The Fine Art department's public lecture and artist talk series are for free and open to the public.
Spring 2024
World in My Eyes – Geo Wyex
6 March 2024
Tickets: www.stadsmissionen.se/motesplats-mariatorget/kalendarium
Autumn 2023
World in My Eyes is a series of artist talks presenting pioneering practices in sound, performance, sculpture, and painting that transforms the field of contemporary art. A collaboration between Moderna Museet, the Royal Institute of Art and Konstfack, hosted by Mötesplats Mariatorget 2023-2024.
Its title drawn from the eponymous 1990s electronic music hit by English band Depeche Mode, the series aims to present artistic perspectives from a wide range of media that are changing the relationship between material processes and socio-political imagination.
Emeka Ogboh
7 September 2023
Yazan Khalili
24 October 2023
CANCELED - Nairy Baghramian
8 November 2023
Spring 2023
Artists Talk: Cecilia Edefalk
25 April, 17:30 - 19:00
Svarta Havet, Konstfack
Artist Talk with Ellie Ga
29 March 2023, 17:30 - 19:00
Svarta Havet, Konstfack
ELLIE GA is a New York City born artist and writer. Her narrative-based videos and performances reflect a passion for multi-disciplinary knowledge exchange told through everyday conversations, poetic sidesteps and obsessive research. Her wide-ranging investigations address pressing social issues, often in unexpected contexts: from the submerged ruins of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria (Square Octagon Circle) and the charting of the quotidian in the frozen Arctic Ocean (The Fortunetellers) to a study of messages in bottles, both as tools for studying oceans currents and as metaphor for exile (Strophe, A Turning; Gyres 1-3). In Quarries, stories of resistance are extracted from unlikely places and found on overlooked surfaces including the mysteries of prehistoric stone tools to the labor of stone masons who paved the streets of Lisbon.
Artist Talk with Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
22 February 2023, 17:30 - 19:00
Svarta Havet, Konstfack
Introduced by Ameena Alali (MA1) and Wilma Hultgren (BA2)
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (PE) is an artist and researcher of transdisciplinarity, working with textile assemblages and embroideries, painting, sound, text, digital media, interactive art, A.I. and video. She explores the boundaries and connections in between tactility, the visual and audio related to the human voice, to nature, and to synthetic ones whose listening is often considered less harmonious, such as machine or digital noises. Her work is complex: she explores the limits of the senses, examining the concepts of interpretation, translation, and misrepresentation, to reflect on mediated sensorial experiences while questioning the cultural hegemony within the history of Technology and the Arts.
She is the recipient of the Stockholms stads kulturstipendium 2022 and of the Honorary Mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2021. She has also has been awarded the Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant from Google Arts and Culture and Google AI in 2020 and was the winner of the “Local Media: Amazon Ecoregion: contest of Vivo Arte.mov in Brazil, 2013. Her works are in collections of the Swedish Public Art Agency and Malmo City Museum.
Spring 2022
Artist Talk with Sergei Tcherepnin
30 May, 17:30-19:00
Mandelgren
Introduced by Livia Prawitz (MA1) and Villiam Törngren Gonzalez (BA1).
Jamie Crewe
20 January, 17:30-19:00
Zoom lecture
Introduced by Jens Masimov (MA2) and Lia Hietala (K2)
Jamie Crewe (b. 1987, Manchester, UK). Jamie Crewe is a beautiful bronze figure with a polished cocotte's head. They grew up in the Peak District, England, and are now settled in Glasgow, Scotland. They have presented several solo exhibitions, including Ashley at LUX Moving Image, London (2020); Solidarity & Love at Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2020); Love & Solidarity at Grand Union, Birmingham (2020); Pastoral Drama at Tramway, Glasgow (2018); Female Executioner at Gasworks, London (2017); and But what was most awful was a girl who was singing at Transmission, Glasgow (2016). In 2019 Jamie was awarded the tenth Margaret Tait Award, and in 2020 they were awarded one of ten Turner Bursaries. They are currently working on a new commission in tandem with a research project at Edinburgh Law School, responding to the theme of identity deception and its history in Scots law; the resultant work, titled False Wife, is a poppers training video which guides a viewer through an ordeal of transformation.
Autumn 2021
Laura Huertas Millán
28 October, 17:30-19:00
Mandelgren
Introduced by Josse Thuresson (MA2) and Karin Keisu (MA2)
Laura Huertas Millán (b.1983, Bogota, Colombia) lives in Paris, France. Entwining ethnography, ecology, fiction and historical enquiries, her moving image work engages with strategies of survival, resistance and resilience against violence. Building complex visual and sonic worlds infused by the real, her cinematographic practice circulates between contemporary art venues and international film festivals. Recent solo exhibitions and film retrospectives include venues such as the Liverpool Biennial, UK (2021); Sao Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Brazil (2019); Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), UK (2018). Huertas Millán is on the faculty of the Bard MFA graduate program, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
Spring 2021
Jimmy Robert zoom lecture
25 February, at 6:00 - 7:30 pm
Jimmy Robert, born 1975 in Guadeloupe (France), lives and works in Berlin.
