Featured articles

Anna Sofia Jernryd is a visual artist based in Gothenburg. She has a masters degree in Fine Art Photography at HDK-Valand. She is currently the PARSE Project Coordinator.

Jernryd’s artistic practice constitutes of photography, video, text, and sound. A recurring question is our understanding of collective identity and our definition of ourselves in relation to others. She is interested in renegotiating the boundaries between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, and “I” and “you”. She works conceptually with the documentary image and creates imaginary/intangible as well as physical spaces.

Cathryn is Editor-in-Chief of PARSE, and currently a senior lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, teaching and supervising at masters and doctoral level. Cathryn is a spatial theorist with a particular focus on interiors and processes of interiority across micro and macro scales. They are currently writing a book which considers how interstellar spatial phenomena can help to spatialise the ethics of artistic research. 

Cathryn has co-edited issue 17 of PARSE on Citations. 

Ele Carpenter is a curator, artist and writer on contemporary art and nuclear culture. Her curatorial research investigates the aesthetics of the nuclear anthropocene and nuclear decoloniality. She is Director of the UmArts Research Centre, and Professor of Interdisciplinary Art and Culture at the School of Architecture, Umeå University.

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.

Gerrie van Noord is an editor/curator of publications and educator who has been involved with PARSE Journal since 2016. Her practice focuses on publications as sites for articulation in relation to both artistic and curatorial practices, and she is particularly interested in expanded understandings of collaboration. For Artangel she produced the ‘Afterlives’ publications (1997–2002) and for Book Works she commissioned the ‘Fabrications’ series of co-publications (2006-09). She was managing editor of the critical anthologies The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice?(2016), How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (2017) and Curating after the Global: Roadmaps to the Present (2019), as well as Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (2022). She worked with Olivia Plender on the book Rise Early, Be Industrious (2016) and a website of the artist’s entire body of work (2021) and edited Curling Up with Reality (2021), a selection of Isabel Nolan’s writing. Moist recently she co-edited Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life (with Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, 2023), Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating (with Paul O’Neill and Elizabeth Larison, 2024) and Curious (with Paul O’Neill, 2024). Gerrie was a Visiting Lecturer on the MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2003–15), Associate Lecturer on the MA Arts Policy & Management at Birkbeck, University of London (2006–19) and is now Tutor (Research) on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. She has a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London (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).

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.

Jessica studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh is published under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (kalliope paperbacks: 2008). She is editor of In the Loop: Knitting Now (Black Dog: 2010), The Textile Reader (Berg: 2012 / second edition Bloomsbury: 2023) and author of Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury: 2012). Her editorial and curatorial project Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury: 2015) was accompanied by a travelling exhibition Migrations (2015–17).

Jessica edited PARSE Journal issue 18 Thinking in Motion and co-edited issue 19 Powers of Love with Jyoti Mistry, issue 15 Violence: materiality with Ole Lützow-Holm and issue 11 Intersections with Kristina Hagström-Ståhl and Jyoti Mistry. Recent writing includes the Afterword to Humanitarian Handicrafts: History, Materiality, Trade (Manchester University Press: 2024), “Toward a Minor Textile Architecture” in Entangled Histories of Art and Migration (Intellect: 2024) and “Crafting Extremes in Andreas Eschbach’s The Hair-Carpet Weavers” in Text/Techne (Bloomsbury: forthcoming). From 2020-2023 she was the Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture, the Netherlands and is currently Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg and Professor II at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

She was PARSE Editor-in-Chief during 2024 and 2025.

Johnny Chang (b.1988 US-TW/SE) is a Stockholm-based interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher working across visual communication, graphic design, publishing, lecture performance, and writing. His practice engages with the sense-making (and breaking)—or poetics—of visual language and material culture, nourishing collective capacities for sensing, feeling, and being. 

Chang’s artistic practice and research attends to questions of care, access, and tactics for gathering, listening to resilient knowledges from below that emerge from diaspora liminality, community memory, and social movement archiving. Through a citational practice, he works with the re/de/composition of material and symbolic-discursive residues to reflect on conditions and processes of social reproduction and relation. https://livingwithimages.info/

Jonas is the PARSE Journal web developer. After many years working as a digital designer in the corporate world, Jonas decided to resign, finalize his thesis work and become a freelancer. Apart from his employment at PARSE Journal, he takes the occasional odd job assignment as a film editor or a film archivist while working on his own short film projects.

Josefine Wikström is a critic and researcher living in Gothenburg. Her research focuses on dance and performance in contemporary art from art philosophical and historically materialist perspectives. She is the author of the book Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and the Event-Score: A Critique of performance (2021), Objects of Feminism (2017 together with Maija Timonen); Kritik av konstens frihet (2022 together with Gustav Strandberg and Kim West) and Autonomins Sken: Om Kalliasbreven och frågan om estetikens politik hos Friedrich Schiller (2024 together with Gustav Strandberg and Kim West). She has been published in journals such as Radical Philosophy, Third Text, Performance Research Journal and Texte Zur Kunst. She writes regular dance critique for Dagens Nyheter and serves as one of the editors of the experimental philosophy- and art- platform SITE Zones. She works as a senior lecturer in the theory and practice of contemporary performative arts at the Academy of Music and Drama, at Gothenburg 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.

