Public lecture: Mick Wilson and Natasha Marie Llorens

Mick Wilson—Professor of Art and Director of Doctoral Studies at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg—and Natasha Marie Llorens—Professor of Art Theory at The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm—will be speaking about their newly funded Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary. The center is set to explore how artistic research engages with, represents, and imagines the political field. 

Welcome to join in!
 

Bios

Trained as both an artist and historian of art and design–with graduate degrees in art & design history; information technology and education; and visual culture,–Mick Wilson is a research professor at University of Gothenburg, appointed on both academic and artistic grounds (according to the Swedish University protocol.) Having three decades of experience in higher arts education, research, development and leadership, he has worked in a wide variety of roles and institutions, including as: former Director of Valand Academy, Gothenburg (2012-2018); Fellow at BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht, the Netherlands (2018/2019); Editor-in-chief PARSE Journal for Artistic Research (2015-2017); Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Ireland (2007-2012); Chair of the SHARE network of 40 higher arts education institutions across 30-plus countries (2010-2014); and Head of Research, National College of Art & Design, Ireland (2005-2007).

Natasha Marie Llorens is Professor of Art Theory at The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholmand co-chair of the Centre for Art and Political Imaginary with Mick Wilson from HDK-Valand. Her curatorial and art writing practices are based on a decade of curatorial experience in the US, France, and Algeria working on decolonial themes. The invisibility of whiteness, structural racism and xenophobia, the persistent center/periphery binary that privileges knowledge produced in the center—all these aspects of a decolonial critique depend on an embodied experience of the place from which one is speaking, as well as a deep sense of its local interlocutors. Llorens’ doctoral thesis, completed between 2015 to 2020, focused on Algerian experimental film from the 1960s and 1970s. In parallel, she worked extensively with contemporary artists and small-scale institutions based in Algeria such as Box24 and rhizome to organize three large-scale survey exhibitions on art from Algeria and its diaspora, all entitled “Waiting for Omar Gatlato.” She publishes regularly on art and politics in both academic journals and in the art press — a commitment that was recently recognized in 2022 with an Arts Writers Grant in short-form art criticism from The Warhol Foundation.