While the topic of das unheimliche seems to have had a breakthrough within literary as well as film studies, it has remained a marginalised topic within the art history field as it has been argued that there is little definitive about its apperance as well as its passing and too dependent on personal history and the psychological disposition of the percieving subject to be ascribed any general validity. This essay has attempted to inquire into wether das unheimliche is merely a subjective experience or if it can be linked to an aesthetic quality and an aesthetic procedure. Taking its starting point in the works of two swedish artists, the purpose of this study has been to investigate, through semiotic analysis, if they can be said to contribute to creating an unheimlich experience through a combination of visual techniques. 

The reults show that it is possible to link the unheimlich experience back to visual techniques such as the combination of separate and conflicting imagery and through the act of introducing strange elements into a familiarised setting. These techniques work to prolong the perception of the image through suspending the viewer in uncertainty. The unheimlich experience can thus be argued to have less to do with personal history and psychological dispositions and more to do with socially,culturally and historically shared references which underlies the perceived clash between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Abstract

Comments regarding Swedish graffiti writer NUG’s film Territorial Pissing (2008) express how graffiti and art appear to be two different worlds and when these worlds come together the expression of graffiti seems to transform. This thesis, Graffiti at stake: a qualitative study, via NUG, about the autonomy in graffiti, aims to both examine and bring about a general discussion on whether graffiti is autonomous when it enters the art world. The thesis also discusses transformed content and expression in the works of NUG when performed in a different context; what is exhibited in an institutional art context and what positions does NUG occupy? The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieus conceptions field and autonomy has been used as a theoretical framework, and partly as method as well. By studying the works of NUG another expression has been found within an institutional art context – black irrational lines and cascades. These are interpreted as energy generated from the act of performing graffiti and have been discussed in relation to the graffiti- and art practice as well as the symbolic capital. The thesis argues that the autonomy is situated in what is recognized and acknowledged. The thesis also concludes that NUG is entering into a masculine, conventional and strong artist position, similar to Pollock.

The monumental sculpture group The Fantastic Paradise (Le Paradis Fantastique, 1967), a collaboration between the artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, was donated to Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden and installed by the water on the island Skeppsholmen in 1971. This was followed by a conflict that lasted 16 years centered around the relationship between the sculptures and the surroundings, in which The Fantastic Paradise was perceived by some as both grotesque and obscene, as well as highly unsuitable in relation to the historical environment. As a result, the sculpture group was moved to a less visible location in 1987.

This thesis aims firstly to examine the historical context of the donation of The Fantastic Paradise to Moderna Museet. The study shows that the donation was the lucky result of a series of events shaped by circumstances such as personal relationships. The artists were life-long friends of the director of the museum at the time, Pontus Hultén, who aimed to incorporate avantgardist ideas into the museum's activities in the 1960’s. The Fantastic Paradise, located in front of the entrance of the museum, continues to function as a reminder of that era, which has come to be seen as the institution's formative years.

Secondly, this thesis aims to contextualise and interpret the meaning of the art work through the use of semiotic theory and the concept of the implicit beholder. This interpretive part of the study is divided into two chapters, in accordance with the dualistic structure of the sculpture group itself. It follows two separate but linked theoretical directions: movement in Jean Tinguely’s machines, and corporeality and femininity in the Nanas, fantasy creatures and vegetation motifs of Niki de Saint Phalle. The interpretation shows that The Fantastic Paradise through both of these aspects can be read as an anti-classicistic comment in an art historical perspective. The concept of movement can be found not only in the actual movements of the kinetic sculptures, but also, in the case of The Fantastic Paradise, implies an idea of an activated, embodied beholder that is constructed as a political subject.

Rapporten ämnar ge en grundläggande översikt över hur konstnärers personarkiv hanteras i det svenska arkivväsendet. Den är tänkt att utgöra ett underlag för vidare studier, där frågorna kan fördjupas och undersökas vidare. Rapporten utreder vart personarkiv efter svenska bildkonstnärer kan doneras, hur beslutsprocessen ser ur samt vilka problem som kan uppstå specifikt för konstnärers personarkiv. Med utgångspunkt i en kvalitativ fallstudie har material samlats in från åtta konst- och arkivinstitutioner. 

