Introducing Our Expert Council for ’Collecting Thoughts’

Our working expert council is made up of eight members who will together guide Collecting Thoughts philosophically, theoretically and practically and engaging artists through Artist-in-Residence.

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is an artist with a bachelor’s degree from the Royal Institute of Art and a current master’s student in Fine Arts at the Dutch Art Institute and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Since 2019, Nordlöf Malekian has been conducting artistic research on hand-colored photography collections from Southwest Asia and North Africa archived at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut and the American University in Cairo. Afrang will also be Artist-in-Residence as part of Collecting Thoughts.

Munish Wadhia

Munish Wadhia (b. 1972, Mombasa, Kenya) is an artist based in Mölnbo, Sweden. Munish Wadhia (b. 1972, Mombasa, Kenya) is an artist based in Mölnbo, Sweden. Munish has a master’s in fine art painting from the Royal College of Art, London and a bachelor’s in fine art painting from Wimbledon School of Art (University of the Arts London). His work deals with painting through an experimental and interdisciplinary approach where his ideas are concerned with collective memories, inheritance, and the amnesiac absence of knowledges in westernised discourses. Munish will also be Artist-in-Residence as part of Collecting Thoughts.

Michael Barrett

Michael Barrett is an anthropologist, researcher, and curator of the Africa collections at the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden. His research focus is on the history of the collections as well as the representation of Africa and people of African descent in museums and other popular mediation practices. Among recent curatorial projects are the contemporary art shows ‘Remixing the Future’ and ‘Sonaxis’ (Etnografiska 2021), and ‘Ongoing Africa’ (2017-2021) – critical development of research, exhibitions, outreach, and public programming in relation to the Africa collections at the Museums of World Culture.

Berta Guerra Aredal

Berta Guerra Aredal (b. 1950, Chile) is an artist educated at the Faculty of Art at the University of Chile and at Konstfack, Stockholm. Active in Sweden since 1981, she has extensive experience of working with graphic methods, mainly in lithography at, for example, KKV Stockholm, Lithographic Academy in Tidaholm, Grafikwerkstatt Dresden, La Ceiba Grafica, Veracruz, Mexico and The Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design, Wroclaw, Poland. She received the Lithography Scholarship of the Year from Huddinge 2017–2018. With lines and drawing as her main tools, her art production explores the connections between health, body, and society’s well-being.

Brita Lindvall Leitmann

Brita Lindvall Leitmann (b. 1977, Sweden) is a doctoral student in the field of visual communication at Konstfack / HDK-Valand. Lindvall Leitmann graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2007 and has been employed as a senior lecturer in visual communication at Beckmans School of Design. Lindvall Leitmann is an internationally acclaimed graphic designer with 25 years of professional activity. Since 2012, Lindvall Leitmann has run the design studio Bastion, where they investigate how feminist and postcolonial theory can be transformed through visual communication. Most notable is perhaps their redesign of the Swedish magazine Bang (2012–2015), which illuminates and plays with typographic traditions, visual culture, and editorial principles — a project that encircles Lindvall Leitmann’s aesthetically and methodologically ground-breaking practice.

Annika Gunnarsson

Annika Gunnarsson has a PhD in Art History and works at the Moderna Museet as a curator for Drawings and Prints since 2001. Her professional career began at the Engraving Gallery at Nationalmuseum in 1992 and she has since taken up working with and researching collections, collecting, exhibitions and exhibiting. In her dissertation – visible / invisible. The reception of the visual in the picture books about Alfons Åberg (2012), she analyzed how we as viewers are involved in how a work appears. In 2018-2020, Gunnarsson worked part-time at Stockholm University as a course coordinator for the Curator course at the Department of History. Gunnarsson is interested in visual cultures, storytelling, performative practices and organization of activities.

Camilla Burvall Terán

Camilla works with the public activities at the Stockholm Museum of Women’s History. She has a broad background in the cultural sector and many years of experience working with cultural events within music, art, clubs, theater and literature, at some of the biggest Swedish cultural institutions. She is a project leader and communicator with a preference for cultural clashes where different art forms can meet in unexpected places.

Åsa Bharathi Larsson.

Åsa Bharathi Larsson has a PhD in Art History (Uppsala University 2016) and is a senior lecturer at Södertörn University. She is currently a researcher in North American Studies at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS), Department of English, Uppsala University (2021-2022). Her research focuses on nineteenth-century visual culture, Scandinavian colonialism, race, and transnational history. Bharathi Larsson has published articles on colonial visual culture and scientific photography. Her work includes: “Hjalmar Stolpe’s Intermediaries: Visualizing Labour on the Vanadis Expedition 1883-1885”, Crating the World, (ed. Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn), Athénée Press, 2019, “To Entertain, to Enlighten and to Instruct: Colonial Visual Cultures in Late Nineteenth-Century Sweden”, Swedish Art History. A Selection of Introductory Texts, (ed. Ludwig Qvarnström), Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences 18, Lund University, 2018 and Colonizing Fever: Race and Media Cultures in Late Nineteenth-Century Sweden, (diss.), Mediehistoriskt arkiv, 2016.