Open Lecture with Professor Lenore Manderson

After the lecture it will be a unique possibility to also celebrate Lenore Manderson for having received the Bronislaw Malinowski Award 2023.

Quintessence: Art, The Elements, and Environmental Change

Climate and environmental artists worldwide have responded to accumulating scientific evidence on the speed of global warming and its impact in ambient, land and sea temperatures, environmental degradation, on water and food systems, and on animal and plant life. Multiple media, performance, documentary, and conceptual artists, writers, photographers and acoustic ecologists have all turned to engage in new ways with this planetary crisis. Professor Manderson will draw on her work in the United States and South Africa, where she produced and curated six major arts/science events focusing on the four classic elements – earth, air, fire, and water. In this Lecture, she considers site specific performance art and installations on two materials particularly salient to Nordic countries – ice and oil. She concludes with a final example that relates to water, river systems, physics and the overwhelming tasks of intervention. Inspired by anthropological understandings, political and critical theory, and presenting short video clips and stills, she examines select works by artists Ólafur Elı́asson and Marcus Neustetter, and the collective Liberate Tate. These works bring together themes of temporality and urgency, via the materiality of the work and through analogue and symbol. They provide avenues for public reflection and engagement with what we have already lost, how we respond to this affectively and practically, and how this supports urgent action at different levels of practice individually, and by governments and corporations. Professor Manderson discusses the role of public art work and artists in synthesis and interrogation, so to provoke ethical and practical responses. She argues that the expressive work of artists, across fields and practices, are multiply important – as affective, illustrative, synthetic, generative and transformational.

Lenore Manderson is Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University, and is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She moved to South Africa and the US in early 2014, after an exceptional academic career in Australia. From 2015-2019 she curated six art/science events, five under the title "Earth, Itself", at Brown University and one, Watershed, at Wits. Her research spans infectious and non-communicable disease, gender, inequality and the environment, in the course of which she has trained 170 masters and PhD students. She is a prolific writer and editor, with her books including Sickness and the State (on the colonial economy, disease and death), Surface Tensions (on surgery, body change and identity) and Viral Loads, on Covid-19. She was made a member of the Order of Australia for her work in 2020, and in 2023, she received the highest honor for an applied anthropologist, the Bronislaw Malinowski Award.