Research — Alex Zivkovic

Dissertation (in-progress)

Ambient Empire: Ecologies, Colonies, and Nature Vivante in Modern Paris (1860-1940)

Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University

My dissertation is an art, architecture, and media history of spaces of constructed nature in Paris across three spatial types: greenhouses, aquariums, and gardens. This project excavates a 19th-century model of propaganda that was immersive and reliant on living ecosystems. In these simulations, visitors witnessed the workings of the imperial Anthropocene—an assertion that nature could be managed in models just as it increasingly was throughout France and its colonies.

Importantly, artists visited these multisensory spaces and made projects that responded to their imperial ideologies about nature, technology, and race. Some artists accepted these lessons: Impressionists captured racist environmental ideas of degeneration in greenhouse paintings and early science fiction films imagined the future colonization of oceans. By contrast, surrealists largely protested the state’s management of plants, siding with untamed nature over gardens and plantations. This project thus reveals the imperial, environmental, and technological histories that informed French modernism.

Winner of the 2023 Farrar Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, Winner of the 2023 Vcologies Early Career Paper Prize (greenhouse chapter excerpt)

This project has been supported by research grants from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Buell Center, DFK Paris, the Huntington Library, and the Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation.

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters

Méliès’s Artificial Nature: Aquariums, Infrastructure, and Empire

Forthcoming: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (exp. Fall 2025)

Inspired by the performances and technologies staged at public aquariums, Georges Méliès made six films using aquariums as a special effects device in his early career. These films—actualités, féeries, and science fiction narratives—not only represented underwater biomes but also captured the increasingly artificial nature of studios, parks, and urban infrastructures in his era. Attuning to the shared goals of aquariums, cinema, and new technologies of exploration, this essay argues that Méliès’s “underwater” films reveal his broader interests in nature, modernity, and empire-building.

Animation and Animacy in Salvador Dalí’s 1930s Multimedia Projects

Forthcoming: Surrealism and Animation: Transnational Connections, 1920–Present (Bloomsbury Press, 2025)

Across a range of art and writing, Dalí frequently cultivated or perceived effects of animation and animacy including shifting forms in paranoiac-critical diagrams, the “frozen waves” of Art Nouveau, or leaping frogs he put on a dinner table at a fundraiser. Dalí’s multimedia art projects uncannily straddle (and often break) the stable boundaries of animate and inanimate—a model for an enlivened, hybrid surrealism.

Joan Jonas’s Ecological Portraits: Echo and Narcissus

Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol. 49, no. 1 (March 2022)

Addressing Joan Jonas’s video Disturbances, I propose an ecological framework in her art of the 1970s—present in her performances, contemporaneous ecological art, and watery films of the 1930s she has cited as influences. Reading the myth of Narcissus as an ecological tale, this article tracks how Jonas uses different media including mirrors, water, and video to emphasize her body’s engagement with environments near and far.

“It’s not really a cat”: Art, Media, and Queer Wildness in Cat People (1942, 1982)

New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 21, no. 2 (Summer 2023)

Mobilizing animal studies, media theory, and queer theory, this article examines representations of cats across various media in Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) and its remake (Paul Schrader, 1982). The two horror films repeatedly expose the inability of static representations like statues, paintings, or photographs to fully “capture” animals or animality instead proposing a form of affective wildness that transcends bodies and encourages interspecies intimacy.

Other Academic Essays

Expanded Vitrines: Museological Sculptures and Diasporic Identity

Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 52 (May 2023)

I propose a framework of “expanded vitrines” in the art of Matthew Angelo Harrison, Fred Wilson, and the 2018 film Black Panther which subvert and even destroy the organizational structures of ethnographic vitrines. In particular, Harrison uses the vitrine as a cultural form that allows him to make new, hybrid sculptures—proposing visual models of his own identity and offering to audiences new ways to engage imagined pasts and hybrid futures of the African diaspora.

Leonor Fini’s Surrealist Object and Other Marvelous Precipitates of Desire

Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, Visualities Forum (March 2023)

Intermingling a story of tides, nonhuman living matter, the accretive stuff of grottoes, and what André Breton calls the “marvelous precipitate of desire,” Leonor Fini’s found book cover conjures up various elemental and chemical processes that speak to the reactive nature of objects across their journeys. Exhibited with a diverse set of objects, Fini’s object prompts us to ask how watery metaphors “submerge”—and thereby transform—concepts like the found object, the outmoded, and empire.

Catalogue Essays

Remedios Varo: Catalogue Essays (2)

Remedios Varo: Science Fictions at the Art Institute of Chicago (2023)

In two essays, I explore ideas of exploration, ecology, and nature in Remedios Varo’s surrealist practice. Inspired by historic explorers to South America and Jules Vernes’ adventure writing, Varo’s Exploración de las fuentes del río Orinoco (Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River) is a portrait of an esoteric expedition along the famous river. In a related work, Hallazgo (Discovery), Varo explores issues of chance discoveries in nature, producing decalcomania trees that evoke the corals and strange driftwood other surrealists celebrated in their art and writings.

Édouard Manet portraits: Catalogue Entries (2)

Manet: A Model Family at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2024–5)

In two catalogue entries (c. 900 words), I examine two paintings featuring Manet’s family members, reflecting on how they mediate both biographical details (his father’s illness, his mother’s caretaking, aging) and art historical sources (allegories of the senses, the still life genre). Perhaps Manet’s combination of the intimate and the grand relates to Baudelaire’s famous notion that “modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”