Cecilia Grönberg new Professor of Fine Arts

Among other things, artist Cecilia Grönberg is looking forward to working with the concept of generosity.

Cecilia Grönberg is an artist, editor, author and researcher. She has a PhD in Photographic Composition from HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design. She successfully defended her doctoral thesis Händelsehorisont || Event Horizon. Distribuerad fotografi (Event Horizon. Distributed Photography) in 2016 and she has continued to also work on artistic research projects in Montreal, Oxford and Paris. Together with Jonas (J) Magnusson she is, since the early 2000s, running the magazine and publishing structure OEI, an investigative, experimental artistic and literary publishing project.

“I am very much looking forward to start working as Professor in the Materiality of Art at Konstfack. This is a subject that is especially close to my heart and that has been continuously present through my entire artistic practice. It is of course a multilayered and complex concept that not only concerns language, images, technology and so on, but also infrastructures and the necessary spaces, both institutional and extra-institutional, in which artistic practices can take place and meet in more open ways, and also be part of and shape a larger cultural discourse,” says Grönberg, who describes her practice as in constant motion between different media, disciplines, materials and materialities, scales, places, temporalities and histories, fieldwork and archives.

“I am interested in questions of extra-disciplinarity, of montage and visuality, in spatiality and knowledge production, and always with attention to different materialities at various levels of agency – and I hope these experiences will be generative here at Konstfack,” she says.

“To develop the subject, we also need to create more nuanced terminology to describe or formulate materials and practices. I am especially interested in what I have called ‘material specific’ knowledge, which is to say a less overarching and synthesising theory that is instead shaped by the singular artistic practice, but which can still help us conceptualise the world at large in new ways. Of course, these questions are also relevant to artistic research, and I am looking forward to being part of the research environment at Konstfack and to continue an experimental and open investivation in a spirit of curiosity together with students and colleagues.

In addition, generosity is one of the concepts I want to explore in the near future. How do we respect and value each other’s practices? How can we shape permissive spaces for collaboration, that are not based on competition, but on generosity? How can we be more generous to those who came before us and those who come after?”

Grönberg has been making books, magazine issues, exhibitions and public events since 2001, often in collaboration with Jonas (J) Magnusson, at venues such as Bergen Kunsthall, Camden Arts Centre, Centrum för Fotografi (CFF), Publics, the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), Index, Moderna Museet, Malmö Konstmuseum, the Artist’s Institute, Malmö Konsthall, Skövde Konstmuseum, INCA Seattle and Bienal de São Paulo. They are currently working on the artistic research projects The Expanded Book and The Latent Image.

For further information, please contact: cecilia.gronberg@konstfack.se