Art and Environment – Visualising Climate Histories and Futures

Human impact on the environment is one of the planet’s greatest challenges. The media reports daily on devastating forest fires and storms, rising temperatures, and rapidly melting glaciers. The exploitation of nature is affecting us ever more and with greater force. 

Within artistic research, there is a strong mobilisation around environmental questions, and this symposium highlights the scope and depth of this engagement. The participants work across a range of artistic fields and their projects are often interdisciplinary. Their work explores alternative ways of understanding the relationship between humans and nature, often inspired by Indigenous perspectives. 

They examine the underlying ideological and economic causes of the climate crisis and develop methods for acting in harmony with nature. A central aspect of art and artistic research is the ability to concretise and visualise both facts and ideas about alternative ways of living – often combining criticality and hope.

Participants include photo historian Liz Wells; artist and researcher Heide Morstang; poet and researcher Fredrik Nyberg; artist and researcher Eva la Coure-Nielsen, designer and researcher Thomas Laurien; artist and researcher Åsa Stjerna; photographer and doctoral student Linda Maria Thomson; writer and researcher Sanabel Abdel Rahman; photographer Emil Ryge; and artist and researcher Åsa Sonjasdotter.

Program

09:00-09:30 COFFEE/TEA

09:45–10:05: Louise Wolthers & Niclas Östlind: 
Introduction

10:15–11:00 Liz Wells:
Landscapes of Exploration: photography, place, purpose and peril.

11:05–11:35 Eva la Cour-Nielsen: 
Imagining Svalbard with Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (1962–1972).

11:40–12:10 Linda Maria Thompson:
Environmentally concerned photography and the art of the return.

12:10–12:55 LUNCH

13:00–13:30 Åsa Stjerna:
Sensing Other Oceans: Artistic Practice with Marine Technologies

13:35–14:05 Thomas Laurin:
Practicing More-than-Human Representation.

14:10–14:30 Fredrik Nyberg:
TWENTY-SEVENTH RUIN: Flowers in the February ice and in the mud – a reading.

14.30–14.55 COFFE/TEA

15:00–15:30 Sanabel Abdel Rahman: 
The Other Lives of Eco-Surrealism.

15:35–16:05 Emil Ryge:
Finding a way through The Common

16:10–16:40 Åsa Sonjasdotter:
Opening historical time: creating possible paths for sensory and social relations of breeding and cultivation in landscapes marked by uniform life.

16:45–17:15 Heidi Morstang:
Landscapes of Deep Time: Remote Fieldwork, Microscopic Worlds, and Imagining Geological Time.

17:20–17:30 Linda Sternö:
Summery
 
18:00–20:00 Snacks and Drinks at Glashuset

Abstracts and biographies in alphabetic order (surname)

Sanabel Abdel Rahman: The Other Lives of Eco-Surrealism.

Abstract 
In this presentation, I aim to expand on a subgenre I have identified in Palestinian literature, which I call ‘eco-surrealism’. Eco-surrealism is a distinct surrealistic connection that characterizes literary and visual expressions describing the Palestinian/SWANA/Indigenous connection to the land. Women gluing themselves to the land or metamorphosing into parts of a tree, with branches growing from their shoulders and mythical-human creatures living inside the rocks and seas, reflect this eco-surrealistic relationship. Dreamscapes buttress the surrealistic aspect.

In the presentation, I will discuss the importance and repercussions of placing Palestinian eco-surrealism within Indigenous ecocriticism, which allows for more potent and intricate interweaving between human and ecological elements. This will prompt the conversation towards the more-than-human entities that dwell in Palestinian nature. For this, I will draw on a selection of iterations of magical realist environmentalism which vividly appear in the works of artists including Ahmad Nabil (Fiction Council), Samara Sallam (A Speaking Puddle of Blood), Manal Mahamid (From Akka to Gaza), Muhyyi al-Din al-Lubbad (Qamous al-Ka’naat al-Usturiyya/ Dictionary of Mythical Creatures), and Jumana Emil Abboud (The Unbearable Halfness of Being).

Bio 
Sanabel Abdel Rahman is a researcher, literary critic, and assistant professor based in Amman. She completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Toronto and holds a Ph.D. in Arabic literature with a focus on magical realism from Marburg University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at EUME (Germany), MECAM (Tunisia), and BBQ+ (U.S.). Sanabel is the author of the forthcoming book Magical Realism in Palestinian Literature and Folk Tales: Reading the Distorted Spaces of the Nakba (2027) and of Māʼ Ward (2026), a work of Arabic autofiction and analog photography. Her work engages folk tales, magical realism, Indigenous climate fiction, and speculative writing, all of which she expands on in her public workshops. Across her academic, pedagogical, and creative practices, she explores liberatory imaginations, reconnection with the land, decolonial writing, and activating alternative realities. Her texts have appeared in academic journals, magazines, and art exhibitions.

