PARSE 10th Anniversary

Nick Aikens is a curator, researcher, editor and educator. He is the Managing Editor and Research Responsible for L’Internationale Online. He assumed his role in August 2023 as part of the four year, EU funded project ’Museum of the Commons’.

Nick has a PhD from HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University. He was previously Curator at the Van Abbemuseum (2012–2023) where he worked on numerous exhibitions and publications as well as leading the research programme Deviant Practice (2016–2019). He was a tutor and course leader at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem (2012–2019) and Guest Professor in the department of Exhibitions and Scenography at Karlsruhe University (2023–2024).

He co-edited the three part issue of PARSE ‘On the Question of Exhibition’ with Kjell Caminha, Jyoti Mistry and Mick Wilson (2021).

Henric Benesch is an associate professor (docent) in Design at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, acting Dean at The Artistic Faculty and an associate of Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS) at the University of Gothenburg. He is an architect interested in transdisciplinary and intersectional aspects of knowledge creation within and in relation to education and built environment with a particular interest in site-based and speculative methodologies. Recent publications include “The Right to Design” (2020), “What if a 1%-rule for Public Design” (2021) and “Co-curating the city: universities and urban heritage past and future” (2022).

Erling Björgvinsson is Professor of Design at the School of Design and Crafts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Gothenburg University. A Central topic of research is participatory politics in design and art, in particular in relation to urban spaces and the interaction between public institutions and citizens. He has published in international design and art journals and anthologies. ​​

Rose Brander (born Leeds, UK) lives in Olsfors and works in Gothenburg. In 2014 Rose moved to Sweden to study a masters degree in Fine Art at HDK-Valand. She is currently the PARSE Project Coordinator.

Rose creates spaces, discussions and events, often working collaboratively. She is interested in expanded notions of artistic practice, how we organize ourselves and each other. She also uses film, sound, performance and space in order to promote dialogue and experience with an audience.

Her work seeks to operate within an ambiguous, interdisciplinary, subjective arena; refusing the autonomy often ascribed to canonical modernist practice and asserting that art is always social.

Baby Dee, the gender dysphoric medievalist carny and child of light from Cleveland Ohio, retired from the happy whoredom of showbiz in 2018. But old habits die hard and on special occasions she makes herself available. Which begs the question, “What’s a special occasion?”

Ingrid Elam is a Swedish writer and critic. She is a former Professor in Literary composition and the former Dean of the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg and ex Chair of PARSE. She holds a PhD in Comparative literature since 1985. Between 1989 and 2000 she was the cultural editor of the Swedish newspapers iDAG, Göteborgs-Posten and Dagens Nyheter. From 2003 to 2012 she was employed at Malmö University, where, among other positions, she acted as the Dean of the School of Art and Communication.

Lucy Cathcart Frödén works at the intersections of arts, activism and academia. Her practice-based PhD from the University of Glasgow, titled Echolocations, explored through music and sound how making things together can foster solidarity and mutual care. She has particular interests in multilingual and process-driven creative collaboration, and has dabbled in songwriting, sound art and podcast production. She worked on the Conviviality and Contamination artistic research project at Malmö University, and she is currently at the University of Oslo, researching the role of music, sound and voice in social change, particularly in relation to carceral systems.

Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA (Honors) in 1999 and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, earning an MA (Distinction) in 2000. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, was published by kalliope paperbacks under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (2008). In 2010 she edited a collection of essays titled In the Loop: Knitting Now (Black Dog), and in 2012 edited The Textile Reader (Berg) and wrote Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury). Her editorial and curatorial project Cultural Threads is about postcolonial thinking and contemporary textile practice (Bloomsbury, 2015) and was accompanied by a travelling exhibition Migrations (2015–17).  

In 2022 Jessica co-edited Violence: materiality (PARSE Journal issue 15, with Ole Lützow-Holm), and in 2020 Intersections (issue 11, with Kristina Hagström-Ståhl and Jyoti Mistry). Recent writing includes “Can That Be Taught? lessons in tacit knowledge” in Somaesthetics and Design Culture (Brill, 2023); “Material Scent: Textiles Beyond Touch” in Kinesic Intelligence in the Humanities (Routledge, 2023); and the second edition of The Textile Reader (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is currently Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and was the Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture, the Netherlands (2020–23).

