elisa r. linn       

(she/they)

@email kmtemporaer.de                                  Film Club der polnischen Versager*innen e.V.

Elisa R. Linn (Elisa Linn Roguszczak) is an East German writer, exhibition maker, and educator. She teaches at Bard College Berlin and is completing her PhD in philosophy under the supervision of Marina Gržinić at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In her practice, she is concerned with politics of self-organization, representation, migration, non-essentialist notions of identity, and the minor, challenging modernist conceptions of the state and the 'great man.'  In her research, she examines the impact of “border thinking” and "borders" on marginalized communities and how their strategies of self-organization from below can dismantle necropolitical conditions. In this context, she is interested in how the Berlin Wall was utilized as a "condom” against the “Other” during the AIDS pandemic and in the Cold War confrontation. Here, Linn focuses on overlooked oppositional movements at the intersection of activism and art in East Germany during the pre- and post-reunification periods, which advocated for alternative, democratic forms of socialism. In this context, she also explores the enduring disparities between East and West Germany following reunification. 

From 2022 to 2025, she was the co-director of Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V. and taught at Leuphana University. Since 2012, with architect and curator Lennart Wolff, she has been jointly running the curatorial and artists project km temporaer. She is co-organizing the Film Club der polnischen Versager*innen at the Club der polnischen Versager in Berlin-Mitte. Linn is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Curatorial Program. She has held the interim professorship of the chair of Art Theory and Mediation (Prof. Dr. Kerstin Stakemeier) at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg for the summer semester of 2022. Linn studied sociology, art history, visual culture, and film studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, as well as curatorial studies at Goethe University and Städelschule in Frankfurt.

Linn has taught and given lectures at The New School, Barnard College, Columbia University, Pratt Institute in New York City, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, AdbK Vienna, Städelschule, TU Berlin, and Royal Academy of Arts in London, among others. She curated exhibitions, performances, and screenings at The Kitchen, the South London Gallery, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the National Gallery Prague, Maxwell Graham and Petzel Gallery, among others. She has contributed to publications and magazines such as Frieze, Starship, artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Mousse, ArtAsiaPacific, BOMB, and Jacobin.