Cecilia Sjöholm
Cecilia Sjöholm is Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stockholm University and a PhD in Philosophy from Radboud University, Holland. Her research is particularly focused on the relation between art and politics in contemporary culture, and she has published extensively on aesthetics and critical theory. Her latest book, Through the Eyes of Descartes; Seeing, Thinking, Writing (Through the Eyes of Descartes; Seeing, Thinking, Writing (with Marcia Cavalcante Schuback, Indiana University Press 2024) looks at the relation between Descartes’ thought and climate issues. She is one of the initiators of a new platform for research in the arts in times of climate change and societal transformation at Södertörn University.
Sjöholm has published extensively on the history of aesthetics. Her books deal with art and Greek tragedy, aesthetics and phenomenology. Her books include Doing Aesthetics with Arendt; How to see Things with Columbia University Press (2015), Kristeva and the Political, London: Routledge. (2005) The Antigone Complex; Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire, Calif: Stanford University Press (2004). She has published a history of aesthetics as a history of reflection on the senses, with commented classical texts on aesthetics (Aisthesis I 2013, with Danius and Wallenstein, Aisthesis II forthcoming). Sjöholm has collaborated with artists and institutions of art in many contexts. She is a member of the Committee for artistic research at The Swedish Research Council and has contributed to art catalogues many times.
Recent publications, select list
Books
2024 Through the Eyes of Descartes: Seeing, Thinking Writing, with Marcia Cavalcante, Indiana University Press.
2023 Aisthesis II, with Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Stockholm: Thales
2021 Virkelighedssans: Hannah Arendt om Kant og æstetik, Oversættelse og forord ved Mathias Overgaard. Serie: Konsten som Forum på tryk (Köpenhamn: Billedkunstskolerne, 2021)
2020 Att se saker med Arendt. Göteborg: Daidalos. Translation of Doing
Aesthetics with Arendt. How to See Things.
2019 “Speech in the Belly. Hannah Arendt and the Ear of Critical Thought”. Zurich Distinguished Lectures. The Art of Interpretation. Ed. Frauke Berndt and Klaus Müller-Wille. Zürich: Könighausen & Neumann.
2015 Doing Aesthetics with Arendt; How to see Things, New York: Columbia University Press.
2005 Kristeva and the Political, London: Routledge.
2004 The Antigone Complex; Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Book chapters
2023 “Helden des Negativen. Blanchot und politisches Bewußtsein” In ”Die Apokalypse Enttäuscht”, ed. Alexander Garica Duttmann & Markus Quent, Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag.
2022 “Sounding. Arendt, music and poetry.” In The Oxford Companion to the Phenomenology of Music, ed. Benjamin Steege and Jessica Wiskus, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
2021 “Den estetiska vändningen”, essay in Natur och Kulturs Litteraturhistoria, ed. Carin Franzén and Håkan Möller, with Sven.Olov Wallenstein, 488-507.
2020 “From Denial to Forgiveness: Arendt, Kristeva and Radicalization.” In The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva, Library of Living Philosophers, 36, Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Ed. Sarah Beardsworth, 719-735.
2020 “Burning Books: Sovereignty and the Fire of Literature” i The Aesthetics of Violence, Gisle Selnes och Hans-Jacob Ohldieck (eds), Scandinavian Academic Press, 2020, s 107-127. (oa)
2020 “Art and performance” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Gratton and Yasemin Sarri, 545-550.
2019 “Voicing Thought: Arendt, Poetry and Philosophy” in Philosophy and Poetry. Continental Perspectives. Ed. Ranjan Ghosh. New York: Columbia University Press, 69-84.
2019 “Arts”, The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory, ed. Yannis Stavrakakis,(London: Routledge, 2019), 341-353.
2018 “Vad är verklighetens öken?” I Zizek som samtidskritiker, ed. Cecilia Sjöholm and Anders Burman, (Stockholm: Tankekraft) 19-31
2018 “Sann konst? Konst och offentlighet på 2000-talet. ed Anna Nyström and Anders Olofsson. I det gemensamma, statens konstråd, Art & Theory Publishing, 13-23.
2017 Cecilia Sjöholm. “Descartes, Emotions and the Inner Life of the Subject”, The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, Ed. Donald Wehrs (London: Palgrave, 2017), 649-667.
