Talk
Art and Craft Lectures: Anna Grasskamp: “The Politics of Recycling”
The Politics of Recycling: Hong Kong Jewelry and Global Ecologies of Reuse.
For centuries, jewelry makers and goldsmiths have created circular economies by melting metal objects and remounting gems. This longstanding practice is continued in the works of contemporary artists who upcycle waste to use it alongside precious materials. My talk introduces aspects of the contemporary jewelry scene of Hong Kong, a city that connects local and global practices while remaining rooted in Asia, one of the world’s top waste-producing and waste-receiving areas. Against the background of a metropolis in transition faced with massive socio-political changes and a mass exodus, the material language of jewelry comments on social and political disruptions in the urban fabric of Hong Kong as a space, a city and a community, preserving memory through the means of craft. Understanding craft as a way of thinking, the talk presents an overview of artistic research into the fabric of a city in flux.
Anna Grasskamp is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at University of Oslo. She is the author of Objects in Frames: Displaying Foreign Collectibles in Early Modern China and Europe (2019; second edition 2022) and Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia. Shells, Bodies, and Materiality (2021). Her awards include a European Research Council Consolidator grant for the project An Ecological History of Eurasian Art: Natural Resources, Aesthetic Practices, and Early Modern Globalization (2024–2029).
The Art and Craft Lectures, hosted by the Art and Craft Department at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, is an annual lecture series devoted to art education, research, theory, and politics. The program, curated by Sara R. Yazdani and Susanne M. Winterling, nurtures an interdisciplinary exchange of practice and theory.