Un débat entre Bilo Høegh Stigsen, Anja Kervanto Nevanlinna, Morten Birk Jørgensen, Tor Lindstrand et Håkan Nilsson, mené par Nicolas Escach

This study is concerned with portraiture as a roleplay and a strategy to communicate the sitter´s identity to affect the viewer. Focusing on the sitter´s pose and the depiction of dress, the study examines three portraits between 1624 and the 1630s, representing Herman Wrangel (1584–1643), Field Marshal and Councilor of the Realm. The analysis is based on the concept, the fiction of the pose, developed by Harry Berger Jr. The idea of Theatricality discussed by Hanneke H Grootenboer´s is also used. The results show that dress, details of dress and the pose which are significant for the identity of the sitter are depicted with emphasis. Therefore, the dress and the pose have a key role in the depiction of the sitter acting his identity. The sitter acts before the artist and in the long run before the beholder. The portrait of the nobleman becomes a monologue for the beholder who can confirm the nobility´s role in society.

NUESTRAS MADRES is an artwork by the art collective IDA performed at the AHRA Architecture and Feminisms Conference (2016), which consisted of a collective ritual and a poetry reading. The ritual created a safe space where a group of participants sat around a table taking turns in sharing their stories about their mothers while embroidering their mothers’ names on a single tablecloth. These were synthesized into a poem and presented the following day. IDA investigates issues in private and public space connected to knowledge production and gender normativity. Even though the role of mothers and their knowledge is usually connected to the private sphere, the knowledge of our mothers and their mothers shared en la mesa - over the table - is important in the construction of political subjects. How has this knowledge helped us survive in society as women, queer, indigenous, working class, Muslim, immigrant - as human beings?

Chile’s democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende came to power in 1970. Then came the dictatorship that began with Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973. It was perhaps logical that the European art world came to the aid of its Chilean colleagues in a great wave of solidarity. 

The long 1970s has been connected to solidarity movements. Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine were among the countries supported by solidarity activists. Several so-called museums-in-exile were created. In particular, one source of inspiration was the Museo de la Resistencia Salvador Allende in Chile. This became a model also for the much older Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) Unified Information Office that organised the International Art Exhibition for Palestine. 

This booklet documents the Witness seminar that was held 19 February 2017 at Tensta Konsthall, where people met to discuss their involvement in the solidarity movements for Chile and Palestine.

Den 9 maj 1958 invigdes Moderna Museet i marinens gamla Exercishall på Skeppsholmen i Stockholm. Museet var inte en självständig institution utan Nationalmuseums avdelning för modern konst med Bo Wennberg som chef. Året därpå tog Pontus Hultén över.

Under Hulténs ledning blev Moderna ett av Europas viktigaste museer för modern konst. Men det var också något av stockholmarnas kulturhus, bland annat inspirerat av Stedelijk Museum i Amsterdam, med plats för film, musik, teater, happenings och modevisningar.

Efter de första årens framgångar möttes Hultén av ett kulturpolitiskt motstånd mot slutet av 1960-talet. Hultén kritiserades för ointresse för den svenska konsten, för bristande politiskt engagemang och för att gå den amerikanska imperialismens ärenden.

Den 26 april 2017 anordnade Samtidshistoriska institutet tillsammans med forskningsprojektet Levande arkiv: Pontus  Hultén på Moderna Museet (1957-73), fiansierat av Vetenskapsrådet och placerat vid ämnet Konstvetenskap, Södertörns högskola, ett vittnesseminarium om Pontus Hulténs tid på Moderna Museet.

The concepts of social realism and new realism are developed in relation to the artworks of Lena Svedberg and Olle Kåks. A comparison between the artists’ uses of the concepts of social realism and function is presented. How the realist approach during the years around 1970 played out in the force field of society and the psyche, the collective realm and the individual, is exemplified by our two very different case studies. Svedberg’s political narratives compose mon-tages in which fictional, metaphorical figures are inserted side by side with political leaders drawn from newspaper clips. Kåks’s allegory-like oil painting shows a stone worker working in the face of his imminent disappearance. They both reveal myths as opposed to historically manifested commodity relations.

The title of this anthology, Regionality/Mondiality: Perspectives on Art, Aesthetics and Globalization, signals the regional dimension inherent in the globalization of the arts. Rejecting a comprehensive theory of globalization, the texts in this anthology instead circumscribe a situated understanding of the production and interpretation of the arts, which serves to condition cultural translatability. The texts of the anthology argue that cultural translatability should be considered through the concept of regionality, that is, the quality of being both territorially and relationally situated. Bypassing the abstract and politically charged category of “nationality,” regionality addresses human relations in and through the more tangible physical environment in and by which they are configured. As seen in the work on archipelagic thinking by the Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, both the cultural and physical aspects of one’s immediate environment are used to articulate a form of self-understanding in the face of cultural and economic expansion, the particular character of which is indicated by the term mondiality. This concept derives from the French word for “world” or “people,” and thus affirms the fundamentally social and cultural character of experiences thought of as global. Each of the eleven contributions in this volume brings its own perspective on arts and aesthetics, producing world-views that still share a keen awareness of their partialness.

