This three-day conference at KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes/University of Bergen looks to foreground new and vital conversations currently shaping Nordic art historical research on the natural world. Focusing on the encounter between art history, visual culture, nature, and the environment, we aim to redress the imbalance in Nordic art history that often emphasises teleological national narratives, and instead situate encounters with nature in relation to more broad historical and contemporary perspectives, including, but not limited to, the transnational, environmental, post-colonial, and Indigenous.

Recent scholarship has embraced the trans-Nordic and trans-disciplinary connections in Nordic art history, particularly with relation to landscape and ecology. This renewed focus has drawn upon novel and timely methodologies that offer an interdisciplinary perspective on artwork and objects previously associated with mystical, national, and colonial tropes. We view this conference as an intervention into the prescribed narrative of National Romanticism, inviting speakers to move beyond the national as a priori framework, and to decentre and reconfigure the geographical and cultural focus of the landscape and natural world in Nordic art history. Pressuring the intimate connections between humans and nature, new and emerging scholarship is intensely aware of the overlaps between the visual arts, environmental humanities, animal studies, Sámi bodies of knowledge, and de-colonialism. This emphasis on interdisciplinarity also showcases the wealth of collaborative research currently shaping art historical practice.

Through Nordic Nature we seek to build dialogue among scholars engaged in interdisciplinary art historical research, and to foster a conversation around how to move beyond National Romanticism as the primary way of understanding the visual culture of the Nordic environment.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Gry Hedin, Curator, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art

The program and registration for Nordic Nature: Art, Ecology, Landscape are now available. The event is free to attend for all, and there are options for both in-person and virtual attendance!

Registration: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=125611361

  • 1. Please note: Zoom links will be sent out closer to the event date for digital attendance

Thursday June 16th

8.45 – 9.00 – Opening Remarks

9.00 – 10.30 – Session 1

Fin-de-siecle Ecology – Chair Tonje Haugland Sørensen (University of Bergen)

  • Endre Harvold Kvangraven (University of Stavanger): Reinterpreting the Cultural Landscape: Ecological perspectives on Nikolai Astrup
  • Anna-Maria Hällgren (Stockholm University): Northern Nature as Aesthetic Experience and Natural Resource in Visual Culture around 1900
  • Dan Karlholm (Södertörn University): Nature without Nationality: Extreme Weather Painter Marcus Larson
  • Alice Price (Temple University): Peculiar Beauty: Conservation and Image Making in West Jutland

10.30 – 11.00 – Break

11.00 – 12.30 – Session 2

Art, Architecture, and Activism - Chair: Ingrid Halland (University of Bergen)

  • Kjetil Fallan (University of Oslo): The Graphic Language of Protest: Design Activism at the UN Conference on the Human Environment
  • Maria Ribeiro (Södertörn University): Nature as backdrop in the age of National Romanticism – Anders Zorn as a political and social commentator
  • Elizabeth Hutchinson (Columbia University): Art, Mining, and Cultural Survival in Nunavut

12.30 – 14.00 – Lunch & Curator Talks

14.00 – 15.30 – Session 3

Animal Studies - Chair: Dolly Jørgensen (University of Stavanger)

  • Bart Pushaw (University of Copenhagen): Playing Reindeer Games; The Ecologies of Ivory in Gold Rush Alaska
  • Mariia Niskavaara (University of Helsinki): Ferdinand and Magnus von Wright from the Perspective of Extinction
  • Jean Marie Carey (University of Stavanger Arkeologisk Museum): Prehistoric Paradigms and Animalized Art

15.30 – 16.30 – Break

16.30 – 18.00 – Curating the Anthropocene Roundtable

  • Gry Hedin (ARKEN Museum of Modern Art)
  • Dolly Jørgensen (University of Stavanger)
  • Tove Kårstad Haugsbø (KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes)
  • Inger Gudmundson (University of Oslo and Stavanger Art Museum)

Friday June 17th

9.00 – 10.30 – Session 4

Arctic Imaginings – Chair Isabelle Gapp (University of Toronto)