Rebecca Hilton is an Australian born dance person living in Stockholm. She is Professor of Choreography for the research profile area Site, Event, Encounter, at the Stockholm University of the Arts. Her research environments are  inter art form, transdisciplinary, and collaborative with a focus on unfolding relationships between embodied practices, oral traditions and choreographic systems. Her ongoing project GROUPNESS (2000-) manifests as a series of long-term artistic research residencies situated in universities, hospitals, dance companies, community groups, friendship circles and family units in Australia, Korea, Mexico, Argentina and Sweden etc. She is an artistic researcher in the context of DöBra, a Karolinska Institute research program exploring experiences of and relationships to death, dying and grieving in Sweden. Hilton has contributed to a range of publications: Routledge Dance Studies Reader (UK), the Swedish Book of Dance History (Sweden), Movement Research Journal, Public Health Journal (US), Sarma, Oralsite (Belgium), Writings on Dance, Dancehouse Diary, Performance Paradigm (Australia) etc. She has contributed chapters to several anthologies, most recently Bare Bodies – Thresholding Life, de Gruyter (2023) and co-edited the collections Researching in/As Motion, Nivel/Teak (2019), and Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond dance, Routledge (2024).

Onkar Kular is Professor of Design and Programme coordinator for PLACE (Public Life, Arts, Critical Engagement), Artistic Faculty, University of Gothenburg. His research is disseminated internationally through exhibitions, education and publications. He has guest-curated exhibitions for The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Karachi and Crafts Council, UK. He was Stanley Picker Fellow 2016, Artistic Director of Gothenburg Design Festival 2017 and Co-Director of Luleå Art Biennial 2022.

Steven Henry Madoff is the founding chair of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He has curated internationally and served as senior critic at Yale University’s School of Art. Madoff was executive editor of ARTnews and president and editorial director of AltaCultura, a project of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has contributed essays to collections such as Turning Points: Responsive Pedagogies in Studio Art Education (Teachers College Press, 2023); Learning by Curating. Current Trajectories in Critical Curatorial Education (Vector, 2022); Fabricating Publics (Open Humanities Press, 2021); After the Educational Turn: Critical Art Pedagogies and Decolonialism (Black Dog Press, 2018); La Valeur de l’art (Beaux-arts de Paris, 2018); To Seminar (Metropolis M, 2017); and Handbook for Artistic Research Education (ELIA, 2013). He is the series editor of Thoughts on Curating (Sternberg Press, 2021–ongoing). His books include Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (MIT Press, 2009); Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity (Princeton University Press, 2004); While We’re Here (Hard Court Press, 1999); and Pop Art: A Critical History (University of California Press, 1997). His criticism and journalism have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Time, Artforum, Art in America, Tate Etc., ARTnews, and Modern Painters, where he served as contributing editor. Madoff is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, among others. He holds a BA from Columbia University and a PhD from Stanford University.

Jyoti Mistry is Professor in FILM at Valand Academy and works in film both as a research form and as a mode of artistic practice. She has made critically acclaimed films in multiple genres and her installation work draws from cinematic traditions but is often re-contextualized for galleries and museums that are outside of the linear cinematic experience. Select film works include: When I grow up I want to be a black man (2017), Impunity (2014), 09: 21:25 (2011), Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit (2010) and I mike what I like (2006).

Select publications include: we remember differently: Race, Memory, Imagination (2012) a collection of essays inspired by her film which explores the complexity of racial identity in South Africa. Gaze Regimes: Films and Feminisms in Africa (2015). Places to Play: practice, research, pedagogy (2017) explores the use of archive as an exemplar entry to rethink colonial images through “decolonised” film practices. She has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of African Cinema: “Film as Research Tool: Practice and Pedagogy” (2018).

