New podcast: Fine Art students meet researchers in conversations about our time

“The most important part for me was simply talking with someone who has carried these questions for a long time. The repeated listening required in editing revealed meanings and intentions that I never would have caught in the moment,” says Shunda Wan, student on the Master’s programme in Fine Art at HDK-Valand, who in the podcast interviews artist, researcher and teacher Nina Mangalanayagam at HDK-Valand. 

In the research project Colouring-in Sweden, Mangalanayagam works with photography and video to highlight hidden stories in Swedish history, with a particular focus on Sweden’s colonial presence on the island of St Barthélemy and the lives of “free Black” women. Her research draws on both archival material and her own experiences as a mixed-heritage subject, and investigates how identity and belonging are formed and renegotiated over time. 

Exploring the podcast as both an artistic medium

The coming episodes explore, among other things, how artistic practice and artistic research can open up new ways of describing experience, as well as questions of narrative, identity and migration. In these conversations, students meet researchers and other specialists from different parts of the University of Gothenburg and other institutions. 

The project is part of the course Dialogues, where students, in collaboration with K103 Göteborgs Studentradio, explore the podcast as both an artistic medium and a communicative platform. Over the autumn, eight episodes are released, moving between artistic practice and research – between the personal and the societal. 

“Our ambition has been to create a space where art and research can meet, and where conversation becomes a way of thinking together across disciplinary boundaries,” says Jesper Norda, artist and lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand.