Um...Crits is an interdisciplinary forum around ongoing artistic research in its broadest sense, sometimes with invited guests. For this session we have invited Annika Bünz, Associate professor and Docent in Museology, Department of Culture and Media Studies, to present an experiment within the UTRI funded project Ecologizingthe Museum by Annika Bünz and Carola Nordbäck. The experiment Gallery Spirals & Intertwinings / An exhibition in a stairwell has the objectives to problematize current narrative practices in museums, to explore new ways of storytelling in museums and to explore the potential of this room in creating narratives.
Bünz will also present her ongoing project The Universe, the Cancer, and I which is a reflection on how all living and non-living things are intertwined in cycles of birth, life, and death, and how the boundaries between my perceived Self and an Illness in my body dissolve and merge with everything around me. It is an exploratory experiment grounded in environmental humanities, blue humanities, and ecocriticism, with the aim of finding new ways to understand and describe the world we live in and are interwoven with.
BIO
Annika Bünz became interested in museum exhibitions, as a medium for communication, already as an undergraduate in archaeology. In her dissertation on Swedish archaeological exhibitions, Bünz developed a method for analyzing four-dimensional multimodal storyscapes. Since then, she has continued to develope theory and methods for multisensory analyses of the many dimensions of storytelling practices in museums, for exaple at maritime museums. Over the years, her focus has shifted from intersectional analyses to posthumanist and ecocritical perspectives. Today, she is an associate professor and lecturer in museology at Umeå University, where she is responsible for teaching multimodal communication and exhibition production, among other subjects. In her latest project, together with Carola Nordbäck, Bünz worked with interactive research, involving museum staff in exploring how cultural history museums can find new ways to narrate a world where humanity is intertwined with the more-than-human.