Embedded Art History in A Burning World

An afternoon on art’s role in deepening and altering our understanding of geological and geopolitical crises

This October, the Art History department at Södertörn University in Stockholm is organizing a symposium on “Embedded Art History in a Burning World” to celebrate our 20th anniversary. The symposium seeks to examine art’s role in deepening and/or altering our understanding of crises––geological and geopolitical––and is centered around presentations given by a young generation of art historians (postdocs and doctoral students) affiliated with the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn (CBEES).

The program for this afternoon covers some fifty years of European history, through artistic works presented by the doctoral students and emerging scholars. A keynote lecture will follow in which the researchers and curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes address the symposium theme. They are both co-directors of the Post-socialist Art Centre (PACT) at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL and co-founders of Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art. Their numerous publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020) and Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021). A Concluding panel discussion will be followed by a reception.

The symposium is one of three events on the occasion of the jubilee of Södertörn’s Art History, the other being a seminar on Visual cultures and counter-narratives in Romania and an adjoint opening in Art Space on October 17th. For more info, see calender of that date.