Enfilade

From the conference website:

Sculptural Mobilities
University College London, 3 July 2013

Tracing the flows of sculptural artworks between the Nordic Countries and Europe from the early modern period to the present day

A one-day symposium organised collaboratively by University College London’s Department of Scandinavian Studies, and Kingston University’s Visual and Material Culture Research Centre. This symposium is funded by the Henry Moore Foundation.

This interdisciplinary symposium investigates the cultural mobility of sculptural artworks. Positioning the Nordic Countries as a contact zone of sculptural exchange, the project traces the flows of artworks to and from the Nordic Countries and Europe and examines the impacts these flows generate on both local/regional contexts of display and the nature of the sculptural artwork itself. Histories of sculpture within the Nordic region are arguably under-studied and the region’s influence upon and translation of influences from the wider Europe remain insufficiently traced. Our symposium emphasises the Nordic Countries’ important role as an interstice between the East, West and the North, and to bring to light individual histories of sculptural mobility from the early modern period onwards.

Stephen Greenblatt has defined cultural mobility as ‘the restless process through which texts, images, artefacts, and ideas are moved, disguised, translated, transformed, adapted, and reimagined in the ceaseless, resourceful work of culture.’ The sculptural artwork by contrast is often imagined as static and fixed, stable and immutable. To what extent is the sculptural artwork changed by transcultural recontextualisation? What is the potential for movement to compel a performative response within the moving object itself – what are the ways in which it is materially made to move via this process of transcultural exchange? Conversely, how do sculptures impact their new contexts of display? To what extent do moving sculptures confirm or critique the complexity, interdependence and instability of ‘localised’ cultures?

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T U E S D A Y ,  2  J U L Y  2 0 1 3

7.30pm  Thorvaldsen (1949) by Carl Theodor Dreyer (Wilkins Gustav Tuck Lecture Theatre, UCL) — Screening and lecture by Claire Thomson (Lecturer in Scandinavian Film and Head of UCL Scandinavian Studies) followed by an informal reception in the Wilkins North Cloisters, UCL.

W E D N E S D A Y ,  3  J U L Y  2 0 1 3

9.00  Sara Ayres and Elettra Carbone / Claire Thomson and Fran Lloyd — Introduction and welcome

9.30  Panel 1: Courtly Patronage and Sculptural Mobilities

• Francesco Freddolini (Assistant Professor of Art History at Luther College, University of Regina, Canada), Denmark and the International Mobility of Italian Sculpture, ca. 1709-1725

• Cynthia Osiecki (PhD Fellow, Interdisciplinary Research Training Group ‘Baltic Borderlands’ at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität, Greifswald), The Import of Flemish Sculpture into Sweden’s Courts in the Second Half
of the Sixteenth Century

• Kristoffer Neville (Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Technical University in Berlin), A Gothic Neptune: Georg Labenwolff’s Sculpture for the Danish Court, 1575-1583

11.00  Coffee break

11.30  Panel 2: Danish Myth, Italian Maestro: The Unveiling of Bertel Thorvaldsen

• Stig Miss (Director of The Thorvaldsen Museum), The Making of Sculptural Awareness in Copenhagen: The Contribution of the Works of Thorvaldsen

• Elettra Carbone (Teaching Fellow in Norwegian, University College London), Reading Sculpture: The Remediation of Thorvaldsen’s Sculpture in Printed Culture

• David Bindman (Emeritus Durning-Lawrence Professor of the History of Art, University College London), The Original Drawings for Thiele’s Biography of Thorvaldsen in the UCL Library

1.00  Lunch break — There will be time to view the one-day exhibition Rediscovered: Unique Thorvaldsen Portfolios held by UCL Special Collections alongside Karin Lowenadler’s Standing Male Nude (1936)

2.00  Panel 3: Post-War Sculptural Exchange between Britain and the Nordic Region

• Frances Lloyd (Associate Dean Research & Enterprise, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, Kingston University), ‘Back in from the Cold’: Karin Jonzen’s Commissions for the World Health Organisation

• Christina Brandberg (PhD Candidate, University of Hull), Henry Moore in the Nordic Countries: The First Two One-Man Shows in 1952

• Sara Ayres (Postdoctoral Researcher, Faculty of Art Design and Architecture, Kingston University), Transfiguring Memorials in Norway and Britain

3.30  Coffee break

4.00  Panel 4: Curatorial Mobilities

• Linda Hinners (Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, National Museum, Stockholm), Establishing a Platform for National Sculpture Production: The Recruitment of French Sculptors to Sweden during the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries

• Liisa Lindgren (Senior Curator, Parliament of Finland, Helsinki), Sculpture Hand in Glove with Architecture: The Sculpture Collection at the Finnish Parliament

• Marjorie Trusted (Senior Curator of Sculpture, V&A), Medieval Scandinavia and Victorian South Kensington

5.30  Concluding remarks and final discussion, chaired by Marjorie Trusted

6.00  Drinks

7.00  Conference dinner for speakers and guests