| 1. |
- Persson, Beatrice, 1963
(författare)
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In-Between: Contemporary Art in Australia. Cross-culture, Contemporaneity, Globalization
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study emerges from the question: what is contemporary art, and mainly what criteria constitute contemporary art in a globalized art world in general? Thus, the focus of this dissertation is on the postcolonial context of Australia and the fact that the contemporary art scene in Australia is divided into Australian and Aboriginal art respectively. This is a division originating from the colonization of Australia that began in the 1770’s, resulting in an Australian art descending from a Western art practice, where there is further focus on two categories within this art. The first category is a so-called “young” Australian art created by young artists who are returning to skills of, for instance, woodcarving and bronze casting, emphasizing the techniques of creation, and the finish of the surfaces in a do-it-yourself-aesthetic. The second category is called Asian-Australian art, featuring diaspora artists, a category pointing to the fact that Australia is situated in the Asia-Pacific region and has a large Asian population. Aboriginal art, on the other hand, is regarded to be an unbroken tradition dating back some 40,000 years, featuring art created by indigenous artists living on ancestral land in remote communities, often being called traditional Aboriginal art, and city-based Aboriginal art produced by indigenous artists who have grown up and are living in Australian cities and have been educated in Western art schools. These four categories are represented by four artists whose artworks are analysed and interpreted from a cultural semiotic point of view in order to be used in practical examinations of the viability of the two theoretical concepts cross-culture and contemporaneity, as well as an investigation of whether the contemporary global art scene is truly global or still tends to emanate from a Western perspective. In this context the concept of cross-culture is examined through the history of how primitive art and primitive artists, and non-Western art and artists in general, have been apprehended, indicating that the crossing of cultures, making transformations and influences possible in the arts, have taken place from a Western perspective, thus demonstrating power relations deriving from colonization. Contemporaneity should be understood as an inquiry into how various artistic expressions with different time conceptions appear when produced simultaneously in different, closely connected, yet mutually incomparable cultures. This is art that communicates across the divide between cultures and as such grasps the driving spirit of the contemporary.
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| 2. |
- Bengtsen, Peter
(författare)
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The Street Art World
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In recent years, street art has become embedded in popular culture and received growing attention from the art market and art institutions. Work by street artists has entered galleries, auction houses and museums, and some artists have been given the opportunity to create large-scale sanctioned public art projects. Simultaneously, widespread photographic documentation of street artworks and the circulation of images online have provided artists with a potentially global audience. The Street Art World investigates street art as a relatively newly established field within contemporary art. With the American sociologist Howard S. Becker’s notion of “art worlds” as a central point of departure, the book seeks to characterise street art by studying and participating in the everyday interaction among the artists, gallerists, collectors, critics, curators, bloggers and street art enthusiasts that make up the social environment (the street art world) in which the term street art is continuously given its meaning. Major themes addressed in the book include: (1) The social construction of the meaning of the term street art and the resulting difficulties in formally defining what street art is. (2) The often contradictory attitudes within the street art world towards art history and the institutions of art. (3) The relationship between street art, the art market and the institutional art world. (4) The relationship between street art and public art. (5) Street art’s potential to affect the viewer’s perception of public space, and the possible challenges the increasing digital mediation of street art may pose to bringing this potential to fruition. While the book presents central characteristics of the street art movement, it also acknowledges that it is not feasible to pin down the nature of street art once and for all, since street art is a product of complex social processes.