2017 “Antigone” in “Handbuch Literatur & Psychoanalyse” Ed. Frauke Berndt & Eckart Goebel, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 305-319.
2015 Doing Aesthetics with Arendt; How to see Things, New York: Columbia University Press.
Articles
2022 ”The Thinking Fetus”, in Emotions, History, Culture, Society, 5 (20 21) 1–25
2022 “Figures of snow: Imagery and knowledge in Descartes’ Meteorology”, in Epoché, Journal of the History of Philosophy, February 1, 2022 https://doi.org/10.5840/epoche202224206
2021 ”The changing ontology of the image” in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, No. 61–62 (2021), pp. 166–170
2021 ”Thought’s last chances. On being bound and free”, in Krisis, Vol 41 nr 2 (2021). 70 years of Minima Moralia, p 90-91.
2020 Cecilia Sjöholm: “Visualizing the Rights of the Dead: Photography after Arendt” Article 13 in World Records vol 4, In the Presence of Others https://vols.worldrecordsjournal.org/04/13
2020 “Arendt in the City. The Architecture of Political Life”, in OASE, Journal for Architecture # 106, 29-42.
2020 “Descartes och snöflingorna” in Anekdot. https://anekdot.se/essa/descartes-och-snoflingorna/
2019 “Frossen subjektivitet. Adornos shakespearske drama.” Agora, nr 4 2018-2019, 57-80.
2018 “Voices in the Belly. The Ear of Critical Thought”. Stasis , European University of st Petersburg, Vol 6 No 1 2018, 138-152. Translated into Russian. Peer reviewed.
Art catalogues
2021 Thomas Magnusson Rött och andra färger, Konstakademien, Stockholm.
2019 Dora Garcia – I Always Tell The Truth, Stockholm: Art And Theory Publishing, 57-79.
2019 Meta Isæus-Berlin – Nattlogik, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, 10 pp
2018 Helene Schmitz, Thinking Like a Mountain, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, 105-109.
Gal Kirn
Gal Kirn is an Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture and a Research Associate at the Faculty of Arts (University of Ljubljana). He holds a PhD in Philosophy with a dissertation that focused on the work of Louis Althusser and socialist Yugoslavia (University of Nova Gorica and ZRC SAZU). Abroad he has been working in the German academic context (Institute of Cultural Inquiry – ICI Berlin, Humboldt University, TU Dresden, GWZO Leipzig), where he pursued a range of topics from memory culture, avant-garde film to contemporary cultural and political theory. He is a member of international research group Partisan Resistances (University of Grenoble), led a research project Counter Archives (Rosa Luxembourg Foundation at ICI Berlin) and is currently leading a research project Protests, artistic practices and culture of memory in the post-Yugoslav context (ARRS, J6-3144).
Kirn’s research has focused most notably on the topics of ruptures and transitions in (post)socialist and (post)Yugoslav context, in particular, he studies the intersection of the fields of art, politics and memory in the period of national liberation struggle. He published two monographs Partisan Ruptures (Pluto Press, 2019) and Partisan Counter-Archive (De Gruyter, 2020), and co-edited (with Natasha Ginwala and Niloufar Tajeri) a volume Nights of the Dispossessed. Riots Unbound (Columbia Press, 2021), with Marian Burchardt Beyond Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2017) and with Katja Diefenbach, Sara Farris and Peter Thomas Encountering Althusser (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Selected bibliography
Books
2020: The Partisan Counter-Archive: Retracing the Ruptures of Art and Memory in the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle. De Gruyter: Berlin.
2019: Partisan Ruptures: Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist Yugoslavia, Pluto Press: London.
2015: Partizanski prelomi in protislovja tržnega socializma v Jugoslaviji, Sophija: Ljubljana.
2012: Conceptualisation of politics and reproduction in the work of Louis Althusser: case of socialist Yugoslavia, dissertation thesis, published in online repository by University of Nova Gorica: Nova Gorica.
(Co)Edited books
2021: Nights of the Dispossesed: Riots Unbound. Edited with Natasha Ginwala and Niloufar Tajeri. Columbia University Press: New York.
2017: Beyond Neoliberalism? Social Analysis after 1989. Edited with Marian Burchardt. Palgrave Macmillan: London.
2016: Yugoslav Partisan Art. Guest Editors, with Jernej Habjan. Slavica tergestina – European Slavic Studies Journal, Volume 17.
