Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design

About this portal
Konstfack was founded in 1844 and is one of Sweden’s largest universities for the arts with around 900 students and 200 employees. The school educates the artists, designers, craftspeople, visual art and sloyd teachers of tomorrow, and the programs represent education and research on both artistic and scientific basis.
Art, crafts, design, art- craft- and design-history, visual communication and arts education are the areas of research at Konstfack. The research environment includes externally funded research projects, research within the teacher’s position and a joint doctoral program together with The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH): Art Technology and Design (KTD). The KTD program aims at radically rethinking the relationship between individuals, communities and the environment in order to contribute to a more sustainable society.
contact person(s):
David Scheutz 
url:
https://www.konstfack.se/
Recent Activities
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Radical Inside
(2020)
author(s): Palle Torsson
published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design
The goal of this work and of my research is to broaden our understanding of contemporary creative conditions in relation to how technologically constructed systems enable cultural production. The work explores specific systems and pushes the limits of their intended use.
In the process, I also hope to reveal the relationship between digital systems and transformative subjects. The work Radical Inside explores 3D models from the largest sharing platform for 3D content. A multiplicity of possibilities opens up as a shift in camera perspective reveals the internal structure of the 3D models. The reorientation points to criticism of how society is structured and imagined by the heteronormative gaze. The unusual angle displaces the normative placement of the model within a reduced and rigid system - the taxonomy and categorization of the platform. From within, I can highlight and explore technology as a fundamentally surreal and queer possibility.
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The Life of an Itinerant through a Pinhole
(2020)
author(s): Behzad Khosravi Noori
published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design
Between 1956 and 1968, the photographer Gholamreza Amirbegi captured a wealth of images from around his neighborhood in southwestern Tehran. At the time the city had just seen a major influx of working-class immigrants from the country’s smaller municipalities. By re-narrating these materials, which evoke not only particular, local memories, but also distinct subaltern histories, this overlooked archive tells stories of social change from below in Iran, as seen in Gholamreza’s subjects: global cinematic images, and unconscious colonial memory. By applying a comparative historical-material analysis, Khosravi Noori’s aim here is to develop a practice based, multi-sited archaeology of contemporary history. This approach begins with an excavation of the historical materials themselves, in order to both discover lost identities in these images, and to displace them from sedimented historical positions. In doing this, he asks the question: What happens to the past from the vantage point of the future?
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jag vet hur folkhemmet luktar
(2020)
author(s): tina carlsson
published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design
jag vet hur folkhemmet luktar is an interdisciplinary project that attempts to show a more complex picture of the Swedish folkhem (“people’s home” – a term used to describe the vision of a better life for all by Swedish social democracy). The project is a response to the romanticised and idealised image of the folkhem which, in the current political climate, is mainly propagated by the far right with the populist and racist Swedish Democrats (SD) at the forefront. Using the artists own “folkhem-marinated” body as a point of departure, the exposition sketches the nodes from which the folkhem unfolded and how that created the preconditions for certain people to feel at home while others were excluded. In mapping the “folkhem nodes” photographic documentation, notes of childhood memories and a conversation with the father is used. The project investigates how the folkhem ideology was implemented through a linguistic as well as a spatial and material aesthetics. The textual memories are contextualized through a system of footnotes, that in the exposition are shown in pop-up windows and act as a commenting and associative parallel text to the memory narratives.