While there is a tradition within both the history of visual art and literature to critically engage with image and text alongside, through and even asone another, the area remains fraught with issues. Artists and art students are oftentimes asked to write about their own work, whereby fundamental questions such as how and what to write, where to write from and to, how the disseminated text might affect the artwork etc. oftentimes arise. Within the literary field, where writing is the principal mode of expression, questions about the dynamics between the written and the visual are different, though also frequent. Key matters tend to be issues related to representation: what is made “visible” in a text and how, what ideological notions are reproduced etc. And in a growing field of visual, textual, and sonic intermingling, made possible by a wide range of online publishing methods, questions of how the literary relates to the visual are intensified and diversified.
Welcome to a conversation about the relations between text and image, and the possibilities of writing about visual art.
Imri Sandström is an artist, writer and researcher. Having worked extensively between the fields of visual arts and literature, she is now investigating possibilities of writing (about) image through initiating the project Writing Visual Relations: The Possibilities of Transdisciplinary Ekphrasis.
Maja Hammarén is an artist and editor engaged in collaborations around language-forms, critical montage and narrating positions. Last years’ projects concern collective local knowledge, historical organization of care and work, and urban transformation processes and public space in late neoliberalism. Hammarén is lecturer in Fine Art and Literary composition at HDK-Valand.
Fredrik Nyberg is an author, most recently having published the book Ruiner (Norstedts, 2021). He has in a number of different projects worked theoretically and artistically to investigate the relationship between text and sound. Is a senior lecturer in Literary Composition at HDK - Valand.
