Book by Sara Callahan
Manchester University Press, 2022
Art + Archive provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between art and the archive at the ... more Art + Archive provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between art and the archive at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book examines how the archive emerged in art writing in the mid-1990s and how its subsequent ubiquity can be understood in light of wider social, technological, philosophical and art-historical conditions and concerns. Deftly combining writing on archives from different disciplines with artistic practices, the book clarifies the function and meaning of one of the most persistent artworld buzzwords of recent years, shedding light on the conceptual and historical implications of the so-called archival turn in contemporary art.
Book Chapter by Sara Callahan
Visuella Kulturstudier, 2024
I ett rum står en rad föremål uppställda på enkla trähyllor. Objekten är gjorda av vardagliga och... more I ett rum står en rad föremål uppställda på enkla trähyllor. Objekten är gjorda av vardagliga och billiga material som kartong, lera, bomullstussar, papper, frigolit, pinnar och plast. Tittar man noggrant ser man toalettpappersrullar, en mjölkkartong, salta kex, sugrör, bubbelplast, en mopp och en diskmedelsflaska. Dessa är sammanfogade till modeller av en stuga, kontor, bibliotek, naturmiljöer, flygplan, bilar, skyskrapor, en cowboyhatt. Här återfinns även ett flertal porträtt: en familj med två små barn, vad som ser ut som ett foto från en id-handling, en knubbig bebis, en medelålders man med vildvuxet hår. En skrivmaskin i frigolit är täckt av silvrig sprayfärg, och ett tangentbord visas bredvid någon slags hand-attrapp. En del av föremålen är framställda i gråskala, men många har grälla färger: knallgult, grönt, rött. Framför vägghyllorna där dessa närmare 200 objekt står uppställda finns Hur du kan referera till det här kapitlet:
Kontextualisering: Teoretiska tillämpningar i konstvetenskap, 2019
The Power of the In-Between: Internmediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection, 2018
This essay considers how a number of artworks mobilize what is tentatively termed " the analogue.... more This essay considers how a number of artworks mobilize what is tentatively termed " the analogue. " " The analogue " highlights artistic practices that implicitly or explicitly evoke themes and concepts associated with analogue photography. The essay argues that the so-called digital turn opens the possibility of tapping into analogue photography as a conceptual and cultural sensitivity distinguish-able from the technique. It is the discourse of analogue photography that is key, not the technological process itself—therefore " the analogue " can be evoked also in works that are produced digitally. The essay explores how " the analogue " can be a productive way of analyzing specific artworks by artists such as Lotta Antonsson,. Contemporary artworks located within a postconceptual tradition can be said to have a built-in self-reflexive relationship to medium whereby the method and technique of production are always intimately intertwined with the artwork's content and meaning. With that in mind, this paper shows how the selected artworks can be analyzed precisely in terms of this interplay between medium as technique and medium as concept and content. The essay adapts and modifies the analytical tools of intermediality to fit the specific conditions of contemporary photographic practices among artists, and shows that the artists considered in the text evoke both the documentary, evidentiary connotations of the medium and the more associative,
Edited Volume by Sara Callahan
The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflect... more The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen case studies where different intermedial issues are explored. The participating researchers investigate phenomena such as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. The volume brings together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas.
Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, contexts, and methodologies, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on.
This volume transgresses the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, the latter targets formal and meaning-making elements of media objects. These fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, aesthetic and technological conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.
Articles by Sara Callahan
Archivo Papers: Journal of Photography and Visual Culture, 2024
This essay proposes that selected artworks by Katarina Pirak Sikku, Kader Attia, Mich... more This essay proposes that selected artworks by Katarina Pirak Sikku, Kader Attia, Michael Rakowitz, and Kajsa Dahlberg exemplify a set of approaches within contemporary artistic practices that operate in ways that simultaneously align with and deviate from the main tenets of the “archival turn” in contemporary art. The author suggests that these artworks involve indirect reconsideration of what critical archival practice can involve. All four artists deal with specific instances of conflict, marginalization, and forms of oppression by actively reframing the confrontational, suspicious and undermining strategies that has characterized some archival discourse. The essay shows how these artistic practices stress notions of care, repair, empathy and permeability in ways that have specific methodological and conceptual consequences. By doing so they invite a rethinking of critical archive theory in the face of specific question and concerns of the current moment such as how to handle remnants of racist histories in present-day archives; the need for recycling and repair in the face of the environmental effects of rampant consumption; how to address those who hold diametrically opposed political position from oneself; and how to take serious people whose bodies operate in ways that tend to marginalize them as non-productive in the face of neo-liberal values like professional success and self-sufficiency.
Art Journal, 2024
The archive has been one of the most persistent buzz-words in the international artworld since th... more The archive has been one of the most persistent buzz-words in the international artworld since the turn of the twenty-first century. While some claim that it has been used with such abandon that its usefulness is questionable at best, others view it as indicative of an important theoretical framework, necessary to make sense of some of the most important contemporary artworks and artistic practices. Several decades after the proposed “turn” to the archive, it is now possible to examine the phenomenon with the benefit of some historical distance, and ask: what was the archival turn, and is it still turning? The first part of this essay argues that an important explanation for the ubiquity of references to archives in the artworld was that elements of the notion theorized by philosophers, historians, and others lined up with a number of issues already of interest to artists and art writers. Two such intersecting interests are considered: first, the focus on institutional structures and a break with traditional forms of history, and second, a concern with critical research practices. In the essay’s second part, the author takes stock of how the archive has been rearticulated in artistic practices that deal with some of the most pressing concerns of the present moment such as the socio-political climate of post-truth; engagement with microhistories and local knowledges; looming environmental catastrophe; and current conditions of AI assisted online surveillance.
