Public Defense: Eva la Cour, Artistic Practice
Dissertation, Eva la Cour, Artistic Practice, HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg: Geo-Aesthetical Discontent: Svalbard, the Guide and Post-Future Essayism.
Propelled by the acute ecological crisis this dissertation moves between artistic affinities and academic disciplines to craft an intervention into imaginaries of Svalbard as an Arctic place. Designed as an iterative set of artistic practice experiments with live editing, it seeks to demonstrate a Geo-Aesthetical Discontent – a dissatisfying lack in the representational discourse – upon terrains with colonial history for visual production. By subverting the historically monolithic and singular narrative of the Arctic, the artistic research unsettles the traditional exemplars of the artist and the scientist. Rather it mobilizes The Guide as an analytical figure and tool with which to propose a Post-Future Essayism: a precarious filmic methodology and epistemological strategy of the moving image; a fragmentary and momentary compositional effect that seeks to navigate and negotiate the role of film in relation to a historiographic concept of futurity.
The dissertation, then, is a response to a discontentment with current portrayals of the Arctic that produce the region as an outside to the global west. At stake is to connect the production of an artistic practice – significantly described in relation to historical image-makers such as Jette Bang, Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson – and the production of the Arctic.
You find the thesis and abstract at Gothenburg University Publications Electronic Archive - GUPEA.
Opponent:Christian Vium, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Aarhus (DK)
Grading Committee:
- Dr Florian Schneider, professor for art theory and documentary practices at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art within the Faculty of Architecture and Fine Art at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway
- Dr Roger Norum, docent in Geography of Mobility, University of Oulu, Finland
- Dr Karin Wagner professor in Art history and visual studies, Department of Cultural Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, University of Gothenburg
The public defense will take place both physically at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg and online.
If you wish to attend in person, the venue is Black Box, a film studio at the Department for Film, Photography and Literature, accessed from Storgatan 43 entrance (Please send an email to Anna.Frisk@konst.gu.se with a notice so we can prepare the number of seats).
If you wish to attend online, please click this link to join the webinar:
https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/65614156813
The public defense will be held in English