Eva la Cour-Nielsen: Imagining Svalbard with Naturrikdom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N (1962–1972).

Abstract
In 2013, an encounter with Tyrone Martinsson's work in Longyearbyen inspired me to apply for a PhD position at HDK-Valand. Three years later, after being accepted into the programme with Tyrone as my supervisor, we travelled together to Svalbard as part of a group of Swedish scientists, predominantly men, with only a priest and myself among the women participants. In this presentation, I begin with an anecdote from that trip to reflect on how it shaped my interest in the position of the woman artist in Arctic regions marked by colonial histories. More specifically, I introduce the acclaimed photographer Herta Lampert Grøndal and discuss her film footage from Svalbard, shot in the 1960s and later composed as the analogue film Naturrikedom och Kullgrubedrift på 78N(Natural Wealth and Coal Mining at 78N).
My aim is to excavate past imaginaries of Svalbard through an analysis of the film's origins, production, and circulation, and to consider its potential for creative engagement with contemporary collective imaginaries of Svalbard's future.

Bio
Eva la Cour-Nielsen is a visual artist and researcher based in Copenhagen, also trained in Media and Visual Anthropology. Her work unfolds across film practice, artistic research, and contemporary art, exploring how chance encounters, affective relations, and collaborative processes expand the often institutional frameworks of archives and knowledge production.

With Tyrone Martinsson as her principal supervisor between 2016 and 2018, her research focused on the making of Svalbard as an Arctic Archipelago, an engagement that continues to shape her work on Arctic imaginaries and their colonial histories. Drawing on her experiences in Svalbard, partly with Tyrone, and experiments with collaborative video live editing, her doctoral research explored relational image practices through a sustained engagement with the figure of the guide (Geo-Aesthetical Discontent: Svalbard, the Guide and Post-Future Essayism, HDK-Valand, 2022). She subsequently held a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Art as Forum, University of Copenhagen (2022–2024), and currently holds a two-year postdoctoral research grant at the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (2025–2027). Here her focus is on the role and function of knowledge production in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), its colonial legacies, and their entanglements with contemporary ecological and social crises.

Thomas Laurien: Practicing More-than-Human Representation.

Abstract
Unfortunately, Tyrone Martinsson and I only managed to meet a few times before he passed away in the spring of 2025. During our conversations, in which we were curious about each other’s practices, it became increasingly clear how much we had in common, even though our methods and approaches seemed to be fundamentally different. Whilst Tyrone worked far away, in challenging conditions, and with high-tech artistic tools, I worked locally, in everyday contexts, and with seemingly very simple methods. What we shared though was our interest and commitment to finding ways to represent, for example, a glacier or a lake in affective and immersive ways. Representation has at least two complementary meanings: on the one hand, it concerns how something or someone is portrayed in images and narratives; on the other, it concerns how that someone has a voice that is listened to and taken into account in the societal processes that both perpetuate and reshape our shared living environments. I do not know how Tyrone viewed this, but in my own work I am interested in how more-than-human beings can be represented in the various spheres of human society – both so that they are portrayed in a dignified manner, as subjects with intrinsic value, and so that their voices are heard and counted. In my lecture, I will discuss and present a few examples of art- and design-led initiatives, primarily from Europe, which not only challenge anthropocentric notions of representation but also contribute with constructive ideas and prefigurative situations.

Bio
Thomas Laurien is a designer/curator/artist, a senior lecturer and an artistic researcher mainly based at the Design programme at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg. He is currently part of the research project “Whose Body of Water? – Rights of Nature as Environmental Guardianship for Sweden” (funded by Formas), and the research environment “Design After Progress – Reimagining Design Histories and Futures” (funded by the Swedish Research Council). Laurien is also active in The Natureculture Association Shimmer and Entanglements where he serves as chair of the association. Regardless of whether the engagement is connected to academic research processes or civil society activities, Laurien’s interest lies in questions of representation and justice, how to deepen relations between humans and more-than-humans, and how to develop new practices of care. Laurien is a founding member of the international network Design+Posthumanism, an active member of The Confluence of European Water Bodies Network, and an ambassador for the tree species Black Alder.’