2013: Co-editor (with Peter Thomas, Sara Farris and Katja Diefenbach) of Encountering Althusser, Bloomsbury: New York.
2012: Co-editor (with Dubravka Sekulić and Žiga Testen) of Surfing the Black Wave. Transgressive moments in Yugoslav Cinema, JvE Academy: Maastricht.
2010: Editor of the book Post-Fordism and Its Discontents, Jan van Eyck Academy, B-Books and Peace Institute: Maastricht.
Selected articles (2023-2020)
2023
—Monumental Iconoclasm after 1989: Between Postsocialism and Decolonialism?, in:[Counter-]Monuments. Transitory Memory Practices in Public Space, eds. Maria Engelskirchen, Ursula Frohne and Marianne Wagner, Transcript, pp. 64-79 (Feb 2024)
—“Female Partisan Memory from Below: Landscapes of Resistance / Krajine upora (Marta Popovida, 2021)” in: Kino! Revija za film, n.49, 2023.
—Partisan Ecology in Yugoslav Liberation and Antifascist Art, in: Baltic Worlds, ed. Cecilia Sjöholm, 2023 (4): 45-52.
—Women Figures and Everyday Life: Photo Counter-Archive of Unwanted Images, in Ekran, nov-dec., vol. 60, 2023.
—„Between past, present, and future imperfect collectives: A (Post)Yugoslav Dialogue“ (with Ana Vujanović), in: Instituting: placemaking, refusal and organising in the arts and beyond; hrsg. von Gigi Argyropoulou, Olga Schubert and Kostas Tzimoulis. Archive books: Berlin, 2023
—”The primitive accumulation of capital and memory: Mnemonic wars as national reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia“, in: Memory studies, Jg. 15, Nr. 6, S. 1470-1483. DOI: 10.1177/17506980221133724, 2022.
—”Vielschichtig und revolutionär. Die jugoslawischen Partisanen-Gedenkstätten „ (mit Roberta Burghardt), in: Informationen. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift des Studienkreises Deutscher Widerstand 1933-1945 Jg. 47 (2022), H. 96, S. 13-18.
2022
“‘The primitive accumulation of capital and memory’: Mnemonic wars as national reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia”, Memory Studies journal, special issue Mnemonic Wars. DOI: 10.1177/17506980221133724
»Thirty years after the break-up of Yugoslavia: the primitive (dis)accumulation of capital and memory; or, how (not) to make this country great again«. Historical materialism, ISSN 1465-4466, 2022, vol. 30, iss. 1, pp. 3-29, open access: https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/30/1/article-p3_2.xml.
»Counter-archival surplus : remembering the partisan rupture in post-socialist times«. In Artl@s bulletin, ISSN 2264-2668, 2022, vol. 11, iss. 1, pp. 14-28.
2021
»In a partisan way : Želimir Žilnik%s Uprising in Jazak and the reconstruction of antifascist memory from below. Studies in Eastern European cinema, pp. 1-16, open access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040350X.2021.2018868
»Built to be torn down, fed to be starved, resurrected to be disposed of : capitalism is a riot, a riot from above«. In Nights of the dispossessed: riots unbound. New York: Columbia Books, pp. 185-204.
“Dissonance of Yugoslav Partisan Past in the Recent Revisionist Methodologies.” In: Radeljić B., González-Villa C. (eds) Researching Yugoslavia and its Aftermath. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham.
“New Yugoslavia: A Diasporic State?”, peer-reviewed J-Bild journal, 5 (1), 83-106.
2020
“Was Dancing Possible During the Fascist Occupation of Yugoslavia?” Yugoslav Performance Art: On the Deferred Production of Knowledge (ed. by Goran Pavlić). Special Issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 11. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2020.00011.238.
“Review of Elena Vogman’s monograph Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Capital’ Project”, in Apparatus.
“Tito’s no to Schmitt : against the compatibility of the partisan figures, against the Blut und Boden ideology of populism.” Philosophy world democracy, pp. 1-13.
“Mediatisation of the Yugoslav Partisan Struggle: Towards a New Counter-Archive” (eds) Maruša Prusnik and Oto Luthar The Media of Memory. Leiden: Brill, pp. 63-84.
“Monuments in Ljubljana and Brussels: From Nationalist Reconciliation to Open Rehabilitation of Fascism” (eds) Ayhan, Kaya and Chiara de Cesari, Populism and Memory. London: Routledge, pp. 47-68.
