Art & Craft Lectures fall 2023

The Art and Craft Lectures, hosted by the Art and Craft Department at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, is an annual lecture series devoted to art education, research, theory, and politics. The program stresses an interdisciplinary approach to rethinking practice and theory in new desirable ways. The fall 2023 series, curated by Sara Yazdani and Susanne M. Winterling, is devoted to art and ecology with a particular focus on the interrelations between bodies and matter.

Taking Isabelle Stengers’ manifestation “An Ecology of Practice” as a place of departure, the series aims to construct tools for thinking. Ecology is here understood as the relations between living and non-living bodies and matter, beyond the nature/culture divide, forming a “different practical landscape,” in which thinking and change emerge in the middle and in the surroundings. Taking a collaborative approach to practice and research, the lecture series seeks to generate inspiration, critical navigation, and community across the arts.

The series, part of the MFA programs in the department, invites scholars, artists, and curators from different disciplines to give a public lecture. It takes the form of traditional keynotes that guide the semester as a platform for students and faculty to share and discuss practice, concerns, and inspiration, with an open door to the public. For the fall 2023 program, we are especially excited to host Astrida Neimanis, Ina Blom, and Elvia Wilk.

The Art and Craft Lectures take place virtually via Zoom on Thursdays at 3pm CET unless otherwise specified. The lectures are free and open to the public.

Art & Craft Lectures schedule (CET)
September 21, 3pm: Astrida Neimanis
October 19, 3pm: Ina Blom
November 29, 5pm: Elvia Wilk, in collaboration with The Academy of Fine Art, KHiO

More information on the program and how to sign up can be found on the Art and Craft Lectures website. To learn more about the MFA programs in the Art and Craft Department–Medium and Material-Based Art, and Art in Public Space–visit our website.  

About the speakers
Astrida Neimanis is a writer, teacher, and researcher working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Mixing cultural theory and practice-based methods, and often in collaboration with artists, scientists, educators, and other practitioners, her work seeks to tell different kinds of stories about water, weather, bodies, and feeling. She is author of many publications, including Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017). Astrida is currently associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan on unceded syilx territory, where she also is Director of the FEELed Lab. Together with Jennifer Mae Hamilton, she is co-founder of the COMPOSTING feminisms reading and research group, and one of the founders of The Weathering Collective.

Ina Blom is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo and a visiting professor in the Department of Art History, University of Chicago. Recent books include The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016), On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture (2007) as well as the edited volumes Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social (2017) and Raoul Hausmann et les avant-gardes (2014). She is also an art critic, contributing to Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, and Afterall, among others.

Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York. She is the author of the novel Oval (2019) and the essay collection Death by Landscape (2022). Her work is represented by Claudia Ballard at WME. Elvia’s essays, criticism, and fiction have appeared in publications such as Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, n+1, Granta, The Paris Review online, BOMB, 4Columns, Mousse, The Nation, The Atlantic, WIRED and The New York Review of Books.

Susanne M. Winterling is professor and Head of MFA Program Medium and Material-based Art at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. 

Sara Yazdani is an associate professor of Art History and Theory and Head of Theory (MFA) at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her work has been published in Art Journal, Afterimage, Art & Education, and various anthologies and exhibition catalogs on modern and contemporary art, and she has contributed to Artforum, Flash Art, Kunstkritikk, and Mousse Magazine.