Vendela Grundell Gachoud Project leader Art and Research
Contact
Name and title: Vendela Grundell GachoudProject leader Art and Research
Visiting address Frescativägen 26
Postal address Accelerator106 91 Stockholm
About me
My work as a researcher, teacher and artist focuses on photography with critical perspectives on seeing and being in a digital world. My doctoral thesis in art history, Flow and Friction, (2016) investigated how digital interfaces shape spectatorship and how this process is revealed in glitch art online. This investigation of normative and disruptive user positions expands in my postdoctoral project Seeing Differently / Seeing Difference (2018-2020) on photography by people with visual impairments, which demonstrates how ableism affects users. I am currently participating in the project The Politics of Metadata, with a study on diversity in cultural heritage collections online. Driven by societal concerns about the integration of technics and aesthetics, I work in international interdisciplinary settings from my base at Stockholm University. In addition to teaching in advanced education, presentations at conferences and workshops, and collaborations with artists and scholars, my work features in circa thirty exhibitions and twenty publications since 1998 – following a transition from dance that informs an in-depth multisensory approach throughout my work.
Review of Flow and Friction in Eye Magazine in April 2018: eyemagazine.com/blog/post/follow-the-glitch.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy in Art History, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University 2012 – 2016.
Flow and Friction: On the Tactical Potential of Interfacing with Glitch Art (Art & Theory Publishing, 2016)
Magister of Philosophy in Art History, Aesthetical Disciplines Program, Stockholm University 2010 – 2011.
Scholarship Course in Art History, the Swedish Institute, Rome 2011.
Bachelor of Philosophy in Art History, Cultural Studies Program,
Stockholm University 2005 – 2008.
Internship, the Modern Museum, Stockholm 2007.
Photography Diploma, GFU and Fotoskolan Stockholm,
Folkuniversitetet 2000 – 2002.
Lecturer in Art History, Department of Culture and Aesthetics,
Stockholm University,
20-50%, 2016-08-19 – 2017-12-31 (temporary since 2012)
Art History I; Art History II; Image, History, Interpretation
Teaching and supervising basic/advanced level theses
Lecturer in Art History, European Humanities, Danish Institute of Study Abroad (DIS), Stockholm and Copenhagen, 25-40%, 2016-05-01 – 2017-12-31
Nordic Contemporary Art; Impressionism in Paris
Course development/management and teaching
Guest lectures at Södertörn University, Gothenburg University, Valand Art Academy, Stockholm University, Fotoskolan Stockholm (photography school),
Danish Institute of Study
Erasmus+ teacher mobility grant, for guest teaching at Universiteit van Amsterdam 2017-05-15 – 2017-05-19, and Universiteit van Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit 2017-12-10 – 2017-12-14.
University Pedagogy I (3 ECTS) and II (7,5 ECTS), Stockholm University 2013/2017.
Current project: The Politics of Metadata (2020)
Postdoctoral project: Seeing Differently / Seeing Difference:
Emancipation and Aesthetics in Photography
by the Visually Impaired (2018-2020)
Funded by Anna Ahlström & Ellen Terserus Foundation
Visiting Fellow, Department of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths University of London
This project aims to analyse emancipatory and aesthetical aspects of images created by visually impaired photographers between 2000 and 2016. In this period, these images move from a sociological focus on therapeutic pedagogies to an aesthetical focus on public displays of art. I home in on the effects of this move on practitioners, producers and viewers in order to investigate how individuals engage with the tension of redefining images that sits uneasily between therapy and art. This tension arises for instance when the images are conceptualized as aesthetic objects yet are described with tropes like “blind”. In an international cross-disciplinary collaboration, the project highlights important under-researched practices whose meanings and manifestations take place where the private and the public clash.
The project develops key areas of my research: photography, spectatorship, and a dynamics between dependence on and disruption of visual techno-logies. Building on the conclusions of my doctoral thesis, I argue that both technical and bodily systems – like sight – can be glitched and that such disruption can expose the socio-cultural coding of human physicality in modes that are standardized as well as deviating. This notion is supported by recent theorizations in media studies that address the glitch as a sensory and bodily experience with political implication. By integrating these perspectives into art history’s framework of situated close observation, my analyses add to the production of knowledge on this topical subject. My position as photo-grapher and art historian ensures a valuable contribution to close contextual-izing image analyses that are much needed to understand this rich material.
Selected Publications
Grundell Gachoud, V. (2021) "Making Worlds: Normative and Other Art Histories of Visually Impaired Photographers," in: C. Persinger and A. Rejaie, eds., Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History, 181-199. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Grundell Gachoud, V. (2020) “Tactical Ambiguity: Materiality, Representation and Interaction in Evan Meaney’s Glitched Portraits,” in: S. Whatley and S. Popat, eds., Error, Ambiguity, Creativity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 21-41. London: Palgrave.
Grundell, V. (2019) “Rethinking while Redoing: Tactical Affordances of Assistive Technologies in Photography by the Visually Impaired.” Media Theory 3:1, 185-214.
