Exhibition | Dressing with Purpose in Scandinavia
From left to right: Eva Aira and Inga Lajla Aira Balto in gávttit from Jåhkåmåhkke and Kárášjohka; Sven Roos in Gagnefsdräkt and Lars-Erik Backman in Leksandsdräkt; Fatima Aakhus and Randi Myrum in Setesdalsbunader. (Photos by Carrie Hertz).
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From the Museum of International Folk Art:
Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia
Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, 12 December 2021 — 19 February 2023
Dress helps us fashion identity, history, community, and place. Dress has been harnessed as a metaphor for both progress and stability, the exotic and the utopian, oppression and freedom, belonging and resistance. Dressing with Purpose examines three Scandinavian dress traditions—Swedish folkdräkt, Norwegian bunad, and Sámi gákti—and traces their development during two centuries of social and political change across northern Europe.
By the 20th century, many in Sweden worried about the ravages of industrialization, urbanization, and emigration on traditional ways of life. Norway was gripped in a struggle for national independence. Indigenous Sami communities—artificially divided by national borders and long resisting colonial control—rose up in protests that demanded political recognition and sparked cultural renewal. Within this context of European nation-building, colonial expansion, and Indigenous activism, traditional dress took on special meaning as folk, national, or ethnic minority costumes—complex categories that deserve reexamination today. In this exhibition, visitors will be introduced to individuals who adapt and revitalize dress traditions to articulate who they are, proclaim personal values and group allegiances, strive for sartorial excellence, reflect critically on the past, and ultimately, reshape the societies they live in.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and Swedish Council of America.
Carrie Hertz, ed., Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 258 pages, ISBN: 978-0253058577, $30.
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Map of Scandinavia
A Note on Terms and Place Names
Foreword, Khristaan Villela
Introduction: Can We Talk about Traditional Dress?, Carrie Hertz
Part I. Folkdräkt in Sweden
1 Swedish Folkdräkt, Carrie Hertz
2 They Are at Peace Here, Like Old Friends in Their Caskets: Traditional Dress Collections as Heritage-making, Lizette Gradén
Part II. Bunad in Norway
3 Norwegian Bunad, by Carrie Hertz
4 Headdress and Hijab: Bunad in Multicultural Norway, Camilla Rossing
5 The Transnational and Personalized Bunad of the Twenty-First Century, Laurann Gilbertson
Part III. Gákti in Sápmi
6 Sámi Gákti, Carrie Hertz
7 The Legacy of Ládjogahpir: Rematriating Sápmi with Foremother’s Hat of Pride, Eeva-Kristiina Harlin and Outi Pieski
Conclusion: The Future of Traditional Dress, Carrie Hertz
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Call for Papers | Thinking Europe Visually
From ArtHist.net (6 December 2021), which includes the CFP in French . . .
Thinking Europe Visually / L’Europe par l’image et en images
IMAGO Center at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, 9–10 June 2022
Organized by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel and Léa Saint-Raymond
Proposals due by 15 March 2022
“If I had to do it again, I would start with culture”: this statement, often erroneously attributed to Jean Monnet, suggests that Europe as a political and economic construct remains, in the absence of a shared culture, nothing but a hollow shell, empty and soulless. This conference aims to question the disillusioned position which holds that there is no meaningful common European culture, and to do so through images.
One way to visualize the potential existence and limits of a European cultural base is indeed to trace the circulation of images—be they works of art, press images, posters, photographs, or even motifs and patterns—in the region, from antiquity through to the present day. What are the images that have circulated most widely in Europe? Are they specific to Europe or are they already globalized? What was their visual and symbolic impact? Is there a ‘visual culture’ specific to Europe and, if so, what might be its distinctive ‘patterns’? This conference will attempt to question the existence, history, contours, and impact of this ‘Europe of images’—from an art historical and visual studies perspective, as well as in historical, anthropological, and geopolitical terms.
Interested contributors are invited to send proposals (400 words maximum) for a 20-minute presentation, along with a short CV in the same document. Proposals should be sent to Prof. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Beatrice.Joyeux-Prunel@unige.ch) and Dr. Léa Saint-Raymond (lea.saint-raymond@ens.fr) by 15 March 2022. The conference will take place 9–10 June 2022 in Paris (France) and will be hosted by the Imago Center at the Ecole normale supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm, in collaboration with the project Visual Contagions at the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
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