Heidi Morstang: Landscapes of Deep Time: Remote Fieldwork, Microscopic Worlds, and Imagining Geological Time.

Abstract
Since 2014, I have worked in the Arctic, where climate change is visibly transforming the landscape. Combining filmmaking, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and scientific collaboration, I use optical technologies to reveal otherwise unseen structures. Through this approach, I seek to create works that reveal connections between deep geological time and the environmental changes shaping our world today.

This presentation focuses on a recent chapter of this ongoing research, emerging from the longstanding collaboration with Tyrone Martinsson that bridges in-situ fieldwork and remote forms of investigation. During his expedition to Svalbard in 2022, he collected a small number of rocks from the edge of a retreating glacier. Working remotely with these geological fragments, I began a process of imagining landscapes of deep time from materials revealed by a rapidly changing environment.

At the centre of this presentation is Landscapes of Deep Time, a project based on microscopic images of 416-million-year-old rocks newly exposed by glacial retreat in Svalbard. Viewed through the SEM, minute mineral formations resemble vast mountain ranges, collapsing distinctions between the microscopic and the monumental. These images invite reflection on the perception of time, situating present-day environmental crisis within a much broader temporal horizon and dissolving boundaries between distant geological pasts and contemporary ecological futures.

The presentation will also contextualise this research within the works that includes Ringhorndalen, which explores microscopic structures in seeds stored within the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and Prosperous Mountain (2014), the film that initiated my long-term engagement with Svalbard. Across these projects, the Arctic becomes both subject and method: a site through which questions of landscape, memory, temporality, and planetary vulnerability can be examined. By moving between field observation and microscopic imaging, the work proposes new ways of seeing and sensing deep time in an era of accelerated environmental change.

Bio
Heidi Morstang is a photographer, filmmaker and artist-researcher whose work explores the intersections of contemporary photography, experimental documentary, and environmental change. Working in Nordic Arctic landscapes, she often collaborates with scientists and researchers to examine ecological transformation through visually driven, interdisciplinary methods. Her practice is marked by a sustained interest in the dialogue between art and scientific inquiry, as well as a long-standing fascination with mathematics and its relationship to visual representation. Her films have been screened at several international film festivals and her photographic works have been exhibited widely since 1995, most recently in the touring exhibition Seedscapes – Future-Proofing Nature at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, and Dick Institute, Kilmarnock; Bergen International Film Festival, Norway; Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Germany, The Ateneo, Madrid, Spain; Royal Norwegian Embassy, London; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Santander y Cantabria, Spain; and The Science Museum, London, UK. Her work is represented in private and public collections.  She is Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Plymouth, UK.

Fredrik Nyberg: TWENTY-SEVENTH RUIN: Flowers in the February ice and in the mud – a reading.

Abstract
I will perform a reading from the long poem cycle “TWENTY-SEVENTH RUIN: Flowers in the February Ice and in the Mud” which was published in the poetry collection Ruins. Second Booklet (XXIII-XLIV), Norstedts 2023. The poem cycle consists of 28 shorter parts and was originally written between February 1st and February 28th 2021, then the poem was revised on the same dates one year later. The poem focuses on a landscape and a surrounding environment in rapid change. The poem, like the book as a whole, revolves around the ephemeral, around disappearance and the unsustainability of the present. Again and again, and in varying ways, the climate and the environment, the mud and the ice that under strong human influence and in a gravitating movement are changing, come into focus. 

The relationship between nature and culture, and humanity's place in, and interaction with, the landscape that surrounds them, has over the years become an increasingly important focus in the poetry I write. Local and cultural history constitute important lenses in the writing. The poetry collections Ruins: First Booklet and Ruins: Second Booklet place the downsides of growth and progress in focus, they relate in different ways to the ephemeral, the disappearing and the unsustainable. These books – as well as earlier poetry collections – can be situated within an ecopoetic tradition. For me, writing poetry (and prose, for that matter) is to a great extent about finding a tone, about creating a specific linguistic alloy in which rhythm, resonance and meaning can interact and develop.

