SPEAKERS (in order of appearance)
Fataneh Farahani is an Associate professor in Ethnology at the department of Ethnology, Gender studies and history of Religions as Stockholm University. In 2015, she was awarded the prestigious Wallenberg Academy Fellowship and started the project Cartographies of Hospitality, through which she examines conditions of hospitality in different multicultural European settings. Her works builds on critical cultural theories and methodologies that seek to conceptualize the divergent and contingent intersections of the complex discourses through which femininities and masculinities are constructed in different diasporic contexts. By placing gender and sexuality at the centre of her focus, she engages with issues of otherness, subjectivity, agency and marginality within different Western multicultural contexts. Recent publications are : “Home and Homelessness and Everything in between: A Route from One Uncomfortable Zone to another One” in European Journal of women Studies (2015), “Iranian Born Men’s Navigations of Race, Masculinities and the Politics of Difference” in Rethinking Transnational Men: Beyond, Between and within Nations (2013), “ Reflections on Gendered, Raced, and Classed Displacements” (2012), “On Being an Insider and/or an Outsider: A Diasporic Researcher’s Catch-22” in Education Without Borders: Diversity in a Cosmopolitan Society (2010), and “Sexing Diaspora: Negotiating Sexuality in Shifting Cultural Landscape” in Muslim Diaspora in the West: Local and Global Perspectives (2010). See a recent interview with Fataneh Farahani here
Jonathan Corpus Ong is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. He is the Convenor of the Newton Tech4Dev Network, as Principal Investigator to a British Council Newton Fund project (2016-2018). He is the author of The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines (2015) and co-editor of Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space (2016, with Maria Rovisco). His current research is on gender and sexuality in post-disaster convivialities, drawing from research on post-Haiyan Tacloban and post-Katrina New Orleans.
Rebecca Bengtsson is a PhD Researcher in the Media Department at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research concerns the interplay of media, migration, foreign policy and human rights. Prior to joining the Department of Media Studies she worked as the media advisor to the Head of Mission for an international observer mission in Palestine, and she has previously worked as a journalist, communicator as well as a media trainer on questions concerning human rights, gender and minorities.
Christian Christensen is Professor of Journalism at the Department of Media Studies AT Stockholm University. His recent publications have addressed the relationship between whistleblowing, transparency, journalism and politics (with an emphasis on WikiLeaks), as well as on the use of social media in political and journalistic work. He is currently involved in a number of projects, including an EU FP7 study on media and democratization, and a project funded by Forte on the use of social media by Swedish journalists.
Andrea Hvistendahl is a visual artist with an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Through interactive pieces, objects, installations, images and cooperations she examines aspects of our major contemporary issues: globalization, environment and social injustice. Hvistendahl’s art generates new meetings in and between different social arenas. She conducts art projects, workshops and lectures often in cooperation with other social actors like Naturvårdsverket, Forum for Living History, Folke Bernadotte Academy, as well as in collaboration with other artists. She has recently exhibited in Rio de Janeiro, Athens and in Iraq where her work was used a method for dialogue. Since last year, she is a lecturer in Spatial Design at Mälardalen University College where is currently running an artistic research project on integration.
Since 2009, the Slovak artist Tomáš Rafa has been investigating “new nationalisms” in Central Europe. One project involved working with Roma communities in eastern Slovakia. Because local residents often feel threatened by Roma people, the authorities have built walls separating citizens with different ethnic and cultural status. These visible boundaries are in clear contradiction of the official respect for equality, so they are called “walls of sports”, officially to be used for recreation. This is why, in 2012-14, local authorities approved Rafa’s project to paint several such walls with “sports motifs.” Together with Roma youth, he created a project that became a sarcastic commentary on the hypocrisy of the authorities. See the artist’s website at http://your-art.sk/
Florencia Enghel is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Department of Media Studies. She has a background in film production, and documentary-making for social change is one of her research interests. Her doctoral study, “Video letters, mediation and (proper) distance”, which analyzes post-conflict international media assistance to the successor states to the former Yugoslavia, received the 2015 Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Swedish Association for Media and Communication Research. Her work has been published in Nordicom Review, Global Media Journal and Media, Culture & Society. She is a member of the Clearinghouse on Public Statements of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), where she served as Vice-Chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section between 2010 and 2016.
