#4
Miljohn Ruperto and Prof. Dr. Jonas Grethlein
25.10.2024
Miljohn Ruperto is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, cinema, performance and digital animation. His work references historical and anecdotal events and speculates on the nature of assumed facts and the construction of truth. Often involving replicas, modified versions and stagings - including Chinese-made reproductions of Caspar David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea, modified images based on the 15th-century Voynich Manuscript, or reworked footage of Filipino actress Isabel Rosario Cooper – Ruperto takes cultural and historical references and removes them from their original context to challenge our perception and generate something entirely new. Ruperto's work is often informed by collaborations with experts from other disciplines, including Dutch animator Aimée de Jongh, neuroscientist and engineer Rajan Bhattacharyya, photographer Ulrik Heltoft among others. Through a richness and diversity of lenses and a taste for the obscure, the mysterious and the magical, his work challenges fixed notions of truth and history, speaking instead of an indeterminacy and subjectivity of experience that renders truth and fiction almost indistinguishable.
In Prof. Dr. Jonas Grethlein, we have found an internationally renowned scholar at the University of Heidelberg. He will meet Miljohn Ruperto's artistic work on an intellectual level. As Professor at the Institute of Classical Philology, he is an expert in the interpretation of ancient Greek literature in almost all genres. He also adopts a modern literary and cultural-historical approach, and his publications bring antiquity to life. Prof. Grethlein received the most important research award in Germany – the Leibniz Prize 2023 – for his research on the narratology of ancient narrative forms, ancient aesthetics and the relationship between the image of history and experience in narrative and historiographical texts of antiquity. As a scholar, he is one of the world's leading specialists in Greek studies and has had a major influence on the development not only of his subject but also of literary, cultural and historical studies. Jonas Grethlein teaches and researches at the Seminar für Klassische Philologie in Heidelberg. - His most recent publication is Hoffnung. Eine Geschichte der Zuversicht von Homer bis zum Klimawandel (C.H. Beck 2024); Mein Jahr mit Achilles. The Iliad, Death and Life. (C.H. Beck 2022); The Odyssey. Homer and the Art of Storytelling (C.H. Beck 2017).