Introduction

Abstract

In Ung Uro: Unsettling Climates in Nordic Art, Architecture and Design, thirteen young writers, critics, and art historians examine how Nordic visual art, architecture, and design relate to the Anthropocene. The chapters in the book represent a new generation of scholarship in the field of visual studies, which holds that critique and analysis of artistic expression must have a different form and agency than before: less descriptive and impartial, according to objective parameters, and more speculative and insistent, in accordance with subjective experiences. By discussing the artwork Future Library: 2014–2114 by Katie Paterson, this introductory chapter presents key notions that run throughout the book: Arne Næss’ deep ecology, Donna Haraway’s ‘staying with the trouble’ and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of profanation. Further, chapter introduces how ethical criticality functions as a methodological underpinning for the authors’ interpretation and proposes the term deep relationalism as an analytical concept for describing a tendency in the Nordic arts in the latter part of the 2010s: an interest in processual works with an ethical value base directed towards destabilising human exceptionalism.

Authors 1

1. Ingrid Halland corresponding Aachen Master's student

   Leiden University · University of Oslo · University of Milan · Norwegian University of Science and Technology · University of Bergen · Oslo School of Architecture and Design

   Affiliation as printed

   Master of Art History and Visual Studies, University of Oslo

   Master of Art History, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU

   Master of Art History, University of Oslo

   Master of Philosophy, University of Milan, Department of Philosophy 'Piero Martinetti'/University of Oslo

   Master's student, Leiden University

   Master's student, University of Oslo

   Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and University of Bergen