“Iconoclasm: from post-socialist Yugoslavia to Black Lives Matter”
https://blog.degruyter.com/iconoclasm-from-post-socialist-yugoslavia-to-black-lives-matter/
Rebecka Katz Thor
REBECKA KATZ THOR is a writer and associate professor at REMESO, Linkoping University. She also works with the strategic vision and knowledge development for a permanent building for the Swedish Holocaust Museum. She holds PhD in Aesthetics from Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research interests are cultural memory studies, processes of commemorations in monuments and museums and political, historical, and ethical claims in contemporary art.
She leads the research project Remember us To Life – Vulnerable Memories in a Prospective Monument, Memorial and Museum (2021-2025), following three ongoing commemorative projects in Sweden. She is also a researcher in the project Distrusting Monuments – Art and the War in Former Yugoslavia (2022-2025). She is part of a network, funded by the Swedish Research Council, called A new generation of scholars of antisemitism: Novel approaches to antisemitism, the Holocaust and Jewish identity in a post-secular conjuncture of contemporary Europe.
She was a visiting scholar at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University during spring 2022 and has been a researcher in Art History at Stockholm University, in Aesthetics at Södertörn University and at Engaging Vulnerability, Uppsala University. She is co-chair of Memory Studies Association Nordic from February 2023. Her dissertation Beyond the Witness – Holocaust Representation and the Testimony of Images investigates the image-as-witness in three films made of archival materials. She was employed as Editor for in-depth material – Research and Reflection at Public Art Agency Sweden from April 2019-December 2020. She has an MA from the New School for Social Research, New York and was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
Selected Publications:
Katz Thor, Rebecka. Beyond the Witness – Holocaust Representation and the Testimony of Images, dissertation, Art and Theory Publishing 2018. ISBN 978-91-88031-61-7
Katz Thor, Rebecka Concepts for Contemporary Monuments, Vol. XVI:4. Baltic Worlds 2023. Pp 54-58.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, Postmonuments? A Discontinued Project, A Current and A Prospective Monument In Sweden, Politeja No. 3(84), 2023. pp. 5- 18.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, Att se bortom seendets gränser, Bildkonflikter, Kultur & Klasse, Årg. 50 Nr. 133, eds. Rebecka Katz Thor, Karen Magrehte Simonsen & Cecilia Sjöholm, 2022. Pp. 63-77.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, An Eternal Witness, Thresholds 50: Before // After, Eds: Jola Idowu, Ardalan Sadeghi Kivi, Meriam Soltan and Antonio Pacheco, Boston: MIT Press, pp. 103-105.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, ”Minne och monument – förhandlingar om sårbarhet och sörjbarhet i det offentliga rummet”, Tidskriften Glänta, 2021. Pp. 5-15.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, Att minnas och representera förintelsen, Lärobok om Förintelsen i Sverige, Natur & Kultur, forthcoming January 2024.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, Monumental Tiredness – The time and function of monuments, Public Art, Public Memory, Stockholm: Art & Theory, eds. Annika Enqvist, Rebecka Katz Thor, Karolina Modig & Joanna Zawieja, September 2022. Pp. 19-27.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, Vulnerable Memories—Monuments and Grievability, Thinking through Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, ed. Lisa Rosendahl, Milan: Mousse Publishing 2022. Pp. 166-183.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, ”Mich wird es geben”, Was denkt das Denkmal? Eine Anthologie zur Denkmalkultur, ed. Tanja Schult & Julia Lange, Köln: Böhlau Verlag 2021. pp. 17-26.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, En blick bortom seendets gränser, Blick, rörelse, röst: Festskrift till Cecilia Sjöholm, eds. Rebecka Katz Thor & Erik Wallrup, Stockholm: Södertrön University Press 2020, pp. 51-55.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, Ihågkom oss till liv, Att hopfoga den sönderfallande världen: LENKE ROTHMAN, Alina Chaiderov, Gery Georgieva, ed. Joanna Nordin, Nyköping: Sörmlandsmuseum 2019, pp. 44-53.
Katz Thor, Rebecka, The Limits of the Reconcilable: Arendt, Eichmann, and Heidegger, On Reconciliation / Über Versöhnung, ed. Dora Garcia, Berlin: K-Verlag 2018. ISBN 978-3-9818635-2-9, pp. 49-59.