Hazelius BBQ: studio talk with Sigrid Holmwood and Claudia Lindén

On Saturday 26 March, Carl Eldh’s Ateljémuseum invites you to a conversation between artist Sigrid Holmwood and Claudia Lindén, professor of literary studies at Södertörn University, about the 19th century’s fascination with folk culture, Skansen’s and the Nordic Museum’s founder Artur Hazelius and the obduracy of evanescence.

Wearing a loose nose and a suit sewn in kattun, a thin, printed cotton fabric, artist Sigrid Holmwood examines political relations embedded in Western European art history and the emergence of modernity. In painting, performance and textile works, she has worked with the peasant as a symbol of something old-fashioned, a figure that needed to be pushed back in time in order to construct modernity.

In her research, professor Claudia Lindén has approached the paradoxical relationship of Artur Hazelius and his visions of life and death. Skansen would become a living place where each new generation could meet their own childhood. In this way, time itself could be shaped, as continuous destruction and salvation in one.

The emergence of these places was closely followed by the artist Carl Eldh, who was hired to design the Nordic Museum’s main portal, with figures such as Mother Svea, the Spinstress and the Farmer. With these institutions, an idea of ​​Swedishness was formed that is still alive to this day. But they also carry the potential to develop the local’s positions in global and colonial processes, and a possible resistance to modernity’s inevitable destruction of life forms.

The studio talk is an open conversation based on an artistic process, a room for the unfinished and exploratory. This conversation is the first of several, and part of Carl Eldh’s Ateljémuseum’s experimental exploration of what a cultural heritage institution can be.

During the day, Sigrid Holmwood’s textile prints are installed among the sculptures in the studio. We open the gates half an hour before the talk.

The conversation is held in Swedish.

Welcome!

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Sigrid Holmwood holds a PhD in Art from Goldsmiths College, London, UK (2021), an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, UK (2002), and a BFA from Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, UK, (2000 ). She is represented in the collections at the Saatchi Gallery, Halland Art Museum, the Swedish Arts Council and the Modern Museum. Her work is currently part of the exhibition “Swedish Acquisitions: Insights” at the Moderna museet in Stockholm.

Claudia Lindén is a professor of literary studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Her research interests include Scandinavian literature from the 19th century, Gothic literature, animal studies, gender studies, queer theory, history theory. Lindén is currently working on the animal study project “The bear’s tracks: A study of the bear in national romantic literature around the Baltic Sea”.