kunsthochzwei is about art, art therapy, psychology, intersectionality, and Open Science. I am Kerstin Schoch (they|them), a Berlin-based artist and art therapist with a PhD in psychology.

As an art therapist I worked for ten years in different work fields, in particular with mentally ill, neurodiverse, and traumatized children and adolescents. I have been freelancing and blogging as kunsthochzwei for over ten years, though my work now focuses on research and teaching.

Besides that I am a research assistant at the Pop-up Institute, which I co-founded, and have teaching assignments at several universitites. I’m an Open Science advocate and was a mentor at the Open Science Fellow Programm by Wikimedia Germany.

I hold a professorship for Intermedial Art Therapy at the Medical School Hamburg and also work at the Pop-up Institute, which I co-founded. I am a feminist researcher, Open Science advocat and was, among other things, a mentor of the Open Science Fellow Programm by Wikimedia Germany.

art + art therapy

Art allows diverse perspectives and opens new prospects. Art therapy is an approach using the medium of visual art. Thoughts, emotions, problems and situations can be expressed in artistic work and thereby be approached constructively. She invites to play with visual arts and the inner self. She encourages new, creative and solution-oriented behavior and fosters personal development.

My approach is process-oriented and works with the individual artistic process of each person. While doing so, the focus does not lie on the product, but the creation itself. There are no firm targets who a final product has to look like. The primary objective is not to “paint well” or learn artistic techniques, but to find and develop your own authentic expression.

This is a good thing, because the performance thinking into which we have been socialized and the idea of doing something “wrong” or “not good” often prevent us from implementing our own ideas. In this value-free framework of process-oriented work, new, creative experiences can be made.

The artistic material used hereby is as various as the people themselves. They reach from drawing and painting to collage, sculpturing, photography and textile towards contempory formats like installation and performance art.

open science + feminist research

If we want to revolutionize science and society, it is necessary to think Open Science together with Feminist Research. Both are about de-hierarchization. While Feminist Research diversifies science through its power-critical, intersectional stance, Open Science opens up practical possibilities to change academia. In doing so, we need to critically question how traditional concepts of scientific theory and practice fit into our society, how they need to be modified, and which need to be discarded. Pursuing Open Science feministically means looking at the same subject matter with different perspectives, questioning ourselves, and not shying away from discourse.

My research is postdisciplinary and deals with quantitative methods in visual art, art therapy, and psychology. You can find my current work under Open Science and on the blog.