Histories of sculpture within the Nordic region are under-studied and the region?s influence upon and translation of influences from elsewhere in Europe remain insufficiently traced. This volume brings to light individual histories of sculptural mobility from the early modern period onwards. Examining the movement of sculptures, sculptors, practices, skills, styles and motifs across borders, through studios and public architectures, within popular and print culture and via texts, the essays collected here consider the extent to which the sculptural artwork is changed by its physical movement and its transfigurations in other media. How does the meaning and form of these objects performatively respond to the pressure of their relocations and rematerialisations? Conversely, how do sculptures impact their new contexts of display? The contributing authors engage with a wide variety of objects and media in their essays. Each focuses on the contextualisation of sculpture in an original and timely way, exploring how mobility acts as a filter offering new perspectives on iconography, memorialisation, collecting, iconoclasm and exhibiting. From the stave churches of early Norway to the decoration of International Style monoliths of the twentieth century, from Italian quarries to Baroque palaces, from fountains to figurines, from text to performance, these wide-ranging and fascinating case studies contribute to the rich history of the Nordic region?s sculptural production.

This book explores the ways in which Nordic private collectors displayed their collections of Chinese objects in their homes.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Michelle Facos links the social and cultural dynamics in turn-of-the-century Sweden to the discourses of primitivism, nationalism, and symbolism. In the process, she sheds new light on a major area of study, the manifestation of modernism in Sweden. These painters - among them Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn, Bruno Liljefors, and Prince Eugen - sought to produce a specifically national Swedish art. They focused on indigenous history, legends, and folk tales as well as customs, values, geography, and ethnography - anything they perceived as uniquely or typically Swedish. Politically progressive and culturally conservative, the National Romantic artists protested against the dangers they perceived in capitalist industrialism and urban expansion and promoted an egalitarian ideology centered on the Swedish/Nordic native culture.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950-1975 is the first publication to deal with the postwar avant-garde in the Nordic countries. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations in arts and culture: literature, the visual arts, architecture and design, film, radio, television and the performative arts. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: The cultural politics, institutions and new cultural geographies after World War II, new technologies and media, performative strategies, interventions into everyday life and tensions between market and counterculture.

Scandinavia is a region associated with modernity: modern design, modern living and a modern welfare state. This new history of modernism in Scandinavia offers a picture of the complex reality that lies behind the label: a modernism made up of many different figures, impulses and visions. It places the individuals who have achieved international fame, such as Edvard Munch and Alvar Aalto in a wider context, and through a series of case studies, provides a rich analysis of the art, architecture and design history of the Nordic region, and of modernism as a concept and mode of practice. Modernism in Scandinavia addresses the decades between 1890 and 1970 and presents an intertwined history of modernism across the region. Charlotte Ashby gives a rationale for her focus on those countries which share an interrelated history and colonial past, but also stresses influences from outside the region, such as the English Arts and Crafts movement and the impact of emergent American modernism. Her richly illustrated account guides the reader through key historical periods and cultural movements, with case studies illuminating key art works, buildings, designed products and exhibitions.

This book examines the influence of imperialism and colonialism on the formation of national identities in the Nordic countries, exploring the manner in which contemporary discourses in Nordic society are rendered meaningful or obscured by references to past events and tropes related to the practices and ideologies of colonialism. Against the background of Nordic 'exceptionalism', it explores the manner in which the interwoven racial, gendered and nationalistic ideologies associated with the colonial project form part of contemporary Nordic identities. An important challenge to national identities that can become increasingly inward looking, Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region sheds light on the ways in which certain notions and structural inequalities, understood as residue from the colonial period, become recreated or projected onto different groups. Presenting a variety of case studies drawn from Sweden, Finland, Norway, Greenland, Denmark and Iceland, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities conducting research in the fields of race and ethnicity, identity and belonging, media representations of 'the other' and colonialism and postcolonialism.

This is the first book to develop a postmigrant analytical perspective for the study of art, concentrating on how postmigration reopens the study of contemporary art and migration. The book introduces art historians and other scholars with a methodological interest in cultural analysis to the innovative concept of postmigration, offering a comprehensive introduction to the various meanings and uses of the term as well as translating it methodologically to an art historical context. The book analyses art projects from Denmark, Germany and Great Britain, which address some of the current challenges to European societies of immigration, and by drawing on theory from fields such as migration studies, transcultural studies and feminist, postcolonial and political theory, as well as re-engaging established concepts such as imagination, commemoration, belonging, identity, racialization, community, public space and participation. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art and politics, migration studies, and transcultural studies.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.

An upsurge in artworks negotiating the conditions of their own production, distribution, and reception has called attention to the infrastructural relations that shape the art world but have long been understudied. In response, this book introduces the concept of infrastructure aesthetics into the study of culture. The concept is drawn from infrastructure studies, media theory, and aesthetic theory. This volume develops it further, addressing: the analytical challenge of working with works that blur the boundaries between art and infrastructure, both historically and in the present, the aesthetic problem of assessing artistic forms that operate on an infrastructural level, and the politics of artistic agency on a social level, beyond the work's content or message. As the relation between artworks and their institutional and social settings becomes infrastructural in nature, we need to move beyond the reductive division of the study of artworks into production, articulation, and reception. This book provides its readers with an innovative conceptual toolbox designed for precisely this task, as well as a forceful set of exemplary case studies applying the concepts in theory and practice.