Dr Luise Reitstätter

E: luise.reitstaetter@univie.ac.at

Luise Reitstätter is a cultural scientist. Her areas of research include practices of modern and contemporary art, critical museum and exhibition studies, as well as methods for visual and material cultural analysis. Building on her curatorial experience in the international art field, she completed her PhD in 2013 with a study on the exhibition as a potential sphere of action in sociology and cultural studies (“Die Ausstellung verhandeln”, transcript 2015). Since then, she has realised numerous research projects on topics such as museum missions and cultural participation (PI “Right to the Museum?”), language and meaning making in exhibitions (PI “Say it Easy. Say it out Loud”, PI “Exhibit Labels in Use”), the updating of archives based on rural images of longing (Co-PI “City-Country-Child”, “City-Country-Image”), and politics of Commons movements (“AXIOM”, “Commons as Mindset and Innovation Strategy in Design”). From 2017 to 2025, she headed the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History at the University of Vienna. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at King’s College London and the University of the Balearic Islands, where she is developing multimodal video analyses in preparation for her research project, “The Tourist Gaze in Exhibitions”. She also serves as Co-Principal Investigator in the FWF-DFG project “The Museum Gaze”.