Maria Bania is professor in Musical performance and interpretation at the Academy of Music and Drama. She is currently leading the project “Rhetorical and Romantic affective strategies in musical performance”, which explores the aesthetic and affective ideas and mindsets in the performance discourses of both the eighteenth-century sensibility culture and the early Romantic aesthetics. She has had an international career as a flutist, specialized on eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century instruments and music. Recordings include solo concertos with Concerto Copenhagen, and solo sonatas by Roman, Scheibe and Raehs. In 2008 she achieved her PhD in Musical performance and interpretation. Publications include ”Affective practices in mid-18th-century German music-making: reflections on C.P.E. Bach’s advice to performers” (Early Music, 2020), ”Om termen affektlära och det svenska ordet affekt i diskussioner om 1600- och det tidiga 1700-talets musik” (STM, 2021), and “The Improvisation of Preludes on Melody Instruments in the 18th century” (The Consort, 2014).

Monica Sand is an artist and researcher at the Academy of Music and Drama, HSM, at University of Gothenburg. With a specific engagement in the public art history and the urban transformation of Gothenburg, her art and research involve public performative rituals and walks in the city, seen as an archive of material and forgotten layers of stories.

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).

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.

Nina Mangalanayagam is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Photography at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research and visual practice explore hybridity, postcolonial histories and decolonial image making. She is currently working on a collaborative research project with Louise Wolthers at the Hasselblad foundation, ‘Photography and the Glitch’, which includes the co-curated exhibition and publication Bugs and Metamorphosis (2025). She is also working on a three-year artistic research project, “Colouring-In Sweden,” funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), focusing on stories of women in Swedish colonial histories.

She has a PhD from Westminster University and a MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, UK. Mangalanayagam exhibits and publishes her practice and researchwidely internationally. Recent publications include co-editing with Louise Wolthers the special journal issue of Philosophy of Photography on Photography and the Glitch (2023) and co-editing the section on Decolonial Practices in The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies (2024) together with Emese Mucsi.

Ole Lützow-Holm studied composition with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. Coming from a central European, avantgarde mode of expression, he has created works for a great variety of ensembles and contexts, early receiving international recognition for his music. Lützow-Holm is a professor of composition at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.

2012 he completed the artistic research project Towards an Expanded Field of Art Music. There, the topic was to experimentally intro­duce ideas and hands-on procedures that promoted unorthodox ways of responding to historic as well as contemporary classical music. The applied research methods aimed at facilitating practice-based musical dialogues, inviting a wide scope of trans­disciplinary discourses to participate in the quest for a potentially broader range of per­formative strate­gies and conceptual protocols. In recent years, Lützow-Holm has explored generative approaches, elaborating on short-term, transient musical practices that, inspired by perceptions of ambiguity and incomplete­ness, would integrate elements of improvisation and open form, recur­rently in collaboration with other artists.

Onkar Kular is Professor of Design at HDK Valand, Academy of Art & Design, University of Gothenburg. His practice has been disseminated internationally through commissions, exhibitions, education and publications. He has guest-curated exhibitions for The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Karachi, and the Crafts Council, UK. He was Stanley Picker Fellow in 2016, Artistic Director of Gothenburg Design Festival in 2017, Co-Artistic Director of Luleå Art Biennial in 2022 and curator of the sonic festival, Bass Cultures, How Low Can You Go! Falkenbergs teater, Sweden in 2023. He is the co-editor of Urgent Pedagogies Journal Issue #6, Earthed Imagination (2023) and Urgent Pedagogies Journal Issue #9, The Right to design (2024).

Ram Krishna Ranjan is a lecturer in Film at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. He works at the intersection of research, pedagogy and film practice. His educational background is in Economics, Media and Cultural Studies, Fine Art and Film. In his work, he critically explores decolonial and postcolonial perspectives and the intersectionality of caste, class and gender. He has made several films on these issues. His latest, Fourth World, delves into the various facets and stages of a creative-collaborative practice that attempted to foreground and engage with Dalit experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943.

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 is invested in creating spaces, discussions and events, often working collaboratively. Common research threads within her own work include our relationship to the environment and climate, the more than human, critical pedagogies and how we organize ourselves and each other by attending to storytelling, listening and subjectivities.

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.

Tom Cubbin is a historian and educator at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design. He undertakes teaching and research into the cultural and environmental significance of craft and design at Campus Steneby in Dals Långed, located in the region of Dalsland.

Tom holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield and an MA in History of Design from the Royal Collage of Art in London, where he has also worked as a visiting lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies.T om has a background in Russian and Soviet history, and his book Soviet Critical Design (Bloomsbury, 2019) charts the development artistic design research in the late Soviet Union. Tom has written on diverse topics including sustainability and the role of craft in queer communities. Tom’s current research examines critical historiographies of how the urban gaze has subjugated certain forms of craft and design practice across diverse geographies.

Together with Dr. Karin Peterson, Tom has developed the BFA in Crafting Futures which engages innovative pedagogies of craft linking materials, place, ecology and technology.

In his previous roles, Tom worked closely with education in the BA and MA programmes in the Design Unit at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, where he was responsible for introducing design studies to the curriculum. Tom has also worked as Head of Unit at HDK-Valand Campus Steneby.

Tom is a member of the PARSE working group, and is a board member of Halmens Hus, Sweden’s museum for straw craft. He also co-supervises Gustav Thane, who is undertaking a doctoral degree in craft.