Irène Unholz
irene.unholz@unifr.ch
https://orcid.org/0009-0005-7243-315X
History of modern and contemporary art
- Artistic and Discursive Strategies since the 1970s
- Collective and Collaborative Art Practices
- Art Criticism, Exhibitions, and Institutions
- Art, Ecology, and Climate
- Reproduction, Simulation, and Modelling of Social, Economic, and Technological Systems
PhD Student SNSF
Department of Art History and Archeology
Biography
Irène Unholz is a doctoral researcher at the Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Fribourg (Switzerland). As part of the SNSF-funded project Real Abstractions: Reconsidering Realism’s Role for the Present, her research examines processes of simulation and reproduction in contemporary art, with a particular interest in how artists model, replicate, and negotiate their relationship with sociopolitical, economic, and technological systems.
She studied Art History, Communication and Media Studies, and Psychology at the University of Fribourg and Freie Universität Berlin. Alongside her academic work, she writes as a cultural journalist for publications including Kunstbulletin, Republik, and WOZ, addressing social, ecological, and institutional issues in the field of art. She is a member of AICA Switzerland (International Association of Art Critics).
Research and publications
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Publications
55 publications
Reproducing, Simulating, Acting? On Artists and Systems , in Training Creative Acts and Action: An edited publication of workshop documents
Irène Unholz (2026) | Book chapterPatricia Bucher – a closed open door (Einleitung) , in Patricia Bucher – a closed open door (Ausstellungskatalog Galerie Sam Scherrer)
Irène Unholz (2025) | Book chapterExpanded Cinema , in Discoteca Analitica. Reader (edited by Nicolas Brulhart & Julia Gelshorn)
Irène Unholz, Nicolas Brulhart, Julia Gelshorn, Balthazar Lovay (2019) | Book chapterAndrea Muheim
Irène Unholz (SIKART Lexikon zur Kunst in der Schweiz, 2022) | Book chapter -
Research projects
Journalistic Role Performance around the Globe: Switzerland
Status: CompletedStart 01.11.2015 End 31.12.2018 Funding SNSF Open project sheet The aim of our project is to explore the role performance of journalists. Journalists have ideals in form of role conceptions: They see themselves, for instance, either as neutral disseminators, investigators, analysts, promoters or entertainers. However, they are likely to make compromises in their everyday work due to personal, financial, political or other restrictions. As a consequence of these restrictions, role conceptions do not necessarily unfold in media content. Thus, in order to investigate role performance, we connect journalists’ output back to their role conceptions. Therefore a content analysis of newspapers will be performed, based on operationalization models recently developed in journalism studies, in order to reveal references to particular role conceptions in news content. At the same time a standardized online survey will be conducted among the authors of the analyzed articles in order to investigate their own conceptions of their professional role and of their level of autonomy. This combination of methods will allow comparisons between the role conceptions as seen by the journalists and the conceptions which are traceable in their articles, i.e. in their role performance. The project will concentrate on journalists and their work in Switzerland but is part of a bigger international project (see http://www.journalisticperformance.org). Researchers in 27 other countries around the globe are in the process of conducting equivalent analyses of their national print media, using the same codebook and questionnaire. Findings from the Swiss study will thus be discussed along with the results from the other participating countries in publications dealing with the international comparison of journalistic role performance. The special situation of Switzerland as a multilingual and multicultural country offers the opportunity for more in-depth analyses about common grounds and differences of journalistic role performance in different cultural entities within the same political system.