Mårten Snickare Professor
Contact
Name and title: Mårten SnickareProfessor
Visiting address Room C 516Frescativägen 22B-26
Postal address Institutionen för kultur och estetik106 91 Stockholm
About me
I am professor of art history and coordinator of research and postgraduate studies. I have been teaching and doing research at Stockholm University since 2006. Before that, I worked as a curator of old master drawings at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, an experience that led to a lasting interest in museums, exhibitions, objects and materiality. The baroque has always been at the centre of my research and teaching, understood as a historical epoch but also as an undercurrent throughout art history. In 2014, I took part in the exhibition Barockt at Kulturhuset, Stockholm, conceived as a dialogue between 17th-century art from Nationalmuseum and contemporary Swedish and international art. Currently, I work on Swedish colonial history as it has been visualized and materialized in art, collecting and museums.
As a teacher, I have developed the ”International Master’s Programme in Art History”, running since 2017. I teach courses on performativity and on postcolonial theory to Swedish and international master students.
My research is centred on the baroque, as a style, a historical epoch, and a transhistorical category. In a research project on baroque performativity, I explored the ways in which people in 17th-century Europe negotiated their identities and worldviews in interplay with art and architecture. The results have been published in Performativity and Performance in Baroque Rome, Ashgate 2012, and in a number of articles. I have also written about the topicality of baroque in our time, the ways in which baroque has come to form an increasingly important reference in art, critique and popular culture of the last decades.
Currently, I explore the visual and material traces of Sweden’s colonial history from the 17th century until today. In particular, I study objects that were acquired by Swedish colonizers and incorporated in museums and other collections. What happens when objects become colonized? How can we deal with the fact that Swedish museum collections to a high degree are built on colonialism? I am about to finish a monograph on colonial objects, their histories, presences, and possible futures.