Erik Berggren shares responsibility for curation and management of The Museum of Forgetting. He has a background as free-lance writer and critic, commenting on culture and politics in Swedish press. He is working at Linköping University at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) as Research Coordinator, teacher for BA- and MA-students, and with a special task of creating seminar activites and collaborations with surrounding society. He has researched and written several articles on right-wing populism in Denmark and its affinities to fascism. Currently he is setting up an exhibition space at Linköping University, Campus Norrköping, with support from FORMAS, for talks and visual art addressing the refugee situation in Sweden.
Kosta Ekonomou shares responsibility for curation and management of The Museum of Forgetting. He holds a Ph.D in interdisciplinary Communication studies from Linköping university and conducted research on youth cultural production and popular culture and media forms. He has also produced and conducted a series of art and new media projects and collaborations, and currently he is involved in curating the University´s exhibition at the 2017 Housing fair in Linköping.
The Museum of Forgetting is run by Erik Berggren and Kosta Economou with the help of a large collective of artists and cultural workers. It is a nomadic platform that creates art exhibitions and opens up space for critical reflection and debate. They have borrowed the name “Museum” to highlight the costs and rewards of social and cultural forgetting. Since 2007 they have addressed themes such as war, American popular culture, Arab cartoons, the relationship between fact and fiction in art and politics, goldmining and migration, in Sweden and Internationally. Currently they work on two projects: Is This the Time for Art? is a curatorial investigation and exhibition about art on migration that has visited Stockholm, Athens, Limerick, Norrköping, Malmö and will go to Örebro in the Fall. Gold is a project being developed that has been show in Athens, Norrköping and will turn up in Stockholm at Supermarket this Spring.
Abir Boukhari is an art curator from Syria. She is the co-founder of AllArtNow, an independent contemporary arts platform that was launched in 2005 in Damascus together with artist Nisrine Boukhari. A neglected house in the old city of Damascus served as AllArtNow’s laboratory for art, a hub for emerging artistic practice and a meeting point for local and international artists to exchange creative ideas and form collaborations. Since July 2012, AllArtNow closed its doors in Syria to open it to Syrian refugee families and started to work in different places in the world as a nomadic space.
UNICORN – artists in solidarity is a network initiated by artists and cultural workers based in Malmö. UNICORN is developing a residency programme in cooperation with Inter Arts Center in Malmö with the aim to give refuge to artists at risk. All over the world artists are put under pressure, and their possibilities to work are being systematically undercut by governments and other oppressing structures. The residency programme comprises an apartment that the artist and/or activist will share together, access to studio space at Inter Arts Center and a small stipend for each participant that will cover daily expenses. UNICORN will assist with access to workshops and equipment according to the resident’s needs and pay for travel expenses and help with visa. At the heart of the residency programme is a desire to act in solidarity and share experiences and strategies with colleagues as well as support artists who are in need of citizenship. See UNICORN’s Facebook page
Jon Brunberg is an artist who lives in Stockholm. In addition to his artistic practice he works as a freelance educator, writer, software developer and publisher. www.brunberg.se
Anusha Caroline Andersson is a writer and cultural producer born in Sri Lanka and based in Stockholm. She has studied at the Nordic Author School, Biskops-Arnö, the Royal Institute of Art and literature science at The University of Stockholm. She has also worked at Kulturhuset, Swedish Radio and is currently working as a coordinator for development through culture in Botkyrka municipality. Anusha is also the director of Historieberättarna, an organization working with children and youth through storytelling and creative expression through film, animation, text, photography, and images. She has also worked together with and for unaccompanied refugee children in the project Culture for Asylum Seekers supported by the city of Stockholm. Historieberättarna is also supported by the City of Stockholm and is currently part of a European collaborative project, Storytelling Without Borders supported by Creative Europe – European Commission, taking place in Sweden, Greece and Denmark. Read more about Historieberättarna here.
Jasper de Rycker is a teacher of Dutch as a second language to adult migrants in Antwerp, Belgium. He’s also a Non-Violent Communication trainer, photographer, artist in general and die-hard fan of the late Richard Pryor.