Bio
Fredrik Nyberg’s artistic practice has its natural focal point in poetic writing but is also, at the same time, concerned with exploring new genres and forms of expression, for example various collaborations with musicians and composers. Since 1998, he has regularly published poems/collections of poetry with Norstedts publishing house (eleven in total), as well as in various journals. This body of lyrical work has also been partially translated and thereby exposed on an international stage. Alongside my poetic writing, Nyberg work as an artistic researcher. In his research, he has, among other things, been interested in the sonic dimensions of poetry and reading as part of an artistic and pedagogical practice. I have also worked with essay writing and with a cross-disciplinary artistic production that has, among other things, resulted in LP and CD records as well as text-image-sound objects presented in an exhibition context and in articles. Nyberg is now (summer 2026) working on completing my first novel, a contract with Norstedts publishing house has been established. Publication is planned for autumn 2027 alternatively spring 2028.The collaboration projects together with artist Dan Fröberg and in the MonoMono constellation are to be regarded as precisely collaborations where one person's contribution is dependent on the other's and so on.

Nyberg has received several literary prizes and grants, including Guldprinsen 2006, the Erik Lindegren Prize 2013 and the Gerard Bonniers Poetry Prize 2014, as well as work grants from, for example, the Västra Götaland Region (2011) and the Swedish Academy (2013). 2024 I was named ”Årets brunnslockspoet”.

Emil Ryge: Finding a way through The Common

Abstract
The climate and biodiversity crises are also a crisis of the photographic image. It's becoming increasingly clear that these immense challenges are developing on a global scale that unfolds over long periods of time. The rise in CO2 has been going on for centuries and some of the consequences, rising sea levels as an example, are occurring incredibly slowly, yet still with devastating effects. The same goes for pollution, which spreads across borders and affects wildlife across the planet. At the same time, photography is always very place and time specific. It's made in a given location at a given moment – often for fractions of a second.

¨The Common¨ is a photographic exploration of Amager Fælled, a local nature reserve in Copenhagen. Besides being home to a number of both rare and invasive species, the area is the object of a heated debate about development versus preservation, as the city is currently building a large housing development in the area. This has sparked a city-wide protest movement consisting of ordinary citizens, whose protests have since morphed into broader demonstrations about climate inaction. As such, Amager Fælled and the debate surrounding it is a microcosm of much larger debates about nature and its inherent value. At its core, it symbolises a global conflict of interests: modern society's willingness to preserve nature and recognise its value, versus strong economic interests in development and resource extraction.

I have been photographing Amager Fælled /The Common for more than 15 years, and during those years, I have been experimenting with approaches to try and describe the many different layers and dimensions an area like this contains. And the many ways photography can be used in the process. The presentation will showcase some of that work, the ideas behind it and lessons learned.

Bio
Emil Ryge is a Danish photographer living and working primarily in Copenhagen.

He works on long-term documentary projects and does commercial assignments. He has a strong interest in the unexceptional, preferring to look for the subject of my work in my local surroundings, often relying on extensive research, with a strong focus on environmental and climate justice. He holds a degree in photojournalism from DMJX, The Danish School of Media and Journalism, and have been teaching photography since 2010.

Åsa Sonjasdotter: Opening historical time: creating possible paths for sensory and social relations of breeding and cultivation in landscapes marked by uniform life.

Abstract
This contribution presents an artistic research project that examines the historical connection between fascist ideology and the development of lens-based technologies of film and photography within breeding programs towards uniform life forms. It traces the historical beginnings of Swedish and German institutes for plant breeding, and their precursory role for the establishment of institutes for eugenics. Though national breeding and distribution programs have been thoroughly researched (Saraiva 2016; Bonneuil and Thomas 2010), visual representations of purified life forms invented at these institutes are less studied, despite their driving role in shaping the vision of purified life. The study of such representations opens historical time for critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008) towards possible other paths for sensory and social relations of breeding and cultivation in landscapes today marked by uniform life.

Breeding for uniformity required a different way of perceiving: the invention of a way of looking at non-homogeneous peasant crops that would enhance the perception of their potential homogeneity. This change in perception was facilitated through the production of images in technical laboratories that isolated the peasant crops from their lived environments. As breeding towards uniformity is a slow process that requires inbreeding for about ten generations before crossbreeding can begin, peasant crops, their human custodians, and their lived environments were the props available until uniformity could be realized and established

The artistic research project is based at the Günther Uecker Institute for Environment and Design in Schwerin, Germany, and includes collaborative processes involving the farmers of the Swedish seed association Allkorn, as well as the German equivalent, IG Nachbau, who since 1998 organize to push back the judiciary regulations imposed by the Germany-based transnational seed industry, as well as they are inventing new forms of social organisation around plant breeding and cultivation. The project develops a method for mapping of farming knowledges, social structures, and ways of perceiving that were marginalized or lost with the establishment and expansion of these state authorized institutions, as means for refiguring “what could have been” (Lowe 2015). The generated material will be assembled through the medium of film.