The contributors are: Charlotte Bydler, J. Michael Dash, John Drabinski, Martin Svensson Ekström, Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, Christina Kullberg, Lisette Lagnado, André Lepecki, Patricia Lorenzoni, Cecilia Sjöholm, and Terry Smith.

This paper is an expression of the social anthropologist's frustration with not being there, and an attempt to deal with my own chronic disciplinary identity crisis and my "it's complicated" relationship with participant observation.1 I have worked for a long time now in an interdisciplinary setting, and although I sometimes characterize myself as an interdisciplinary bastard, I have retained a rather strong identification as an anthropologist. This identification is perhaps paradoxical as one of my main reasons for applying to an interdisciplinary PhD program was to get away from social anthropology. As a master's student, I became increasingly frustrated with anthropology and its insistence on ethnographic fieldwork as the one (and only) way to do research. I remember my annoyance with my supervisor's question, 'but how is this anthropology' as she was reading my proposals, until I finally included a passage on participant observation, which appeased her. I remember reading master's thesis upon master's thesis where it seemed to me that participant observation was actually quite ill-suited for investigating the issues at hand. And then, finally, I remember my relief when one of our professors tried to instil in us, that there are 'other ways of knowing about the world' than participant observation. I came to my PhD studies with a thematic I wanted to study: the memory and commemoration of the Second World War in Russia. It was a topic I far from exhausted in my master's thesis, and a doctoral dissertation later I could easily devote a few more years to it. I also had a vague idea on how to go about studying it. Participant observation was to be a part of it, but I did not envisage it as the main part. Through serendipity, I happened upon the search for fallen soldiers, and ended up doing far more anthropological fieldwork than I would ever have imagined. It was quite literally field work, where I took part in work on the former battlefields to locate the remains of soldiers, fallen but often officially listed as missing in action. It was heavy, dirty, cold (or sometimes too hot) and very participatory, even hands-on. It was in many ways life-changing; allowing me close. 

The article will by emphasizing a transnational and geopolitical approach, investigate eight exhibitions of modern art from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden presented in Nordic cities 1946–1959. The text highlights the importance of this regional context and argues that the artworks can be seen as socially interconnected signs mediated through the communicative agency of the exhibitions. By focusing on subject matter and artwork titles presented, the article suggests that the exhibitions can be viewed as part of interacting artistic, civic, and political agendas aiming to democratize culture in the postwar Nordic welfare states.

The historical study of art in relation to geographical space has for a long time been biased by the “canonical logic” of the centre–periphery narrative. This text takes as its starting point a methodological critique of this binary framework by using an example from Swedish art history, namely the art historical narrative of 1950s Sweden as a slumbering Nordic province slowly being awoken by the heroic and foresighted efforts of the Swedish curator Pontus Hultén. The text analyses two local contexts between 1944 and 1953: a presumed periphery, Stockholm, Sweden, and a presumed centre, Paris, France, and the collaboration between individuals in these two spaces. In focus is a 1953 exhibition in Paris of Swedish abstract art from 1913 to 1953. The text concludes with a methodological discussion arguing that by considering “the material conditions of encounters and exchange”, it becomes clear that the transnational contacts in these cases were spurred by local competition and that they were mutually dependent, rather than a product of diffusions of aesthetic innovation from centre to periphery.

From the perspective of art history and sociology, this article investigates the artist Nils Wedel (1897–1967) and his position as head teacher to the department of decorative painting at the art and design school Slöjdskolan in Gothenburg 1938–1953. The article argues that the recruitment of Wedel can be seen as a strategic outcome of combination of his deviant interest in abstract art (compared to his more successful expressionist contemporaries) and his modest career. Supporting his family as a graphic designer, he was, due to his abstract “inclinations”, isolated from the dominant networks of Francophile and well-tempered expressionist art in Stockholm and Gothenburg in the 1930s and 1940s. However, this homology of aesthetic and social characteristics that positioned him in the margins of contemporary Swedish art made him the perfect teacher to meet the increased demand in Sweden in the late 1930s for art and design artists tuned to modernist idioms and skilled in professional methods of visual design. In commercial work in visual imagery, such as advertisements, shop window displays, or even carpet design, abstraction had become fashionable by the early 1930s. Wedel's introduction of a basic form course in 1946 can be seen as a pedagogical confirmation of this attraction of modernist idioms. In the geographical, social and aesthetic periphery, it was possible to build a pedagogical setting that introduced students to the then historical avant-garde of abstract art and modern idioms while also training skills valuable for a commercial career. © 2015 The Author(s)

At the center of attention of this issue is trans-local, transnational, regional, and worldwide contacts inside and outside the Nordic-Baltic region from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. As an introduction, this text attempts to give an overview of some of its major themes and findings. It highlights how the interactive function of cross-border contacts is demonstrated by cases of art and design transfers, artistic travels, Scandinavian intellectual contacts, and cross-border connections over 100 years. Together, the texts published in this issue reflect the interdependent nature of international relations and the vital function of intermediate positions.

