The first subject area is devoted to the concrete manifestations of transition (motifs, themes and patterns and courses of action), which the arts have created in the course of their history. For this, figurations of artistic authorship and mediality are examined on a meta level.

• Figures of the Border addresses the broad inventory of liminal shapes, from the personification of death to boundary figures at the threshold of death or between the living and the inanimate – ghosts, vampires, homunculi, cyborgs, automata, robots. In the form of the hermaphrodite, and in formations of the androgynous in general, gender identity appears as a merely fantasized given.
• Scenarios/Narratives of Transition deals with literary, pictorial and musical action topoi of transition such as awakening, apparition, vivification or occluded perception.
• A figure at the thresholds of text genesis, text direction and text action is the originator of the work of art.
• Archive and Performance explores, on a meta level, the media of preservation and actualization of the arts.
• Life Sciences and Death Studies enquires into the role of the (cultural and natural) sciences in determining the boundaries of life and death.

Picture credits: William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015, Still, Galerie Barbara Goodman.