In recent years, Robert has exhibited at 8th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Tate Britain, London; WIELS, Brussels; CCA Kitakiushu Project Gallery, Japan; Cubitt Gallery, London; Neuer Aachen Kunstverein, Germany; CAC Bretigny, France. Jimmy Robert was the 2009 laureate of the Follow Fluxus–After Fluxus grant. In 2012 Jimmy Robert had two solo shows one at gallery du Jeu de Paume in Paris and one at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago and in June 2013 a solo show at the Power plant in Toronto. He performed at MoMA New-York in 2014 and participated to Performa 17 in 2017 and was commissioned in 2019 to do a new performance at KW in Berlin. He Participated in the recent Chicago architecture biennial and is currently working on a touring mid-career survey which will start at Nottingham contemporary then go to Museion Bolzano and then CRAC de Sète this year. He is currently professor of Sculpture and Performance at UdK, Berlin.
Jimmy Robert works with diverse media including photography, collages, objects, art books, short films and performance art. In his explorations into the relationship between images and objects, Robert draws attention to the dynamics of different surfaces. Questions of identity and its representation are his main interest, and he uses a variety of references to literature, art and music to emphasise the fragility of the materials he uses. In some performances Robert's body becomes a projection surface, where the tension between the portrayal and the content reveal the relationship between appropriation and alienation. In previous works, Robert has explored the politics of spectatorship by reworking seminal avant-garde performances in ways that complicate their racial and gendered readings.
Art Dept Lecture Series presents: Ed Atkins
17 February, at 6:00 - 7:30 pm
Ed Atkins (born 1982, UK)
Solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Bregenz; Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin; K21 Dusseldorf; Castello di Rivoli in Turin; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Serpentine Gallery in London; and MoMA PS1 in New York, among others.
He was included in the 56th and 58th Venice biennales, and his works are in the collections of many museums and public institutions, including the Guggenheim, MoMA, Tate, the Smithsonian, and Musée d'Art moderne, Paris. Forthcoming solo projects include the New Museum in New York, Tank Shanghai, and Tate Britain in London.
His artwork is the subject of several monographs, and he has published two works of fiction with Fitzcarraldo editions: the collection, A Primer for Cadavers; and an epic antipoem, Old Food. Atkins is represented by Gladstone in New York, Cabinet Gallery in London, Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie in Berlin, and dependance in Brussels.
Atkins has been a professor and lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, the Steadelschule in Frankfurt, and Goldsmiths College in London. Ed lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Camilla Akraka via Zoom
11 February, at 6:00 - 7:30 pm
Camilla Akraka föddes 1968 i London. Uppvuxen i Stockholm och Roslagen och nu bosatt i Östergötland.
Efter en karriär som fri idrottare utexaminerades Akraka med en MFA från Kungl. Konsthögskolan 2001.
Akraka har sedan dess arbetat främst med skulptur och måleri. Utställningar inkluderar "Pasaportes" Angelika Knäpper Gallery, Stockholm, 2011 år, "Colonial Rooms" Konsthall Passagen, Linköping, 2014.
2019 placerades Metoomonumentet "Listen!" på Rådhustorget i Umeå för att uppmärksamma de röster som bröt tystnaden i samband #metoo-upproret, hösten 2017.
Frågor om klass, kön, ras, ålder och utseende, är ständigt närvarande i mina verk och här finns ofta ett ifrågasättande av en etablerad position eller roll. Jag förhåller mig ofta symboliskt och i mina skulpturer ligger fokus på fördelningen av massa i kroppar.
Autumn 2020
Amy Sillman open lecture
17 December, at 6:00-7:30 pm
Sillman will be presenting a newly written talk on her "principles for painting" which can also be said to be an "ethics of tactility."
Lubaina Himid Zoom lecture
2 december 2020 kl 18:00 - 19:30
Lubaina Himid (b. Zanzibar, 1954) lives and works in Preston, UK. For more than four decades Himid has created paintings, drawings and installations that uncover and celebrate marginalised histories, figures, and forms cultural expression. Her work frequently references art history and the so-called canon as a means to address the invisibility of the black body in the Western pictorial tradition. Countering such selective histories and narratives, her work presents stories, characters and voices through vibrant colours, lively forms, rich imagery, and diverse references from poetry and other art forms. Himid's painting practice frequently moves beyond the wall-based work onto a variety of surfaces and objects, including newspaper, furniture, and tableware, as well as life-size cutouts figures imbued with performative potential.
She has been pivotal in the UK since the 1980s for her contributions to the British Black arts movement, making space for the expression and recognition of Black experience and women's creativity. In 2017 she was awarded the Turner Prize and in 2018 she was bestowed with the honorary title of CBE for her contributions to the arts. Himid is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire.
