonn: Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; Cologne: Snoeck, 2019.
“Vorsprung Durch Reinkarnation,” in Martin Kippenberger: Hand Painted Pictures, 9–26. New York: Skarstedt, 2017.
“Interiority Complex: The Art of Peter Wächtler,” Artforum International 53.03 (November 2014).
“Distanced Inhabitation: Loretta Fahrenholz’ Stylistic Promiscuity and Mode of Production,” in Prize of the Böttcherstraße in Bremen, ed. Eva Fischer-Hausdorf and Julia Bunnemann (Kunsthalle Bremen, 2014).
The Sixth Year, drama in five episodes; written by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda; directed by Rick Alverson, Dustin Guy Defa, Loretta Fahrenholz, Nick Mauss, Ken Okiishi, and Alex Ross Perry. DVD with 24-page booklet by Jakob Schillinger (Sternberg Press, 2014).
“User Friendly: Jakob Schillinger on Digital Labor,” Artforum International 51.3 (November 2012).
“Between Art and Public – A Roundtable Discussion with Natasa Ilic, Maria Lind, Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Jakob Schillinger,” Texte zur Kunst 86 (Summer 2012).
“7th Berlin Biennale, Various Venues,” Artforum International 50.10 (Summer 2012).
“The Prosumer Version – Art from the Masses,” Flash Art International 128 (October/November, 2011).
“Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange (Letter to the Editors),” October 135 (Winter 2011).