University of Gothenburg
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Kerstin Hamilton

Lecturer

The Film, Photography and Literary Composition
Unit
Mail
kerstin.hamilton@gu.se
Visiting address
Storgatan 43
Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

About Kerstin Hamilton

Kerstin Hamilton is an artist and artistic researcher. Her PhD research project The Objectivity Laboratory: Propositions on Documentary Photography explored how materialities and processes are visualized using a camera, exploring the photographer’s reach both physically and ethically. With the aim of proposing how to move beyond some of the more incapacitating aspects of representational critique, it approached the concept of "situated objectivity" as a form of ethical, empathic and engaged objectivity. The research maps experimental approaches within contemporary documentary photography and discusses the relation between documentary, photography, post-truth politics and ethics.

In her art and research, Hamilton has explored the connections between the natural sciences and the field of photography: using the laboratory both physically and as a symbol, the image’s relation to reality is considered. Main outcomes of her work carried out in nanotechnology laboratories are the film Zero Point Energy (2016) which was part of The New Human exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Malmö and the two image/text/installation based artworks The Science Question in Feminism (2018) and A World Made by Science (2018) made for the 2018 Riga Biennal Of Contemporary Art. Her work has also been presented at the Riga International Biennial of Art (RIBOCA), Fotohof in Salzburg, Art Initiative, Stockholm School of Economics and Chalmers University of Technology among other venues.

Hamilton is the curator of the exhibition Dear Truth: Documentary Strategies in Contemporary Photography at Hasselblad Center. The exhibition investigated how artists approach complex social and political realities in times of post-truth. Photography is in the exhibition applied as an experimental, inclusive and expanded medium. The exhibition presented artist’s works that insist upon the importance of seeing, knowing and reacting to the complexities and disorders characteristic of our time.

Link to Dear Truth: Documentary Strategies in Contemporary Photography is available at the Hasselblad Foundation website.

To download the dissertation The Objectivity Laboratory: Propositions on Documentary Photography and access the artworks and curatorial work that the research contains, click here.

The film Zero Point Energy is available here.

Information about the work presented at the Riga Biennal Of Contemporary Art can be found here.