Featured Research Project

Decolonising the Avant-Garde: With Isabel Wünsche (Constructor University, Bremen), Bru began a new collaborative project that considers how to decolonise the post-1945 history and notion of the avant-garde. More information here.

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Work In Progress

A new book, co-authored with Tyrus Miller (University of California, Irvine), has been in the making for several years now. It will argue that our understanding of the striking turn to issues of time and history in contemporary art can benefit from taking a longer view that also brings into scope the early twentieth-century avant-garde. For it is to the latter's credit that it discovered art's radical potential to institute new forms of historicity and temporal experience.

Another new book, tentatively entitled The Formless Infant, will study the early twentieth-century avant-garde's attempts to articulate alternative figurations and views of childhood and infancy in film, literature, painting, theatre, music and architecture. It will argue that not Romanticism but the early twentieth-century avant-garde was perhaps the last to undertake an orchestrated attempt at altering the modern understanding of the child through art, to the aim of upsetting the social status quo.

m dr n

Trained in general and comparative literature, Sascha Bru has a long-standing interest in the art of literature. While his work has increasingly also come to deal with other art forms and media, literature is always on his radar and often functions as his point of departure. Bru studies avant-garde writing, among others, as a director of the m dr n research lab at the University of Leuven. Learn more here.

Image Credits
Photo bottom right on 'About' page: Tryvannstarnet under construction June 1961 by Trarir. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Image on this page: detail from Ana Hatherly, The streets of Lisbon (1977). Collage on paper on hardboard from the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Modern Collection, Lisbon, Portugal. Inv.: 91P742. Photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simões. CC by 2.0 Deed. Source.