  • Katarina Macleod (Södertörn University): Illustrating Neutral Nature: The Image of Science
  • Louise Hardiman (University of Cambridge): Arctic Aesthetics, Imperial Explorations: The Art of Alexander Borisov and his London Exhibition of 1907
  • Christopher P. Heuer (The University of Rochester, New York): The Confines of the Known World: Land and Vision in the Medieval Arctic
  • Synne Tollerud Bull (University of Oslo): An Ocean in the Making -LoVe Ocean and Kristine Colban Aa’s Perspective Map of Lofoten (1816)

10.30 – 11.00 – Break

11.00 – 12.30 – Session 5

Contemporary Responses: Chair MaryClaire Pappas (Indiana University)

  • Heiða Björk Árnadóttir (University of Iceland): Romanticism, or the Ecological Imperative in Icelandic Conceptualism
  • Haylee Glasel (Florida State University): Reciprocity and Respect: Land Based Practices in Rájácummá – Kiss from the Border, 2017-2018
  • Ingvild Krogvig (National Museum of Norway): Norwegian Land Art in the ‘70s and ‘80s: Re-connecting with nature?
  • David W. Norman (University of Michigan): Infrastructural Life: Urban Earthworks in Copenhagen and Qaqortoq

12.30 – 14.00 – Lunch & Curator Talks

13.45 – 15.15 – Session 6

Gender in the North - Chair Katarina Macleod (Södertorn University)

  • Lisa Bloom (University of California Berkeley): Reclaiming the Arctic through Feminist and Black Aesthetic Perspectives
  • Jadranka Ryle (University of Manchester): Blue Ether: Nature, Fluidity and Gender in Hilma af Klint’s Watercolours
  • Anne Hemkendreis (University of Freiburg): Romantic Aesthetics Revisited: The Arctic Sublime and Heroic Imaginaries in Scandinavian Art

15.30 – 16.30 – Break

16.30 – 18.00 – Keynote Address

  • Gry Hedin (ARKEN Museum of Modern Art)

Saturday June 18th

10.00 – 11.30 – Session 7

Film and Photography - Chair Bart Pushaw (University of Copenhagen)

  • Roger J. Crum (University of Dayton): Harvesting Nordic Nature: Logging, Photography, and the Visual Culture of Triumphant Elimination
  • Stig Storheil (Senior Photo Archivist, NVE): No Man’s Land: Glacier Photographs, Science and Materiality
  • Jonathan Peyton (University of Manitoba): Materiality and the on-screen stories of the Canadian Arctic energy imaginary
  • Synnøve Marie Vik (University of Bergen Library): The Forest Case

11.30 – 11.45 – Break

11.45 – 13.15 – Session 8

Scandinavian Sculpture – Chair Kesia Eidesen Halvorsrud (University of Oslo and KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes)

  • Lauren Barnes (University of Toronto): “You never know when you’ll need a long stick”: Ecology and Tie in the Sculptures of Silje Figenschou Thoresen
  • Martin Schieder (Universität Leipzig): In the Mirror of the Arctic Circle: An Outdoor Sculpture by Dan Graham on the Lofoten Islands
  • Erika Brandl (Independent Scholar, Bergen): Drawn altars, lines of site: Sverre Fehn and the territorial eye

13.15 – 14.30 – Lunch & Curator Talks

14.30 – 16.00 – Session 9

Garden Landscapes – Chair Tove Kårstad Haugsbø (KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes)

  • Martin Søberg (Royal Danish Academy): Taste and Taxonomy: Nature, Sensations and Ordering in the Nordic Baroque Garden
  • Kesia Eidesen (KODE/University of Oslo): At Home in Nature: The Ecology of Nikolai Astrup’s Interior paintings from the Astrup family home at Sandalstrand
  • Anna Grasskamp (University of Saint Andrews): Traces of Guangzhou: Chinese Landscapes in Nordic Spaces

16.00 – 16.15 – Closing Remarks