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| 3. |
- Medbo, Mårten, 1964
(författare)
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Lerbaserad erfarenhet och språklighet
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the course of the twentieth century, a doubt emerged – first within visual arts, and later also within crafts – where the relevance of the traditional way of making art was addressed, as were thoughts on what was termed ‘empty shape’. The notion that shape in itself was no longer artistically valid is closely linked to notions of materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom – all of which have had a major influence on contemporary visual arts and crafts, in general, and, more specifically, on what I term ‘theory-practice’ within the field of crafts. During the past few decades, increasing proof of this influence on the field of crafts as a whole has also been experienced. As a ceramist expressing myself through clay, form has never been empty, and clay never a hindrance, and my dissertation is an attempt to put materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom, in context, as well as to reflect upon questions related to their emergence and what impact they have within the field of crafts. My point of departure here is my own experience as an artist and ceramist, where inquiring and exploring takes places through practical knowledge. I argue that there is no such thing as immateriality in art and that all artistic expression requires bodily-situated craft skill of some kind in order to be materialised and communicated, as well as to take place in the world. I also argue that art should be seen as what I term ‘language-practice’. Through this practice I craft the concept of ‘clay-based language-ness’ and ‘language- like-ness’ in order to come as close as possible to describing, in words, the kind of communication I wish to create as a ceramist, as well as what art-making (‘art-crafting’) constitutes when conceptual artists create their art. Regarding crafts as a language-practice, however, conflicts with the theory that is setting the tone as well as leading the field of crafts today. I therefore wish, and propose, to find a way out of this conflict-ridden situation. As part of this endeavour, I present the text-based part of the dissertation and the clay-based part of the dissertation – side by side.
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| 4. |
- Ibrahim, Muna
(författare)
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Effects of Art and Design on Orientation in Healthcare Architecture : A study of wayfinding and wayshowing in a Swedish hospital setting
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates the role of interior design elements, especially artwork, in way-searchers’ wayfinding and orientation in hospital environments. The thesis considers the way-searcher’s background and the impact of cultural belonging, occupation, memories, aesthetic preferences, and language, and the influence that such factors might have on the perception of the hospital environment and its guiding elements. The aim is to increase the knowledge about the role of art objects and how they relate to design processes by studying how art and design appear to users at three different sites at the hospital SUS Malmö, and also to gain insight into decisions made about the design and the placement of public art in a health-care environment.The thesis consists of four studies developed to complement each other. They include three different experiencing perspectives: the visitor’s perspective, the designer’s perspective, and the observing researcher’s perspective. This mix of perspectives helps to obtain a broad understanding of the complex experience and effectiveness of wayshowing design in a health-care environment and of the intentions behind making, choosing, and installing art for and in hospitals. A mixed-methods approach is used that mainly relies on qualitative studies, but that also has some quantitative elements. The techniques used for collecting information are: questionnaire, on-site interviews, semi-structured interviews, walking interviews, observation, and photographic documentation. This mixed-methodological approach is used to attain a successively deeper understanding and acquire more diverse knowledge of the role that interior design and artwork have for wayfinding, and by that also pointing to the development of wayfinding theory, especially as it refers to notions like orientation, wayfinding, legibility, affordance, and familiarity. These theoretical concepts are used here in analyses and descriptions of way-searchers’, especially newcomers’, experiences and perceptions of the interior health-care environment.The four studies of this thesis point out different areas of interest for analyzing wayfinding in hospitals, thus also indicating how they could be considered to guide the design of wayshowing in hospital environments. The areas of interest can be listed as: spatial heterogeneity (about the making of contrasts between spaces); evoked familiarity (about elements in the hospital space that may bring back memories); overfamiliarity (about places taken for granted due to frequent use); broad participation (about consulting a range of users in all stages of the realization of a hospital environment); users’ background (about considering ethnicity, cultural knowledge, occupation, and previous experiences of art), and time- and duration effects (about acknowledging that perception might change during visits or in stays of a longer duration).
