Magdalena Holdar Senior lecturer, associate professor

I have been teaching courses and supervised students on all levels including PhD candidates since 2005, at Stockholm University but also at Södertörn University College and Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. I have been working with the two-year international Master's program Curating Art, also in the capacity as Head of Program.

A liberal arts approach took shape early on in my teaching career, likely through its focus on curating—a field characterized by constellation thinking and an explicit fusion of theory and practice. In 2014 I taught a course at Amherst College, in close collaboration with the Mead Art Museum. The semester in Amherst was part of the STINT program Teaching Sabbatical. My application for the residency came out of a scholarly interest in how art, through its presence in front of us and its materiality, can shape teaching and learning.

Together with my colleague, professor Anna Bortolozzi, I have designed learning situations with object-based learning. Our collaborative project, placed at the Center for the Advancement of University Teaching at SU, largely reshaped the pedagogical models for art history at SU, expanded to also include so-called ‘on site-seminars’, where i.e. sites, buildings, collections, and archives where the starting point for the course design.

My teaching 2025/26 includes:

• Art History 1: Visual Studies
• Together: Project Course in Curating (BA level)
• Curatorship (MA program in Curating Art)
• MA Thesis in Art History (MA program in Art History)
• MA Thesis in Curating (MA program in Curating Art)
• Introduction to Curatorial Theory (distance course)

My interest in collaboration, performativity, networks, and materiality in art is present in my research topics, teaching, and overall approach to my work. My research in recent years has concentrated on the artists’ network Fluxus, in particular its transnational artistic and creative strategies during the 1960s and 70s. Results from this research has been shared in articles, discussed in conferences, and published in the monograph Fluxus as a Network of Friends, Strangers, and Things: The Agency of Chance Operations (Brill 2022). Networks as material, theory, and methodology, including the agency of nonhumans, are at the heart of my work.

Although much of my research operates in the realm of academia, it also aligns with practices that smudge the line between conventional art historical research and other research traditions. The Moss Seminar (Träskseminariet, from 2022 ongoing) is a practice-based research project that explores so-called wetland methodology. In this project, the wetland acts a as a metaphor that highlights material agency, the performance of things, and the effects of untraceable, micro-level activities. It acknowledges subjectivity, empathy, and seduction as indispensable components in research and investigates overlaps of artistic, art historical, and curatorial research practices. Results from the Moss Seminar are generally performative and performance based, mediated through curated activities and programmes.

My experience in academic leadership has encouraged me to reflect on the creative potential of administrative practices and bureaucracies as important resources for transdisciplinary and collaborative research and teaching that can respond to the changing landscape of higher education. I explore this possibility for a new way to think about administration and bureaucratic practices and its relationship to research and teaching in my project, Between studio and classroom: exploring academic creativity through curatorial thinking (from 2025). It is influenced by my previous research in performance and conceptual art practices, such as those found in Fluxus and shaped by curatorial theory. It builds on curating’s ability to bridge distinctions and categories and explores how creativity operates in three central aspects of academic work: research, teaching, and academic leadership. Specific artworks and materials, as well as artistic practices from my Fluxus research, informs this project, bringing together different forms of knowledge and thinking in new ways for a rapidly changing and increasingly precarious and volatile world.

My work with the International MA Program in Curating Art at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics has largely coloured and shaped my academic and creative thinking and practice. It has resulted both in research on curatorial practices during the 20th and 21st Century, and shaped the way I view and communicate academic research.

I received my doctorate in 2005 at Stockholm University with the dissertation Scenography in Action: Space, Time, and Movement in Theatre Productions by Ingmar Bergman. Using the director Ingmar Bergman’s late works for the stage as case studies, the dissertation developed theoretical and methodological tools to analyse ephemeral art characterised by instability and change. Via three crucial elements in scenography for the stage—space, time, and movement—the research showed how they, independently or combined, transgress the built, material set and become a continuously moving and shifting phenomenon or art form.

Monograph

Fluxus as Network of Friends, Strangers, and Things: The Agency of Chance Collaborations, Leiden & Boston: Brill (2022)

Scenography in Action: Space, Time, and Movement in Theatre Productions by Ingmar Bergman. Diss. Stockholm University (2005)

Chapters & articles

“Five New York Evenings”, Konsthistorisk tidskrift (forthcoming 2026)

“The Sound of 92 Events”, Ken Friedman 92 Events, Kalmar konstmuseum, Kalmar (2023)

“The historicization of Fluxus and its eventual institutionalization: A dialogue with professor Magdalena Holdar”, Fluxus Anthology: 60 Year Anniversary, 1962-2022, eds Caterina Gualco, Leo Lecci, Francesca Serrati, Genua: Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce (2022)

”Fantasi”, Vade mecum: Nio brev om företagsekonomins obegripliga gripenhet, ed Jens Martin Svendsen, Stockholm: Bokförlaget Korpen (2021)

“The unlimited performativity of instruction art: Space Transformer by Yoko Ono”, The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection, eds Sara Callahan, Magdalena Holdar, Christer Johansson & Sonya Petersson, Stockholm: Stockholm University Press (2018)

“Doing Things Together: Objectives and effects of Harald Szeemann’s Happening & Fluxus exhibition 1970”, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Vol. 6, nr 1 (2017)

“Vagina Painting – en performance av Shigeko Kubota”, Hjärnstorm, No 120-121 (2014)

”Mot könsmaktsordningen”, Svensk illustration – en visuell historia 1900-2000, eds Andreas Berg & Sara Teleman, Stockholm: Arena förlag (2013)

Reviews

”Recension: Dick Higgins Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings”, Konsthistorisk tidskrift (2026) https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2025.2603972)

“Recension: Framträdanden; performativitetsteoretiska tolkningar av Tadeusz Kantors konstnärskap”, Konsthistorisk tidskrift, Vol 91, No 3 (2021)

”Recension: All-Women Art Spaces in Europe in the Long 1970s”, Tidskrift för genusvetenskap (TGV), Vol. 40, No 1 (2019)

”Recension: Glorious catastrophe – Jack Smith, performance and visual culture”, Konsthistorisk tidskrift, Vol. 83, No 4 (2014)

“Recension: Mona Hatoum. Magasin 3, Stockholm. 9 Oktober – 19 December 2004”, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, Vol. 75, No 2 (2006)

“Konferens: The Next Stage. Konferens om scenografi, Nottingham Trent University 8 – 9 September 2004”, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, No 74, Vol 4 (2005)