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Magdalena HoldarSenior lecturer, associate professor

About me

Magdalena Holdar is senior lecturer of Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics. She is Head of Curating, Director of the Curatorial MA Programme, and Director of Studies in Art History.

Teaching

I have been teaching courses and supervised students on all levels including PhD candidates since 2005, at Stockholms University but also at Södertörn University College and Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Between 2007 and 2014 I was Director of the two-year international Master's programme Curating Art, an education I remain engaged in through teaching and supervision of theses. 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 programme Teaching Sabbatical (prev Excellence in Teaching).

Courses:

  • The Politics of the Art Exhibition (swe/eng)
  • Artists on Art (swe/eng)

Courses developed for other colleges/universities: Art History I and II (Konstfack) and Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practices (Amherst College, MA, USA).

Courses on Advanced level:

  • Curatorship (eng)
  • The Practice of Art History (swe/eng)
  • Exhibition and Master Thesis (examination courses) (eng)

Course developed for other university: The Effects of Exposure (Södertörn University College).

Research

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 work with the International MA Programme 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.

 

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

Show all publications by Magdalena Holdar at Stockholm University

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