Anna Riwkin photographed Elise Ottesen-Jensen over three consecutive decades. The aim of the thesis is to examine what Riwkin’s photographs of Ottesen-Jensen portray, how they have been used, and how Ottesen-Jensen is visually produced as a political subject through the same photographs. By examining a material selected through extensive research in personal-, magazine- and newspaper archives, exhibition catalogues and research, an image of – and story about – Ottesen-Jensen has taken shape. In the process, a collaboration and joint agency with Riwkin have materialized. The story about Ottesen-Jensen is presented through the suggested concepts of the talker, the listener, the traveler, the teacher, and the president. The thesis makes visible how that story was shaped and received, as well as how it is reproduced and evolving today.

Through the story of Kathputli Colony, thiss essay; Creating Urbanity – Destroying Cultures, Relationships Between Public and Private in Kathputli Colony, New Delhi, India, discusses various degrees of public and private in urban architecture. It compares the architecture of the former Kathputli Colony with the new architecture proposed for the site.

Striving to become a “world class city”, Delhi has, through the Master Plan 2021, decided to raze all informal settlements and replace them with high-rises. Kathputli Colony was such an informal settlement; an urban environment built up by an architecture that responded to the needs and economic means of its inhabitants. Its design was the result of network connections and personal relationships merging public and private life.

The essay concludes that Kathputli Colony consisted of a heterogeneous architecture, that had more in common with pre-industrial urbanism and village-architecture, than with the modernist architecture of the high-rises with its clear separation between public and private, work and leisure.

In this essay called Searching for Language at the Frontiers of Pain. Lenke Rothman and possibilities and limitations of languages in front of phenomenon of pain, I investigate how experiences of pain and suffering is communicated through four artworks by artist Lenke Rothman (1929-2008). Having survived the Holocaust, she felt, like many other, that testimony of pain and suffering was impossible within the limits of language. Through a semiotic model for analysis, using Rothmans experiences of both physical and psychological pain as context for interpretation, I discuss how the artworks as visual instead of textual can communicate experience when language fails. With a theoretical starting point in phenomenological theories of pain as something that escapes conceptual definition, I show how the symbolic level in the artworks is able to expand meaning when it comes to the phenomenon of pain. It happens in the gap between words as describing an artworks as showing.

This article derives from the research project entitled "Art, Culture and Conflict: Transformations of Museums and Memory Culture around the Baltic Sea after 1989;" which was financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, Sodertorn University. It discusses how history museums in Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have reacted to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the conclusion of the Soviet occupation of the three Baltic states. It argues that the Cold War is understood by the museums as a special historical epoch not comparable to any other historical period in these six countries. It concludes that to be able to deal with this particular point in history we either need to metaphorically put the Cold War in between red brackets, as it were, which makes it possible to address the Cold War when needed, or to place it outside the historical narrative of the modern rise of the five discussed nation-states.

The thesis proposes the use of listening as a method of unfolding material relationships between time and space. Partly as sound as a powerful stimulus, but also an ephemeral phenomenon. By analysing and describing sound recordings from Moderna Museet in two contexts, now and then, the study outlines the tension between history and memory, remembering and forgetting. The first part approaches this juxtaposition in the echo of the museum by listening to the past through archive studies. The second part analyses the sound of the present through soundwalks. The empirical material of the study strained through theories about the memory and an ambiguous subject defined by a community brings the museum’s now and then together. Through time and space and a sonic subject that can be discerned by defining a narrative of post-silence, which produces and manipulates spaces through sound. Finally, by identifying socio-cultural signs and sonic power the study proposes the act of listening towards multisensory perception.

This essay focuses on the digitalization of art canonisation in the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo/Nintendo EPD, 2020). Furthermore, the purpose of this essay is to understand which artworks the game incorporates in its museum, as well as how the player can interact with the artworks in question. Bolter and Grusin's remediation theory are thoroughly explored through the material, as well as the maintaining of norms through representation. The conclusion is that the game allows the player to interact restrictedly with the art in the museum, but is allowed more freedom outside of it. However, the restricted interaction is strongly incorporating known norms of how to behave and interact with the museum as an institution. These norms are also applicable in situ – outside of the museum's pixelated world. The aura of the artworks is compromised through the notion that the player can obtain any number of original artworks. Still, the originality and aura of the artworks are secured through the institutionalised environment in the museum.