Grundell, V. (2018) ”Navigating Darkness: A Photographic Response to Visual Impairment.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 14:3, 193-210.
Grundell, V. (2016) Flow and Friction: On the Tactical Potential of Interfacing with Glitch Art. Stockholm: Art & Theory. ISBN 978-91-8803-137-2.
Grundell, V. (2016) “Friction as Tactical Experience: Interfacing Photographic Instances through Rosa Menkman’s Sunshine in My Throat,” in: J. Gomes Pinto and R. Matoso, eds., Art and Photography in Media Environments, 39-65. Lisbon: Lusófona University.
Other Publications - Selected
Grundell, V. (2020) “Att se annorlunda: Skadade ögon bryter fotografiets vaneseende” (article, VERK 4 2016) and “Flöde och friktion – ett samtal med Vendela Grundell” (interview, VERK 1 2017), in: L. Bergman, ed., VERK antologi – Texter ur VERK tidskrift 2016 – 2019. Stockholm: Boris Press, 63-69 (article) and 101-111 (interview).
Grundell, V. (2019) “The Failed Fly: Process and Positioning in the Documentation of Living Documents” in: C. Ruth and D. Grünbühel, Living Documents I-V. Stockholm: MDT.
Grundell, V. (2018) “Trött hud: Om bortvänd blick and pirrande fingertoppar”
[Tired Skin: On a down-turned gaze and tingling fingertips]
VERK, no.2.
Grundell, V. (2016) “Att se annorlunda: Skadade ögon bryter fotografiets vaneseende”
[Seeing Differently: Impaired Eyes Break the Habitual Seeing of Photography] in VERK, no. 4.
Grundell, V. (2015) “En stilla retad nerv” / ”A Nerve Slightly Bothered”, in Me – every body volume I, Gothenburg: Olof Persson Projects, 23-30. ISBN 978-91-982056-0-2
Forthcoming Publications
Grundell, V. (2021) “Unruliness Online: Activist Visuality in Glitch Art and Disability Aesthetics on Instagram,” in: D. White and S. Hartle, eds., Visual Activism in the 21st Century: Art, Protest and Resistance in an Uncertain World. London: Bloomsbury.
Selected International Conference Papers
2021 “Metadata as a Diversity Tool: Sámi Traces in Institutional Archives Online,” Cultural Heritage and Social Impact: Digital Technologies for Social Inclusion and Participation. Online.
2019 Accepted papers for conferences on medical imagery, the commons and media ecology.
2018 “Seeing More or Less: Troubled Sight and Inner Vision in Photographs by the Visually Impaired,” Art of the Invisible, Courtauld Institute, London. “Material Agency and Sensory Challenge: Exploring Photography through Visual Impairment,” Nordik XII: [no title], Copenhagen University. “User Bodies: (Self-) Representation between Ableism and Disability Aesthetics,” Digital Cultures: Knowledge/ Culture / Technology, Leuphana University, Lüneburg. "Seeing by Taking Pictures Without Seeing: Assistive Technologies in Photography by the Visually Impaired," Human-Technology Relations: Postphenomenology and Philosophy of Technology, University of Twente, Enschede.
2017 “Glitched Bodies: Digital Critique in Photographs by the Visually Impaired”
Digital Existence II: Precarious Media Life, DIGMEX Network, Sigtuna Foundation, Sigtuna.
2016 “Interfacing Poetics: Glitch Art Transforming Spectatorship”
Poetics of the Algorithm: Narrative, the Digital, and Unidentified Media,
Liège University. “The Cyborgian Portrait: Speaking through Photographic Disruption,” Photomedia: Photographic Agencies and Materialities
Aalto University, Helsinki.
2015 “Painting with Something: Media Merges in Contemporary Swedish Photography,” Nordik XI: Uncharted Territories, University of Iceland, Reykjavik.
2014 “Interface Photography: Disruption as Tactical Experience”
Art Photography in Media Environments (ECREA), Lusófona University, Lisbon.
Selected Research Presentations
2020 Coming: Lectures at Stockholm University; Gothenburg University; University of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm.
2019 “The Landscape of Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Stockholm, symposium at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Fotografi & forskning, photography art and research workshop, Centrum för fotografi in Stockholm.
2018 “Unruliness: Images against Normality,” lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Coventry and Nottingham Trent universities. “Making Change through the Humanities: Institutes, Ideas and Infrastructures,” symposium at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. “Cultural Techniques,” workshop at Stockholm University. Linneaus University, Växjö.
2017 “Data-driven Research in the Humanities,” symposium at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. “Performativity and Artistic Practice” and “Acting Images: Understanding the Agency and Materiality of Imagery and Visual Culture,” workshops at Stockholm University. Stockholm University Research Days, presentation here.
2016 “Glitchar och glitch-konst. Museet som gränssnitt: Flöde, nätverk och störande konst” [Glitches and Glitch Art. The Museum as Interface: Flow, Network and Disruptive Art], the Modern Museum, Stockholm