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Goldin, Simon
(författare)
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Zero magic : Shifting the Valuation Convention
- 2016
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Zero Magic is a trick for the financial markets, which has the capacity to undermine the perceived value of a publicly traded company and profit from this. Short selling is a way of profiting from loss: Making money if and when a target company loses in value. It is a fundamental market activity that goes as far back as the first stock, yet to this day little is publicly known about the strategies employed by short sellers. On the US exchanges there is no requirement for hedge funds to disclose short positions, and in other jurisdictions such requirements are very limited. Zero Magic was developed by covertly infiltrating a secretive hedge fund specializing in short selling, and reverse engineering its methods. In brief, the hedge fund’s trading strategy is based on identifying suitable short selling targets through analyzing networks of corruption, and then framing critical newsworthy stories about these target companies that can be anonymously distributed among journalists. Profit is gained when a target company loses in value. Rigorous measures are taken by the fund never to be identified as the source of a negative campaign.Access to the hedge fund was gained through the art world. The founder and co-director routinely supports artists and art institutions and is said to have gotten the idea for his fund when looking at a Mark Lombardi drawing (an artist known for mapping networks of power and corruption). It is hard to tell whether the founder’s engagement with art merely entertains personal vanity, or if it functions more strategically as a means of “secret publicity” for the fund; giving access to investors, while staying under the radar of more mainstream public relations. Covert techniques such as hidden recordings and proxy researchers were used to uncover the fund’s methods. With the assistance of Théo Bourgeron, sociologist of finance, Zero Magic not only reconstructs the workings of the trading strategy, but offers a fully operational magic gimmick. The magic gimmick is a computer program providing non-expert users the means to identify relevant short selling targets (companies with weak “valuation conventions”), and a step-by-step guide to undermining their perceived value. With this gimmick one can execute a successful short sale without any previous contacts in the investor community or access to insider information. A US patent application for the trick was filed in January 2016.The artistic PhD “Zero Magic: Shifting the Valuation Convention” concludes with a stage performance and a magic box:The stage performance, “On a Long Enough Timeline the Survival Rate for Everyone Drops to Zero” with magician Malin Nilsson, performed on May 11 and 12, 2016, at Cirkus Cirkör, Stockholm. Through the ticket sales, audience members are drawn into the Zero Magic trick, buying into the predicted future loss of a target company. The magic box, prepared for public archives, contains the Zero Magic computer software, a US patent application for a “Computer Assisted Magic Trick Executed in the Financial Markets” and four historical examples of magic tricks played out beyond the stage, in the world at large.
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| 7. |
- Karlsson Rixon, Annica, 1962
(författare)
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Queer Community through Photographic Acts. Three Entrances to an Artistic Research Project Approaching LGBTQIA Russia
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This compilation thesis is made within the field of fotografisk gestaltning (photography) and is a study of the potential for queer community to emerge through photographic acts. It consists of two artworks that have been presented in a series of exhibitions, published texts, workshops, and lectures. The artworks are the photography-, video-, and sound-based installation State of Mind, and the photographic series At the Time of the Third Reading/Vid tiden för den tredje läsningen/Во время третьего чтения, which is presented as framed images as well as in book form. The publication Queer Community through Photographic Acts introduces the research through three entry points: photography, queer, and artworks. The first two entries highlight how these concepts are used in the research as practices and theories. The latter is a written visit to the artworks that takes place from different temporal and situational positions, and reflects on the work with LGBTQIA issues and community over borders. The focus is on the emergence of community within, and through, the artworks, and how this may produce recognition of certain identities. At the same time, the artworks may destabilize what is taken for norms. How community emerges in the process of making art, as well as when activating the finalized works through exhibitions, workshops, and other presentations, is also explored. The subject of the artworks is lesbian living in St. Petersburg, a Russian women’s camp, and how one may navigate through society as queer identities. Group portraits and community form the overall foundation for the gestaltning of the artworks. The conditions for making art with the Russian LGBTQIA community as an artist from abroad are taken into consideration, as well as other shared embodied positions such as queerness and whiteness. This is performed through notions of positions and movement, as well as paying attention to an in-between – Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept which opens for a space of change and resistance to fixed positioning.
