From the very beginning, during your education in Art History at Södertörn University, you will be in close contact with your potential future working life. Artists, critics, curators and other actors are regularly invited to be visiting lecturers at Bachelor’s and Master’s level, as well as in doctoral education. There are study visits to various art institutions, public and privately funded, such as museums, exhibition halls, galleries, municipalities, producers of public art, auction houses and higher art education. Students from Södertörn have been on placements at relevant and extremely interesting institutions.

Numerous partnerships with other higher education institutions, such as the Umeå School of Architecture, the University of Arts, Craft and Design and the Royal Institute of Art, have included exchanges of lectures and the organisation of joint seminars with the HEIs’ student groups. Art History’s partners include Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Public Art Agency Sweden, Stockholms Auktionsverk, Tensta konsthall, the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Botkyrka Municipality and Huddinge Municipality, etc.

As a subject, Art History has undertaken a number of joint projects in education and research. In the period 2018-2020, the subject is conducting a major research project on new aspects of public art, commissioned by the Public Art Agency Sweden. Exponeringens effekter (the effects of exposure) will be conducted in 2019 as a postgraduate course in partnership with Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum and the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, with funding from Vinnova as part of a mobility programme. In 2016-2017, Konsten, staden, invånarna. Idémässig och historisk fördjupning av konstens roll i stadsomvandling med många aktörer (The art, the city, the inhabitants: a deep ideological and historical look at urban transformation with many actors) was conducted in partnership with Huddinge Municipality and other actors in Flemingsberg, with Bachelor’s and Master’s students, funded by the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth.

The research project Kulturarv- Att skapa historia för framtiden (Heritage – creating history for the future) was a joint project with researchers in Art History at Södertörn University and curators at Stockholms Auktionsverk; the project also involved other actors such as staff at museums, Swedish Customs and the police force. The project was conducted in 2010-14 and funded by the Knowledge Foundation.

The Euroavantgarde network at Södertörn University

The Euroavantgarde network - Transnational strategies within European avant-gardes, a network funded during the conference The European artistic avant-garde c. 1910-30: formations, networks and transnational strategies, Art History, Södertörn University, 2011.

In 2013, a three-day interdisciplinary symposium, The European artistic avant-garde c. 1910-30: formations, networks and transnational strategies, was arranged by department of Art History, Södertörn University, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. The call for paper attracted a large number of international researchers, among whom eighteen were invited to Stockholm. Together with the key-notes by Piotr Piotrowski and David Cottington the presentations constituted a broad inventory of ideas and theories on transnational mobility and cubist historiography through out the international research community. The conference turned out as a first platform, for the discussions of ideas and future research projects and cooperations.

Symposium program: Formations, Networks and Trans-national strategies Pdf, 1.3 MB.

In conjunction of the EAM2014, the biennale conference of the European Network for Avant-garde and Modernism Studies in Helsinki in August 2014, a second meeting with the Euroavantgarde-Södertörn network was arranged. The attendants of this meeting underlined the potentiality of the network funded at Södertörn, while also deciding it to remain a loose network from which different initiatives can arise. The meeting was also informed that the symposium at Södertörn had served as the intellectual ground for and international workshop called Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Avant-Garde and Modernism: The Impact of WWI at the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague, in November 27th-29th, 2014. Contacts for this workshops are Prof. Vojtěch Lahoda, lahoda@udu.cas.cz and Lidia Głuchowska, ligl@wp.pl.

See also on the conference Art in transfer, November 6th-8th. The Södertörn-Euroavantgarde network, will continue to serve as a source for new initiatives and communications. For further information on the activities, please contact Annika Öhrner, department of Art History, Södertörn University, initiator.