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The Looking Glass Dialogues presents Magnus Bärtås and Sam Hultin in a conversation on archives and microhistory in the context of artistic research. Bärtås and Hultin share important methodological ground in their commitment to close reading of collected material, their attention to narrative construction, and their sustained critical engagement with how history is mediated. Each insists on staying with specific lives rather than resorting to grand synthesis or explanatory closure.
Yet their practices also diverge in productive ways as well. Bärtås’ practice deploys montage and essayistic structures to examine geopolitical histories. Hultin’s work foregrounds embodied research, durational engagement, and the collective activation of archives.
Taking a cue from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the conversation unfolds across a reflective threshold—between visual analysis and participatory practice; between institutional archives and personal ones shaped by intimate proximity.
The Looking-Glass Dialogues foregrounds practice-based reflection based on the assumption that artistic research must be defined by artists through their methodological, material, and institutional entanglements. The series hopes to offers a nuanced contribution to current debates on the politics of knowledge production in contemporary art.
Magnus Bärtås is a Swedish artist, writer, and filmmaker, and Professor of Fine Art at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. His work is situated at the intersection of artistic practice and historical inquiry, with a sustained focus on moving image practices, narrative structures, textile, and the politics of representation.
Bärtås is the author of several books that combine artistic research, essayistic writing, and case-based analysis, including You Told Me – Work Stories and Video Essays (2010) and Bebådaren – Gabrielle D’Annunzio och fascismens födelse (”The Annunciator – Gabriele D’Annunzio and the birth of fascism”), together with Fredrik Ekman. His publications examine micro historical cases and threads, engaging with life- and work stories, the meaning of biographies, necromancing and speculative historiography.
His artistic research frequently takes the form of installation, video essays and film works that engage with archival material, dilettant research, testimonial narratives, and historical events, investigating how meaning is constructed through audiovisual regimes. During recent years his film practice is made in collaboration with Swedish-Iranian artist Behzad Khosravi Noori. In addition to his artistic and scholarly work, Bärtås has been actively involved in the development of artistic research and doctoral education in the arts in Sweden through his long-standing role as Deputy Vice-Chancellor for research at Konstfack.
Sam Hultin is a Swedish artist and writer based in Stockholm. Hultin’s artistic practice engages with queer history, identity, community, and the relationships between personal experience and broader social and political structures. They work with performance, video, public events, and participatory formats including city walks, sing-alongs, and collective reading events that foreground queer histories in public space.
Hultin holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Konstfack in Stockholm (2012). Their work is included in the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Statens konstråd (the Swedish Public Art Agency), Göteborgs konstmuseum, Gotlands konstmuseum, and Malmö konstmuseum.
Since 2019 Hultin has developed Eva-Lisa’s Monument, a long-term memory and archival project based on the life and archives of Swedish lesbian activist and trans trailblazer Eva-Lisa Bengtson (1932–2018). This project has taken form through public walks, collective readings, archival research, texts, and other formats, and has an associated book, Eva-Lisa’s monument: Berättelsen om en transpionjär, published by Brombergs förlag in 2025. The archive material Hultin received from Bengtson is preserved at Queerrörelsens Arkiv och Bibliotek (QRAB) in Gothenburg.
Hultin was a recipient of the Ganneviksstipendiet in 2024 from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.