She has taught at University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), New York University; University of Vienna; Arcada University of Applied Science Polytechnic in Helsinki, Nafti in Accra and Alle Arts School at University of Addis Ababa. Mistry has been artist in residence in New York City, at California College of Arts (San Francisco), Sacatar (Brazil) and a DAAD Researcher at Babelsberg Konrad Wolf Film University (Berlin). In 2016-2017 she was Artist in Residence at Netherlands Film Academy. In 2016 she was recipient of the Cilect (Association of International film schools) Teaching Award in recognition for innovation in practices in film research and pedagogy.

Andrew Morrison works within and across design, urbanism and landscape, including design writing, fiction and criticism, and design and technology critiques. His applied research extends to design education, artistic research and scholarly communication. He has coordinated the AHO PhD School, supervised and examined widely on practice-based doctoral design research. Prominent funded research projects include YOUrban and FUEL4DESIGN and the AHO Research Review 2014-2017. Books publications span Inside Multimodal Composition (2010), Exploring Digital Design (2010) and Design Futures Literacies (2023, Vols 1 & 2). Andrew was co-chair of Design + Power NORDES 2017, a member of Anticipation 2017 Conference and chair of Anticipation 2019 Conference hosted by AHO. His more recent work engages in design fiction, futures literacies, speculative inquiry and modes of mediating mixed methods and articulations of transdisciplinary design and artistic research. He has published in numerous venues, formal and experimental, and is currently writing a poetics of anticipation. Andrew is the Director of the Centre for Design Research at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO).

andrew.morrison@aho.no

https://designresearch.no/people/andrew-morrison

Gerrie van Noord is a free-lance editor and educator. Following a variety of roles at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (1988-1992) and de Appel Foundation (1992-1996) in Amsterdam, she was Head of Publishing at London-based commissioning organisation Artangel (1997-2002), project manager for the first official independent Scottish presence at the Venice Biennale (2003), and commissioning editor of a series titled Fabrications published by Book Works (2006-2009). Although now mainly engaging with one-off projects, she has longer term collaborations with several artists, arts organisations and education institutions, including PARSE Journal, for which she has been a copy-editor and proofer since issue #3. Recently she was the managing editor of a series of anthologies edited by Paul O’Neill, Lucy Steeds, Mick Wilson and Simon Sheikh – The Curatorial Conundrum (2016), How Institutions Think (2017) and Curating after the Global (2019) – published by The MIT Press. For information on current and past projects, see https://gerrieat.work/.

Gerrie has contributed as a Visiting Lecturer to the MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2003-2015) and was an Associate Lecturer at the MA Arts Policy & Management at Birkbeck, University of London (2006-2019). Currently she is a Visiting Lecturer on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. She is undertaking a practice-led PhD (Birkbeck, planned submission 2021), which focuses on publications and their role in and contribution to curatorial practice and discourse.

Jay Pather is a choreographer, multi-media artist, curator, writer and teacher. He is Professor at the University of Cape Town where he directs the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA). He is curator for the Infecting the City Festival; the ICA Live Art Festival, the AfrovibesFestival (The Netherlands); Spier Light Art (Cape Town), co-curated the Africa 2020/21 Season (France); and has curated Live Art for Zeitz MOCAA and the Spielart Festival. 

His artistic work deploys site-specific, interdisciplinary and intercultural strategies to frame postcolonial imaginaries, decolonization and matters of social justice. His artistic work has been written about by academics such as Catherine Cole and Ketu Katrak, who recently published the book Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa. Pather’s publications include articles in New Territories: Theatre, Drama, and Performance in Post-apartheid South Africa edited my Marc Meaufort; Rogue Urbanism edited by Edgar Pieterse and Abdul Malik Simone; Performing Cities edited by Nicholas Whybrow, Where Strangers Meet; Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm, a book, Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa and for the Theater Journal. He serves as a juror for the TURN Fonds, and Board member of the National Arts Festival of South Africa. He has been appointed Fellow at Queen Mary’s College, University of London and made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2022 he was awarded a Villa Albertine residency in New York City to create his new work, surface tension.

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Dr Andrea Phillips is BALTIC Professor and Director of BxNU Research Institute, Northumbria University & BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Andrea lectures and writes about the economic and social construction of public value within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganization within artistic and curatorial culture.