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| 8. |
- Marhöfer, Elke, 1967
(författare)
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Ecologies of Practices and Thinking
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How does a new materialist film practice look? To approach this question the practice-led material driven research explores dynamic ecological relations and processes of thinking and practicing. It employs an animist methodology which allows it to relate to the nonhuman as an active participant, rather than a passive object of inquiry. The approach intensifies affinities and bonds with the other-than-human, and activates a path into materiality and knowledge production different from humanfocused epistemologies. Forming particular connections with matter and situating oneself within specific and relations, the project mobilizes and is mobilized by affects, percepts and sensations of the more-thanhumans. The first chapter inquires into inherited scientific, technological, social-political and philosophical epistemologies often based on colonial and anthropocentric presumptions and mappings of the world. However, the research does not strive to rewrite or reclaim a certain history, identity or a place, it instead outlines concepts like becoming or lines of flight that pass through these legacies, building more complex and fruitful temporalities, interrelations and geographies. The writing often collaborates with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as their philosophy explicitly acknowledges inhuman forces and ambiguous ontologies. In the second chapter the focus moves towards processes, when individuals become multiplicities, when animals, plants and things are endowed with inhuman force or personhood, when matter is enthusiastic and territories are not just static backgrounds. From here the research literally travels. It travels with specific singularities and their material based practices — an entire ecology of practice often building innumerable interconnections and even landscapes. Situating itself within the ecological relational field, the research project explores methodologies of collaboration and becoming with the more-thanhuman practiced by sorcerers and fabulists from Cuba and South Korea, and by farmers from China, Burkina Faso and Japan.
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| 9. |
- Nyberg, Lisa
(författare)
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Pedagogies of the unknown : studying for a future, without guarantees
- 2021
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Lisa Nyberg's PhD project starts from the question: how can we study for a future unknown? In light of anthropogenic climate change, a global environmental crisis, and its destabilizing impact on social and economic systems, there is an urgency to examine how we relate to the future in our pedagogy; how we anticipate, imagine and prepare through our teaching and our studies. At the basis of this research is a teaching practice; the classroom of aesthetic education at the intersection of study, creative work and the institution. From this base a performance practice has developed that draws from lecture performance and meditation as a quotidian and creative practice, to create a series of guided meditations. These are presented as art installations, as sound pieces and as activities in the classroom. The guided meditations propose an experiment in how to address the contradiction of learning for the future, by focusing, intently, on the present. Simultaneously, the project raises a critique of Western constructs of utopia as the dominant form of imagining otherwise, by looking to feminist and de-colonial theory that resist utopian fatalism and claims to universality. The aim is to make a critical shift from utopia towards a constantly changing and undetermined future – the unknown.
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| 10. |
- Nyström, Ingalill, 1969
(författare)
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Bonadsmåleri under lupp: Spektroskopiska analyser av färg och teknik i sydsvenska bonadsmålningar 1700-1870
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The objects of this PhD thesis are Southern Swedish painted wall-hangings: folk art paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries. The aim and objective of the study are: to investigate the construction and manufacturing processes of the painted wall-hangings; to identify both the painting materials and other substances employed; and, to document painting techniques used by different painters within this painted wall-hanging tradition. This is to get an increased understanding of the materials and techniques used, and the material development of these painted objects during the 18th and 19th centuries. The study is interdisciplinary in which Art Technological Source Research (ATSR) is combined with conservation science. Non-destructive and non-invasive analytical methods were preferentially used. Therefore spectroscopic methods including multi-spectral imaging systems, FT-Raman with a micro video probe head, FTIR with diffuse reflectance and Electron Microscopy with Elemental Analysis (SEM-EDX) were applied. Most of these chemical and technical analyses are undertaken on site. Supplementing analyses using spot tests and experimental reconstructions of coloring matters from plants and possible binder composition has then been carried out in the laboratory. In order to understand the manufacturing process of the wall-hangings also mock-ups where made. Historical recipes have been used to make these reconstructions. The Results indicate that generally inexpensive pigments such as chalk, red lead, ochres, orpiment, carbon black and woad have been used. Some artificial pigments such as; Prussian blue, emerald green and chrome yellow were introduced in the wall-hangings in the latter part of the era. The binding media in the paint contains egg and in some cases also starch. The paint is normally painted on reused linen cloth prepared with starch containing glue. During 19th century also paper has been used as a support. Representative for these painted objects is also that templates were adopted for the figures in the picture scenes and motifs. The significance of this study is that the materials science and knowledge of the technology used is important to be able to predict degradation risks, and to develop preventive and remedial conservation strategies for these objects. The technological material knowledge not only is crucial for preservation but also can supplement previous studies and previous attribution of Southern Swedish painted wall-hangings without signature.
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