Photo by Andreas Schlieter. | Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964), Shed, 2006. Chromogenic color print on a Diasec mount, 78 ¾ x 69 ¾ in. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase with funds from the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation, 2011.
Gallery Talk–From Source to Afterlife: How Images Become New Stories
What happens to an image when it is taken out of its original context and made into something else? In this talk, Frauke Thielecke explores adaptation not simply as the reproduction or reinterpretation of an existing work but as a fundamental artistic practice through which images acquire new meanings, histories, and afterlives.
Drawing on the artworks in After the Image: Adaptation in Contemporary Art, the presentation follows images as they move across media, historical periods, and cultural contexts, including examples by Thomas Demand, Andy Warhol, Cang Xin, Nicole Eisenman, and more.
Rather than treating the “original” as a stable point of departure, the talk considers what happens when artists copy, translate, reenact, appropriate, fragment, or transform what already exists. The works suggest that an image’s afterlife may be as revealing as its source and that adaptation does not merely repeat culture but helps produce it.
About the Speaker:
Frauke Thielecke is an award-winning filmmaker, theater director, and screenwriter. She has directed 13 feature films and more than 100 episodes of television drama, developing a distinctive approach to narrative, genre, and adaptation. Her short film Dunkelrot (Dark Red) received the Max Ophüls Prize, and her graduation film Abendlied (Evening Song) won the Studio Hamburg Young Talent Award.
Currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, Thielecke is a member of the International Writers Track, where she combines creative practice with scholarly research on horror cinema, adaptation, moving-image analysis, and screenwriting. Her interdisciplinary work investigates the way stories transform across media and cultural contexts. In fall 2026, she is teaching Remixed & Remade: Literature into Film at Washington University. As curator of the installation After the Image: Adaptation in Contemporary Art at the Kemper Museum, Thielecke brings her expertise in adaptation into the realm of visual art, examining how artists reinterpret, translate, and reimagine existing images and narratives.
Alongside her directing career, she teaches camera acting workshops in Germany and literature courses at the women’s prison in Vandalia, Missouri. Her plays Follow the… (2024) and The Winger (2026) received the A. E. Hotchner Playwriting Award.