Magdalena Grüner, M.A.
Photo: Isabel James
Curriculum
Magdalena Grüner is a scholar of the entanglements of art and ocean science in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She earned her PhD in art history from Universität Hamburg (Germany). She studied art history, philosophy, and design in Madrid, Vienna, and Hamburg. Her research has received generous support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Princeton University Library, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Getty Research Institute, where she was a predoctoral fellow in 2023/24 (Art and Technology). Before joining the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force as a junior fellow, she was a scholar in residence at the German Museum of the Masterpieces of Science and Technology in Munich. She will join the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities as a postdoctoral fellow in the academic year 2025/26.
In her current book project, tentatively titled Claiming Truth, Picturing Doubt: The Painted Epistemologies of the Bermuda Oceanographic Expeditions (1929-1940), Magdalena examines the visual objects and picturing practices of these expeditions, which gained prominence as the site of the first crewed deep-sea descents. The book brings together the fields of art history and the history of science through the methodological framework of critical ocean studies. This approach seeks to uncover the unruly and obscure aspects of past scientific activity, which in turn provide a rich source for rethinking present and future epistemologies through the ocean.
Publications (selection)
- One Photograph: Claiming Truth, Picturing Doubt. Or: When Knowledge and Ignorance meet in an ‘Empty’ Picture, Photography and Culture (forthcoming).
- Sie haben uns ein Denkmal gebaut (und jeder Vollidiot weiß, dass das die Liebe versaut.), with Nina Lucia Groß, in: Lerchenfeld #60, Feb. 2022, pp. 64–68.
- Coded Gaze & Male Default. Feministische Perspektiven auf digitale Kunstgeschichte, with Nina Lucia Groß, in: Kritische Berichte, 4/2020, pp. 67–76.
- The Pages of Day and Night. Von Saatgut-Tresoren und Herbarien in Pia Rönickes Arbeit, in: Ina Jessen, Isabella Augart (eds.): Metabolismen. Nahrungsmittel in der Kunst, Hamburg 2020, pp. 41–54.
- „It seemed we were a kind of a show.“ Pierre Huyghes Zoo-Dramen, with Kathrin Rottman and Tim Jegodzinski, in: Tierstudien 09, 2016, pp. 147–157.
Research project: Claiming Truth, Picturing Doubt: On the Epistemic Potential of Uncertainty
My project examines how scientific images not only picture knowledge and truth but also reflect uncertainty, doubt, and ignorance as active forces in scientific inquiry. While scholars have questioned the assumed objectivity of scientific images, have highlighted the tension between idealized objectivity and material messiness, and have discussed the necessary failure of an ‘objectively true’ picture, the underlying assumption remains, that within the scienes, images picture knowledge, certainty, and truth.
More recently, however, scholars have highlighted that ignorance carries its own epistemic force and constitutes a crucial dimension of knowledge making. My goal is to extend these insights into the realm of art history and reframe painterly reflections of ignorance as generative and epistemically potent. Rather than viewing scientific image-making as a linear path toward veracity, I approach it as an oscillating process between confirmation and doubt, certainty and uncertainty, knowledge and ignorance. How was uncertainty articulated and reflected pictorially? Can we identify a visual regimen of ignorance—and what might it look like?
Emerging from my dissertation on early twentieth century picturings of the ocean, this project expands into a broader art historical inquiry into how scientific images make space for ignorance. It asks how such images trouble conventional narratives of rationality and progress, presenting instead a more nuanced picture of scientific picturings, by foregrounding the potential of ambiguity and the force of the unknown.