Media Theory, 2022
This essay examines three instances where Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies have been reference... more This essay examines three instances where Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies have been referenced and reused in present-day visual culture-a scientific experiment that encoded a GIF of a galloping horse into bacterial DNA (2017); a project where multiple frames from the horse-in-motion series were tattooed onto eleven different people (2014); and an activist video that used images of animals from the series to argue for the urgency of species extinction and environmental catastrophe (2019). The author's central argument is that, in addition to the more or less clearly stated intentions of this image-use, these transmediations of Muybridge's historical photographic images also activate and extend questions and concerns from recent media theory: contributing to notions such as image ecology and image liveness, and proposing challenges to established distinctions between new/old media, still/moving images, and material/immaterial media qualities. A further suggestion is that their ability to carry out complex theoretical work relating to present-day media practices can help explain why these images have come to have such staying power in visual culture a century and a half after they were first made.
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 2019
This essay offers a broad look at the way critique as a mode, method, and attitude in post-war ar... more This essay offers a broad look at the way critique as a mode, method, and attitude in post-war art history research and teaching intersects with occurrences of critique in humanities scholarship and teaching generally, but also how distorted forms of critique occur in contexts outside the academic field. The essay outlines concerns raised by humanities scholars with what they consider to be an over-reliance on critique as a negative skill, resulting in scholarship that tears down without building up, and self-satisfied debunking of anything that does not stand up to the current era’s identity politics. The essay argues that the question of critique is of particular urgency to the field of contemporary art. Here critique is embedded in the material studied—artworks, artistic practices, and discourses—and therefore in dire need of being understood, challenged, and decentered as a method.
Journal of Art History/Konsthistorisk tidskrift, 2020
Papers by Sara Callahan
Konsthistorisk tidskrift, Apr 2, 2020
The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection, 2018
Kontextualisering. Teoretiska tillämpningar i konstvetenskap: 2, 2019
Det första uppslaget i barnboken Zoom visar en bild av en obestämd röd form som på nästa sida vis... more Det första uppslaget i barnboken Zoom visar en bild av en obestämd röd form som på nästa sida visar sig vara kammen på en tupp; efter ytterligare en utzoomning framträder två barn som betraktar tuppen genom ett fönster; fönstret är placerat i ett av många hus på en stor bondgård, vars skala omkullkastas av ett par gigantiska barnhänder som leker med bondgården som alltså tycks vara en leksak; barnet och leksaken visar sig i sin tur vara en bild i en tidning; på nästkommande bild syns en man i en solstol som läser tidningen; solstolen står i sin tur på däcket på ett kryssningsfartyg som visar sig vara del av en reklambild på en buss i en stadsmiljö, osv.1 Den alltmer utzoomade bilden illustrerar hur kontextualisering kan ske genom att förändra den ram som läggs kring det verk som skall tolkas.2 I Zoom rör det sig om en enkel rörelse från mikrotill makrodär varje uppslag ger ny information som bidrar till en mer och mer komplett tolkning av scenen. I många samtida konstverk innefattar...
Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 2020
Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 2015
Exhibitions and Conferences Looking Outside the Cathedrals. CAA Annual Conference, New York City,... more Exhibitions and Conferences Looking Outside the Cathedrals. CAA Annual Conference, New York City, 11-14 February 2015
This essay looks at the way the photograph functions as a sign, and how an interest in analogue t... more This essay looks at the way the photograph functions as a sign, and how an interest in analogue technique and related sensitivities can be analysed and understood in selected works by Maria Miesenb ...
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 2019
This essay offers a broad look at the way critique as a mode, method, and attitude in post-war ar... more This essay offers a broad look at the way critique as a mode, method, and attitude in post-war art history research and teaching intersects with occurrences of critique in humanities scholarship and teaching generally, but also how distorted forms of critique occur in contexts outside the academic field. The essay outlines concerns raised by humanities scholars with what they consider to be an over-reliance on critique as a negative skill, resulting in scholarship that tears down without building up, and self-satisfied debunking of anything that does not stand up to the current era’s identity politics. The essay argues that the question of critique is of particular urgency to the field of contemporary art. Here critique is embedded in the material studied—artworks, artistic practices, and discourses—and therefore in dire need of being understood, challenged, and decentered as a method.
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Book by Sara Callahan
Book Chapter by Sara Callahan
Edited Volume by Sara Callahan
Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, contexts, and methodologies, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on.
This volume transgresses the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, the latter targets formal and meaning-making elements of media objects. These fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, aesthetic and technological conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.
Articles by Sara Callahan
Papers by Sara Callahan
Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, contexts, and methodologies, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on.
This volume transgresses the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, the latter targets formal and meaning-making elements of media objects. These fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, aesthetic and technological conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.