About the group
The Visual Studies Research Group takes a comprehensive look at a broad range of visual artefacts and phenomena, including popular imagery, scientific visualizations, and the built and natural environment.
Simultaneously, the group seeks to develop new theoretical tools to embrace the multifarious worlds of images we live in and have always lived in, reflecting developments in recent scholarship where the nature of images and their place in culture and society have been widely debated.
Research interests
The Visual Studies research group focuses on three specific areas:
- We approach the making, transmission, and reception of images as techniques by means of which the articulations, divisions, and associations, both material and symbolic, defining a culture at any given moment are brought into being. Images are ways of world-making, and this necessitates research, not only on the ontological status of images, but also on their pragmatics—how images have shaped, and continue to shape, the practices of doing, inhabiting, and thinking.
- We pay special attention to the politics of images, seeking to come up with an in-depth, historically nuanced understanding of how the politics, and the power, of the visual should be understood and conceptualized in the age of global capitalism.
- We study how images reflect and participate in environmental changes that take place across multiple scales and that are perhaps best understood through the term medianatures.
Upcoming events
"Into the Air" public talk by Michelle Henning
11 June 2024 16.00-18 / Auditorium 5, Domus Academica (Urbygningen), Karl Johans Gate 47
The Houston-Mount Everest survey expedition of 1933 was a triumphalist, imperialist propaganda exercise over Nepal. As anti-colonial movements were gaining steam and figures in Britain calling for withdrawal of the British Raj, members of the far right wanted to teach India a lesson in British racial superiority. The expedition was a media event promoting British imperialism and the cinematographic and photographic materials used by the expedition were chosen to represent the latest technical achievements – notably Ilford Limited’s new infra-red plates which could cut through blue atmospheric haze. To use this technology the whole plane became a camera, necessitating additional flights specially for photography. Yet one infra-red photograph, captioned as Everest in the press but actually of the peak of Makalu, came to represent the survey in ways that seem more aesthetic than scientific. It described by the Times critic as “probably the most remarkable photograph ever taken” and he praised the picture for its “photographic purity” and truthfulness. The picture became emblematic of both aesthetic and technical modernisty, aligning modernity with far-right claims regarding Britain’s imperial “vigor”. Thus Ilford’s infra-red plates stripped the mountains of one aura only to overlay them with a new aura of imperial power and modernity.
Prof. Michelle Henning is Chair in Photography and Media at the University of Liverpool, UK. She is the author of Museums Media and Cultural Theory (Open University Press 2006), Photography: The Unfettered Image (Routledge 2018) and the edited collection Museum Media (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2015).
The talk is free and open to everybody!
Academic courses
Bachelor
KUN1003 - Introduksjon til visuelle studier (Only in Norwegian)
KUN2232 – Philosophies of the Visual
KUN2560 – Topics in Visual Studies