What are you going to work with at IFIKK?
I teach Modern and Contemporary Art. My focus is on European and North-American Art from the 19th century to the present. But I’m also very much interested in how these local traditions are related to global perspectives. I already started teaching at IFIKK this semester with a seminar: Curating the Contemporary. The seminar is part of a Master’s program in art history, titled Curating, criticism and the cultural heritage of modernism. I’m looking forward to develop this fantastic program further within the next semester, which implies to foster and strengthen collaborations with local museums and their collections. Exhibitions are how art can become part of the public arena. This is why it is so important to think about them as specific mediums, which make art accessible and relevant for the historical moment we live in. I think this program is an exciting opportunity for students to not only research art as an historical practice, but to also think about ways how they can transform art's very institutions. How we exhibit art today is an urgent political question.
Can you tell us a bit about your research interests?
At the moment I work on a book, which tries to analyze how new articulations or even productions of consciousness transformed our notion of aesthetic experience as well as how we conceptualize artistic production within the last decades. Within recent ecological discussions, but also within neuroscience, or the discussion of neural networks, the relation of humans to their technological and biological environment is increasingly described with the term non-conscious. The term implies a radical decentering of humans with regards to their surroundings. I’m interested how artists have transformed their use of media, materials and formats in order to register this change. This certainly implies an extension of the sensual dimension of the work of art beyond the visual. But it means a decentering of the artist, who acts less as a strategic manager, and more like a guardian with regards to different non-human agents, be it animals, mountains, streams of data or an entire ocean.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
I moved to Oslo together with my son. So we just started to explore our new home: the city of Oslo. I like to get lost in a new town and stroll around for hours. I also like music a lot and hope to find a good piano to set up in my apartment. When I'm stressed out piano practice is my remedy.