Adjusting the Lens | Learning With Syeyutsus Speaker Series

Join Sigrid & Hilde Wallem Nielssen as they talk about the role of photography in contemporary renegotiations of the past and in Indigenous art activism.

In moving and powerful stories, Sigrid & Hilde will analyze photographic practices and heritage related to Indigenous communities in Canada, Australia, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the United States. In their discussion, they will call attention to how Indigenous people are using old photographs in new ways to empower themselves, revitalize community identity, and decolonize the colonial record.

Sigrid Lien (b. 1958) is Professor of Art History and Photography Studies, at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen. Project leader for the Norwegian team in the HERA-project PhotoClec (Museums, Colonial past and Photography) 2010-2012, and for the project “Negotiating History: Photography in Sámi Culture”, funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2014-2017). Lien has published extensively on nineteenth century as well as modern and contemporary photography. Recent publications include the edited volume Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of Photographs, Ashgate 2014, (with Elizabeth Edwards); the authored volume, Pictures of Longing. Photography in the History of the Norwegian U.S.-migration, University of Minnesota Press 2018, and the edited volume Contact Zones. Photography, Migration and Cultural Encounters in the US (with Justin Carville), Leuven University Press, 2020.

Hilde Wallem Nielssen is Professor of Intercultural Studies at the Department of Pedagogy, Religion and Social Studies/Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway, and PhD in social anthropology. Nielssen has published extensively on issues such as ritual aesthetics and practice, critical museology and museum exhibitions, and indigenous photography. Her research interests include photography and visual practices, critical museology, representation, colonialism and decolonisation. Together with Sigrid Lien she has published Museumsforteljingar. Vi og dei andre (Museum Stories. We and the Others 2016) and Colonial Legacies and Decolonial Activism in Indigenous Photography (2021).

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