PhD and Postdoc Projects
Katarina Stenbeck
PhD StudentIn Search of the lost Future is a curatorial practice-based Ph.D. project on the implications of the Anthropocene. I approach the Anthropocene as an event, Rrather than thea geological epoch defined and described by the natural sciences, I approach the Anthropocene as an event, in order to identifying the historical and ideological developments, which have caused radical transformations of the planet and its life- sustaining processes. The project examines European colonialism and early capitalism as a turning point, after which has accelerated the consumption of the planet through a global web of exploitation, legitimized by the ideological paradigm of Western modernity and its externalization of nature, has only accelerated. Following this, I discuss how Capitalist modernity’s repression of otherness creates a knot of destructive processes making possible the increasing extinction of species, peoples and worlds. The project explores the exhibition as a space where questions of the Anthropocene can be approached in new ways, generating other ways of perceiving human and non-human entanglements in the web of life.
Rikke Luther
PhD StudentThe title of my PhD is “Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post Democracy”. As the title suggests, this research has two parts.
The first part of the research is examining the political, and specifically democratic, ‘architectures’ that gave concrete its particular meaning in Scandinavian societies in the era between 1945 and 1980. It is the era of the post-war welfare state in most parts of Europe. More generally, that coincides with the era of universality symbolised by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). So, concrete the universal material seeming gave form to those ideals.
The second part of the research, is examining the current meaning of concrete in the very different context of today. That is a context – beside concrete is negative linked to climate change – defined in relation to what Colin Crouch has defined as the ‘post-democratic era’, in that the main dynamics ordering social space are no longer that of democracy, but rather those based on, or derived from, the freedom of markets.
Practical outputs of this research will use artistic work to generate new, materially embodied, understandings of these developments.
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld
PostdocAffect’s Time is the work title for my post-doctoral research project. Through the triple engagement with the affect, time and materiality of digital image production the project explores how to develop the conceptual framework of what I call affect’s time. The timing of affect is often described as the “missing half-second” between an initial affect is being registered in the brain to the affect’s registration by consciousness, but I suggest that an affective experience opens up to a possibility of multiple space-times existing within the same moment.
Through the production of video installations, archival research and performative presentations, I explore affect’s time as both a glitch to a normative time and a wandering in time that is able to connect different space-times. What I situate with Edward Said as contrapuntal: an awareness of simultaneous dimensions in which new and old environments are occurring together. Film-screenings, performances, exhibitions and discursive events, which I organise in collaboration with other artists and cultural producers at the cultural venue & bar Sorte Firkant | Abajour, pushes the conceptual development of Affect’s Time by creating an intimate space where multiple space-times can exist within the same window pane.
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld (1981) is a visual artist and postdoctoral researcher working with video installation and performative practices. She holds a MFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and a MA in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College 2007 and a PhD from University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts & Cultural Studies. Her artistic research PhD Time in the Making: Rehearsing Reparative Critical Practices (2015) develops the conceptual and practical framework of reparative practices by shifting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the reparative reading from a hermeneutics to an image practice. She has developed the video installations Djisr (The Bridge) 2008, TIME: AALBORG | SPACE: 2033 (2010), movement (2012), Leap into Colour (2012- 2015), Schizo Archive (w. Arendse Krabbe, Mathias Kryger & Nina Wengel 2016), The Christmas Report & Other Fragments (ongoing). Her current artistic work & research explores notions of affect, time and materiality through a collective engagement with the bar & cultural venue Sorte Firkant | Abajour, which she is a co-founder of.
Mads Kullberg
Researcher, PhDThe Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ collections
Institution history, art history and learning utility
This project studies how an art academy’s collections of works and study objects evolve through ongoing mutual exchanges between concepts such as identity production, cultural heritage and practical learning utility.
Through different eras, changing approaches and attitudes towards these concepts have, of course, had a major impact on the academy’s collecting activities and emphases. Parts of the collections are formal in nature and were acquired as part of the academy’s programme (such as the Academy’s art collection), while others relate directly to a given didactic function (such as the Schools of Visual Arts’ collection of plaster casts and parts of the print collection).
One of the subjects naturally arising when studying the use of collections concerns the extent to which past and present professors and students at the academies are inspired by, challenge, and interpret the vast body of historical material embedded in the collections – and how this aspect as well as changing practices and changing perceptions of art are reflected in the overall composition, priorities, accessibility and upkeep of the academy collections.
The project takes its starting point in the Schools of Visual Arts’ own collection, but will encompass comparative studies that investigate how other European art academies with similar backgrounds relate to their collections and other cultural heritage. These will include the Royal Academy of Arts in London, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan.