Per Hüttner is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Stockholm and Paris. He has shown extensively in Europe, Australia, Asia, North and South America. Solo exhibitions include Zendai Contemporary in Shanghai, the Nobel Museum, Chisenhale Gallery. Group exhibitions include Wellcome Collection in London, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM); Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Hayward Gallery in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, MACBA in Barcelona. Performances include Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the Venice Biennial. A dozen monographs on the artist’s work have been published in the last decade. Hüttner is the founder and director of the Vision Forum, a project-based international experimental research network. www.perhuttner.com
CHAIRS:
Anna Roosvall is Associate Professor (Docent) of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. Her research is centered on three overlapping areas: online journalism and issues of justice and solidarity, particularly in relation to identity politics, ethnicity, nationality and globalization; media and climate change, particularly in relation to global climate justice and indigenous peoples; and cultural journalism, specifically its political and ethical aspects.
Temi Odumosu is an art historian, creative educator, and postdoctoral researcher for the Living Archives Research Project at Malmö University in Sweden. Her international research and cultural practice is concerned with the representation of African peoples, visual politics of slavery and colonialism, colonial archives and archiving, Afro-Diaspora aesthetics, and more broadly exploring how art mediates social transformation and healing. Her PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge explored the construction and use of African caricatures in British satirical prints during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This work provided the basis for her upcoming book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes, White Humour (Brepols, 2016). Between 2012 and 2014 she was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral fellow for EUROTAST at Copenhagen University (Denmark), where she worked collaboratively on a pan-European project with geneticists, historians and archaeologists investigating the effects of the transatlantic slave trade on African health, disease patterns, and biosocial identity. Since 2014, Temi has been working collaboratively with an interdisciplinary team of researchers for the Living Archives Research Project, which has been addressing the challenges of producing and working with archival material in an increasingly digitized and networked environment. Under the project’s “Performing Memory” inquiry strand she is currently developing alternative approaches to the representation of colonial archival material, by combining augmented reality (AR), sound, media projection, and varying kinds of performance to develop more affective public experiences with this contested past. www.temiodumosu.com
Macarena Dusant is an art historian and independent writer based in Stockholm, working within the field of art and exhibition production since 2009. Her work focuses mainly on power structures, the notion of the public realm and mechanisms of exclusion within contemporary art. Dusant is currently finishing her studies in Art History at Södertörn University with the master’s thesis “Power Relations and Discourses that Create Meaning,” where she investigates three case studies of site-specific art projects in socioeconomically underprivileged areas in Sweden. She is a co-founder of IDA (Institute for the Decolonisation of Art), which investigates knowledge production and formations within Swedish contemporary art. She has recently published the book The Art of Participation, on the conditions of newly arrived immigrant artists. Currently, Dusant is working on a book about Swedish contemporary artist Valeria Montti Colque where she highlights a discussion on diaspora and belonging in relation to Montti Colque’s work.
ORGANIZERS:
Miyase Christensen is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Stockholm University and Guest Professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Technology, Science and Environment, at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden. Christensen is Editor-in-Chief of Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture; Associate Editor of Annals of the International Communication Association; and Director of Leading Environment in Global Media Studies and Politics of Mediated Communication, Stockholm University. Her latest book (with A. Jansson) is Cosmopolitanism and the Media: Cartographies of Change (2015).
Isabel Löfgren is a visual artist, independent curator and researcher. She has a Ph.D in Media & Communications from the department of Philosophy, Art, & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School based in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. She is an Associated Researcher at the Institute of Latin American Studies (LAI) at Stockholm University, and is a co-founder of IDA, Institute for the Decolonization of Art which investigates issues of diversity and diaspora in contemporary art in Sweden. Her doctoral thesis Hospitality and its Other: Migration, Media and the Divided City focuses on the theory and practice of hospitality in relationship to spaces of otherness, focusing on segregation patterns in divided cities; social housing and the impact of participatory art projects in such areas; and the role of media cultures in shaping a sense of belonging among communities of persons in exile. Since 2015, her interest in the history of marginalized communities, struggles for social emancipation, and their relation to the urban environment has led to new research possibilities and a series of artistic projects and events. At the moment, she is working on artistic research projects that involves looking at feminist activist groups re-imagining hospitality in divided cities from a gender perspective. www.isabellofgren.com
GLOBAL MEDIA CAFÉ: A SECOND HOME 