Bio
Artist, researcher, writer, and curator Åsa Sonjasdotter has contributed extensively to the discursive field of art and agriculture, introducing questions of agriculture as a practice creating ontologies beyond the nature-culture divide. Together with artist Daniela Zambrano Almidón, Sonjasdotter is since 2022 developing the long-term research project The Potatoes’ Testimonies on the Defense of the Earth, enquiring relations through migratory trajectories of potatoes. The project has recently been unfolding in collaboration with the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore and the Goethe Institute in Sucre and La Paz, as well as with Spore Initiative, Berlin, and roda – soft water on hard stone, Copenhagen.  Sonjasdotter’s projects and exhibitions have further been presented in contexts such as the Singapore Biennale, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Spore-Initiative, Berlin; Lunds konsthall; the EVA International biennale, Limerick; the Bergen Assembly; the Gothenburg Biennale; the Delfina Foundation, London; M HKA, Antwerp; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; Kasseler Kunstverein; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Fransisco; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, and more.

Sonjasdotter received her PhD in artistic practice at HDK-Valand, the University of Gothenburg, in 2024. Her dissertation, Towards peasant Cultivation of Abundance involved long term collaboration with farming communities in Scania organising around the custody of peasant-bred, common grains. The outcome was concluded in the 2022 film Cultivating Abundance. The film is distributed by Filmform, Stockholm, and represented by Malmö Art Museum and KIN Museum of Contemporary Art. Sonjasdotter is since 2025 co-founder of the association NaturKulturVen located on the island of Ven, Sweden, focussing on trans-local, collaborative eco-social relearning. She was co-founder and co-director of The Neighbourhood Academy, a platform for radical pedagogy on matters of ecology in Berlin, between 2015 and 2019. Between 2007-2014, Sonjasdotter was instigating professor and Program Leader of the Academy of Contemporary Art, the Arctic University of Norway, a practice-based art education with a formalised responsibility on matters of ecology and indigeneity. Sonjasdotter is the author of internationally distributed books and articles, and has published extensively within academic and artistic realms. For more info on Sonjasdotter’s work, see asasonjasdotter.info and naturkulturven.org.

Åsa Stjerna: Sensing Other Oceans: Artistic Practice with Marine Technologies,

Abstract
How do technologies used in marine science shape what can be perceived, understood and imagined about the ocean? Åsa Stjerna discusses how artistic practice can expand their uses and create new relations with the ocean, and how this work develops further through teaching. Her starting point is the scientific conditions that shape how environmental change becomes accessible to experience, knowledge and public engagement. Scientific instruments select, record and organise processes, helping to determine what is recognised as significant. Working artistically with these technologies therefore also involves engaging with how knowledge about the ocean is produced.

Drawing on her artistic research project Sonic Visions of the Arctic, Stjerna discusses how marine scientific technologies and their data help shape the image of the Arctic. Through transversal mapping and artistic work with image and sound, she explored connections between instruments, scientific practices and Arctic marine environments. The presentation considers how artistic interventions in these connections can shift what we attend to and generate other relations with the ocean.

This research informs Sensing Ocean, a course developed by Stjerna and currently running at HDK-Valand in collaboration with the Centre for Sea and Society at the University of Gothenburg. Bringing together artistic inquiry and marine science, the course invites students to explore how encounters with water, organisms, instruments and marine research environments can generate artistic questions and approaches. Stjerna discusses this teaching as a context for further developing the research: how can teaching combine critical questions about how the ocean is investigated and represented with opportunities for students to develop their own artistic practices and relations with the ocean?

Bio
Åsa Stjerna is an artist and researcher with a background in photography. Through site-specific installations, she explores how sound and listening can create new relationships with ecological and planetary processes. She has long been interested in how ecological processes, scientific practices and political interests shape the ocean in the Anthropocene, influencing both the conditions of marine life and the ways we perceive and relate to the ocean. Working with data and measurements, she develops spatial installations that explore how these materials can take sensory form.
After completing her PhD at the University of Gothenburg in 2018, Stjerna continued her research through Sonic Visions of the Arctic (2021–2023), a postdoctoral project funded by the Swedish Research Council. Combining the mapping of marine scientific technologies with artistic explorations of their data, she investigated how the image of the Arctic is shaped and how it might be reimagined. She currently leads the MFA programme in Photography at HDK-Valand, where she also developed Sensing Ocean, a course that brings artistic practice into dialogue with marine science.

