This study focuses on mural paintings, sculptures, picture writings and body images from 16th-century Mexico. Julia Kloss-Weber analyses the extent to which many of the images produced during the New Spain mission address alterity, i.e. identity-creating otherness. At the same time, she investigates the form of alterity assigned to images as fields of tension within an "iconic difference" (Gottfried Boehm). This brings together two areas of discourse that had developed largely independently of each other: Reflections on constructions of the "other" in the context of postcolonial studies, and debates on image theory. Thus it emerges that images not only mediate between cultures, but are also themselves the subject of processes of transcultural negotiations.

Julia Kloss-Weber has been a private lecturer and acting professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Hamburg since 2022. In 2010, she was awarded her doctorate for the thesis Individualisiertes Ideal und nobilitierte Alltäglichkeit. Das Genre in der französischen Skulptur der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Genre in French Sculpture of the Second Half of the 18th Century) at the Freie Universität Berlin. Following this dissertation, she worked at the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin before joining the DFG research group Transkulturelle Verhandlungsräume von Kunst. Komparatistische Perspektiven auf historische Kontexte und aktuelle Konstellationen, where she wrote her habilitation thesis entitled Bilder der Alterität - Alterität der Bilder. Zum transkulturellen Potenzial von Bildern in Übersetzungsprozessen zwischen Neuspanien und Europa im 16. Jahrhundert (On the transcultural potential of images in translation processes between New Spain and Europe during the 16th century). She has held lectureships and acting professorships at the University of Bern and the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.