Recent and ongoing research projects include: Curating Architecture, a think tank and exhibition examining the role of exhibitions in the making of architecture’s social and political forms (AHRC 2007-2009: http://www.art.gold.ac.uk/ research/archive/ curating-architecture/); Actors, Agent and Attendants, a research project and set of publications that address the role of artistic and curatorial production in contemporary political milieus (in collaboration with SKOR 2009-2012: http://www.skor.nl/ eng/site/item/ actors-agents-and-attendants-ii-programme); co-director with Suhail Malik, Andrew Wheatley and Sarah Thelwall of the research project The Aesthetic and Economic Impact of the Art Market, an investigation into the ways in which the art market shapes artists’ careers and public exhibition (2010-ongoing); Public Alchemy, the public programme for the Istanbul Biennial 2013 (co-curated with Fulya Erdemci); Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures (in collaboration with Grant Watson and Iniva, AHRC 2013-2014: http://art.gold.ac.uk/tagore/); How to Work Together (in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery, Studio Voltaire and The Showroom, London 2014-ongoing: http://howtoworktogether.org/).

My main research interest lies in understanding the role of technology and other material artifacts in organizing and managing professional work, especially in cultural and creative fields. I am more specifically interested in how professional norms, rules, structures and ideas are enacted, changed and maintained, in practice and how technology intervenes in these professional practices, transforming over time what is considered professional. Theoretically, I have mainly worked between institutional theory and actor-network theory.

My main field of investigation has been news production. I have conducted a number of ethnographic studies in Italy, France and Sweden in established and new news organizations, all struggling with the establishment and development of so-called digital journalism. Most recently, I have been following two relatively new trends in journalism, namely entrepreneurial journalism and robotjournalism. Both enabled by digital technologies, they have been different responses to the so-much-debated crisis of journalism and news organizations.

I am also interested in the meeting between the arts and business both in academic and industrial practices. I have done research on artistic interventions, that is the use of art in business and other organizations. I have a deep interest for developing qualitative studies and academic writing and in particular by looking at art practices, such as choreography.

I have studied and worked internationally in different countries. I have been visiting researcher at Stanford, Bocconi University and Sciences Po. I have also worked at Jönköping International Business School and Copenhagen Business School before coming to the School of Business, Economics and Law in Gothenburg.

Cecilia Roos is a Professor of Artistic Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts. She has worked as a dancer, collaborator and rehearser with, among others, Margaretha Åsberg, Per Jonsson, Jefta van Dinther, Cristina Caprioli, Reich / Szyber, Tilde Björfors, John Caird, Mats Ek, Ina Christel Johannessen, Twyla Tharp. Her research focuses on the dancer’s practice and the role it plays in performative processes. Roos is part of the editorial committee and the publisher for VIS – Nordic Journal of artistic research.

Biography coming soon

Elena Wolay is a music journalist, lecturer, and curator for concerts and exhibitions. Since 2011, she has been running the platform ‘Jazz Är Farligt’ (‘Jazz Is Dangerous’) and has been described as one of the driving forces behind Sweden’s alternative music scene. Currently, Wolay works as a music and literature coordinator for the City of Malmö. Her recent curator projects include ‘Sun Ra’ at Mellanrummet, Malmö Konsthall (2021), Åke Hodell, Malmö Konsthall (2022), and Åke Hodell’s ‘220 Volt Buddha’ at Kalmar Art Museum (2022), as well as participating as an artist in the group exhibition ‘File under freedom’ at Bergen Kunsthall in 2022 and serving as a curator for the music program at Uppsala Art Museum (2022-2023). Wolay’s activities and practice involve in-depth research into music that touches upon the unexpected, raw, and interdisciplinary.

Doctor Niclas Östlind is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Unit of Film, Photography and Literary Composition, and deputy Vice Prefect of Research at HDKV. His is currently engaged in a research project called MOMENT: Lens Media Evidence and Aesthetics in Sweden 1939–1969, and together with colleagues at Hasselblad Foundation and GPS400: Center of Collaborative Visual Research he has done several research projects, for example Thresholds: Interwar Lens Media Cultures 1919–1939.