Dr. Sara R. Yazdani
Visiting Scholar
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity. Image, Space, Material”
Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte
Email: sara.yazdani@hu-berlin.de
Sara R. Yazdani is a Visiting Scholar at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin funded by the Research Council of Norway. Her fields of research are modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on the relationship between art, media, and technologies, avant-garde art, theory of the Anthropocene, media archaeology, media ecologies and process philosophy.
Yazdani earned her PhD in art history and media theory at the University of Oslo in September 2019. In 2016 she was a Visiting Scholar with the Media Archaeology group at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, in 2019 a research affiliate with Environmental Humanities at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and between 2016 and 2019 she was co-leader of the research group Media Aesthetics at the University of Oslo. She is a guest teacher in art theory at the University of the Arts London and Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Her work has been published in Art Journal, Afterimage (forthcoming) as well as a number of anthologies and exhibition catalogues. As an art critic she has contributed to Artforum, Mousse Magazine, Kunstkritikk, and Flash Art, and she also done a number of curatorial projects.
Yazdani’s current research considers the reemergence of an ecological, processual approach to art and photography of the twentieth and twentieth first centuries, with a particular focus on the work of Wolfgang Tillmans. From this she is developing her first monograph, Self-Sufficient Images. Art, Media, and Ecologies in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans.
Yazdani is also an associated member of the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity. Image. Space. Material.
Peer reviewed Articles
““Social Fabric”: Photography, Sun Atmospheres and Process Ontology in Sonne München, 1994,”
Art Journal 80, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 84–106.
Wolfgang Tillmans’s Abstract Mediations and Other World Perspectives,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 48, no. 2 (Spring 2021) University of California Press (forthcoming).
“Fungi, Art, and Life in Neue Welt”, British Computer Society: Special Issue: Politics of the Machine: Art and After, Bind EVA Copenhagen (Electronic Workshops in Computing), 2018. Conference proceedings.
Invited Essays in Books
“Invisible Processes. The Production of the New in the Work of Ane Mette Hol,” in Becoming. Edited by Franz Thalmair. mumok–Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (forthcoming, 2021)
“Magical Works, Grey Ecologies and Affect: On Complement for Company (skyline and sky)” in Writing Images. Conversations on Photography. With Susanne M. Winterling. Edited by Antonio Cataldo. Berlin: Kehrer Verlag, 2021
“Bodily Transformations” in New Scandinavian Photography, eds. Bjarne Bare and Behzad Farazollahi. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015
Conference Presentations and Invited Talks
“Contemporary Art and Sun Media Atmospheres”
Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, University of Oslo. November 2020
“Photography, the Arctic and Process Ontology in the Anthropocene”
Worlding Northern Art (WONA), The Arctic University of Norway. November 2020
“On Contemporary Art, Technologies and Imaginary Environments”
Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Department of Art and Craft. August 2020
“Reframing the Individual: The Sun, Process Ontology at Sonne München, 1994”
7th biennial conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies.
University of Leuven, Belgium. September 2020
“The Relevance and Possible Limitations of Media Archaeology for an Understanding of the Digital in Contemporary Media Art,” PhD Defense Lecture, University of Oslo, September 2019
“Fungi, Photography and Life”
The Politics of the Machine: Arts and After.
Aalborg University in Copenhagen. May 2018
A Conception of Photography as Media Diagrammatic”
Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Medienwissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. June 2016
“Art and Materiality in the Photographic Work of Wolfgang Tillmans”
XXII International Conference of Film Studies: Contemporary Film and Media Aesthetics:
Culture, Nature and Technology in the 21st Century. Tre Roma University. November 2016
“Contemporary Material Processes, Media, and Bodies in Approaches”
The symposium What is the Contemporary?
Text, Image, Sound, Space. Programme franco-norvégien,
Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris. January 2016
“Temporality, Life and Photography”
The Symposium How to do the History of the 1970s,
Edinburgh University and Schools of Fine Arts, May 2015
“Art, Media and Ecologies: On Tillmans’s Neue Welt”
Art Matters. Barcelona University and MACBA. November 2014
“Space, Bodies and Desires: On the works of Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowitcz”
The Annual Conference of the Nordic Society for Aesthetics, University of Oslo, May–June 2013