Linda Maria Thompson: Environmentally concerned photography and the art of the return.

Abstract
Returning to place is a method for artists and visual practitioners across various backgrounds and disciplines. In rephotography, returning to a site and making photographs there can show change. Beyond ‘before-and-after’ images, photographers like Tyrone Martinsson have shown how environmental rephotography can tell the “long story” in which more ecologically grounded revisions are still possible. I will share reflections from my ongoing doctoral project “Revision and the River” which explores acts of witnessing and revision in documentary arts practice focused on storytelling places of environmental change. Specifically, “Revision and the River” focuses on the iconic Nämforsen rapids-turned-hydropower-plant along the Ångermanälven River in Northern Sweden. Nämforsen is the site of one of Europe’s largest concentrations of petroglyphs, its rapids depicted by artists, photographers, archaeologists and locals. In the 1940s Nämforsen became the site of the first of forty-four hydropower dam installations on the Ångermanälven watershed imposing barriers to Sámi reindeer herding routes as well as to wild salmon’s critical migration journey. Perpetuating “the hydropower myth”, it remains a popular for its summertime artificially free-flowing “tourist-waters” and simultaneously a site of extractive industry. I will explore the return as a way of paying attention to- and concern for- places in change; where rephotography can be an act of building a relationship with place.

Bio
Linda Maria Thompson is a doctoral student in artistic practice with focus on photography at HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenburg in collaboration with the Department of Natural Sciences, Design and Sustainable Development at Mid Sweden University.

Liz Wells: Landscapes of Exploration: photography, place, purpose and peril.

Abstract
Since the second half of the nineteenth century expedition photography has documented places and circumstances for a range of purposes. Whether colonialist, militarily or commercially commissioned, or engaged in scientific, geographic, anthropological or botanical investigations, such visual storytelling inherently reflects the interests, attitudes and curiosity of specific travellers with cameras. More recently, in the past half-century, this photographic archive has provided a starting point for reflections including re-photographic methods of investigating change over time, as well as for ecologically oriented artistic interventions resulting from site visits, residencies and related initiatives.

Liz Wells will reference historical exploration of places, from the Arctic North to the Antarctic South, from the American West to the Chinese Tibetan Plateau, and reflect briefly on the import and significance of (selected) creative projects by contemporary artists motivated by environmental peril. She will also briefly introduce her current research into uses of the camera within botanical explorations during the later years of British colonialism.

Bio
Liz Wells, writer and curator, is Professor Emeritus in Photographic Culture, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business, University of Plymouth, UK. Solo publications include Photography, Curation, Criticism, an anthology (2023) and Land Matters: landscape photography, culture and identity, (2011/2021). She edited The Photography Reader (2019), The Photography Culture Reader (2019) and Photography: A Critical Introduction (2021, 6th ed., 7th ed. forthcoming 2027). She was a founding co-editor for photographies, Routledge journals, and is series editor for Photography, Place, Environment, Routledge Academic. She has contributed many essays within artist books, exhibition catalogues, journals and other collections

Exhibitions as curator include: Sea, Sand and Soil: Plastics in our Environment (Pingyao International Photography Festival, China, 2021); Seedscapes: Future-Proofing Nature (Impressions Gallery, Bradford, Yorks, 2020; UK tour 2021); Layers of Visibility, (Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Cyprus, 2018/9; co-curator, Yiannis Toumazis); Light Touch, (Baltimore Washington International Airport, 2014); Futureland Now – John Kippin, Chris Wainwright (Laing Gallery, Newcastle, 2012/13); Sense of Place, European Landscape Photography (BOZAR, Brussels, 2012); and Landscapes of Exploration, British Art from Antarctica (Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth, 2012; UK tour 2013 & 2015).

She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 2017; Honored Educator, Society for Photographic Education, 2021; and, in 2022, The Royal Photographic Society, J Dudley Johnston Award for research in photographic culture.

More:

For any questions, please contact Niclas Östlind: niclas.ostlind@akademinvaland.gu.se

The symposium is organised in memory of Professor Tyrone Martinsson (1967–2025). Based at HDK-Valand, he conducted groundbreaking, photo-historically anchored research on the visualisation of climate change on Svalbard and contributed to establishing and developing international and transdisciplinary research networks.

The symposium is organised in collaboration between the research cluster Environment: Ecology and Climate Challenges at HDK-Valand and the Hasselblad Foundation.