If you can not attend live, the lecture will be recorded and available on Konstfack's website shortly after the event.
Spring 2020
Lecture 03
Jumana Manna
Tuesday 21 January 2020, 17:30-19:00
Konstfack, Svarta Havet
Introduction by Sahar Al Khateeb (MA1)
Jumana Manna (b. 1987) is a visual artist working primarily with film and sculpture. Her work explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of nationalism, and histories of place.
She was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012 and the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts in 2017. Manna has participated in various film festivals and exhibitions, including Henie Onstad Museum, Norway, 2018; Mercer Union, Canada, 2017; Jeu de Paume and CAPC Bordeaux, France, 2017; SculptureCenter, USA, 2014; Marrakech Biennale 6, 2016; The Nordic Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale; as well as the 54th and 56th Viennale International Film Festivals, 66th and 68th Berlinale and CPH:DOX 2018, where Wild Relatives won the New:Visions award. Manna was raised in Jerusalem and is currently based in Berlin.
Autumn 2019
Lecture 01
Michael Rakowitz
Thursday 19 September 2019, 17:30 - 19:00
Konstfack, Svarta havet
Introduction by Isabella Kalén (BA2) and Ferdinand Evaldsson (MA2)
Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist whose projects grapple with the history of Iraq, its diaspora, and the broader Middle East. Projects such as The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2007-ongoing) and Enemy Kitchen (2003—ongoing) contend with the aftermath of the US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq in 2003.
"Over the years Rakowitz has received great acclaim for projects that push gestures of ostranenie, or estrangement, to operatic dimensions: In New York he once served an Iraqi-inspired dish on plates looted from Saddam Hussein's palaces (Spoils, 2011), and for Documenta 13 he presented copies of books that were burned in the Fridericianum in Kassel during World War II; the copies were carved from travertine collected in the hills of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, where the Taliban blew up two massive sixth-century sand- stone Buddhas in 2001 (What Dust Will Rise?, 2012).
"For Rakowitz, the practice of, lifting an object or material from its given context and embedding it in an unexpected setting or giving it an unwonted purpose lends itself to a multidimensional confrontation that is powerful not only for the highly politicized and controversial terms of this dislocation but also for foregrounding destruction as the defining motif in the history of civilizations."
- Gökcan Demirkazık, Artforum review January 2019
Michael Rakowitz's exhibition The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (Room G) is on view at Malmö Konsthall from 14.9 2019 – 12.1 2020.
Rakowitz has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including a major survey of his practice this year at Whitechapel Gallery, London, Castello di Rivoll, Turin, and Malmö Konsthall. He has been featured in group exhibitions including the 14th Istanbul Biennial; Yokohama Triennale, Japan; and Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany. He recently completed the Fourth Plinth commission in London's Trafalgar Square. He is Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.
Lecture 02
James Richards
Thursday 10 October 2019, 17:30-19:00
Konstfack, Mandelgren
Introduced by Erik Viklund (MA1)
James Richards' artist talk includes a compilation video made specifically for this single occasion and shown 'for one night only.' Titled Some Rushes, it re-appropriates a selection of his earlier works, as well as work from other artists with whom he has had a continued dialogue with. In that spirit, one of Richards' long-time conversation partners, artist Martin Gustavsson, senior lecturer in art at the Department of Fine Art at Konstfack, will lead a question and answer session, weaving in his own relationship to Richards' work.
Due to copyright reasons, James Richards' compilation video Some Rushes has been edited out of the lecture documentation.
James Richards (born Cardiff 1983) is an artist living and working in Berlin, Germany. Through archival research, found footage and extensive collaboration, his video, sound and curatorial projects examine themes of obsession, desire and technology.
James Richards' solo exhibition Speed II (with Leslie Thornton) was presented at Malmö Konsthall from 16 March – 26 May 2019.
Other recent solo exhibitions include Crossing (With Leslie Thornton), Secession Vienna, Migratory Motor Complex, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff (both 2018) Music for the gift, Welsh Pavilion at the Venice Biennial (2017), Requests and Antisongs, ICA London; Crumb Mahogany, Bergen Kunsthall and Radio at Night, Museum of Contemporary Art Bordeaux (all 2016); James Richards, Kunstverein Munchen (2015) and Not Blacking Out Just Turning The Lights Off, Chisenhale London (2011).
Previous Artist Talks
Sharon Hayes
Wednesday 10 April 2019, 17:30-19:00
Konstfack, Mandelgren
Sharon Hayes' Artist Talk in April 2019 was the precursor to the current Artist Talk Series. Find more information about Sharon Hayes' practice and artist talk at the link below:
www.konstfack.se/Aktuellt/Kalender/2019/Open-Lecture-and-Artist-Talk-with-Sharon-Hayes/