Sara R. Yazdani

Dr. Sara R. Yazdani is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory and Head of Theory MFA at Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Yazdani’s fields of research are modern and contemporary art and theory, with a particular focus on ecology, the relationship between art, media, and technologies, sensation, and process philosophy. Her work is published in Art Journal, Afterimage, Art & Education, and various anthologies and exhibition catalogs on modern and contemporary art, and she has contributed to Artforum, Flash Art, Kunstkritikk, and Mousse Magazine. She is convener and director of the Norwegian Arts Council supported art and research project Parallel Ecologies (2019–2022).

Yazdani holds a Ph.D. in art history and media aesthetics from the University of Oslo (2019), and in 2020 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Art and Visual History and the cluster of excellence Matters of Activity at Humboldt University, Berlin. She has taught at the University of Oslo, University of the Arts London, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and received fellowships from Media Aesthetics, University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Research Council. She is currently working on her first monograph on the work of Wolfgang Tillmans and the reemergence of ecological image thinking in visual art, and a research project on how ideas of the environment and sensation (perception) are explored in contemporary art of the 21st century called Sensing Bodies and Other Ecologies.

Publications (a selection)

FORTHCOMING: “On Not Planet Earth and the Weather,” in The Ocean, ed. Axel Wieder. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Essay for exhibition catalog.

““Social Fabric”: Photography, Solar Atmospheres, and a Process Ontology, Sonne München, 1994,” Art Journal 80, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 84–106. Peer-reviewed article.

“Wolfgang Tillmans’s Abstract Mediations and Other Ecologies,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (University of California Press), 48, no. 2 (June 2021): 109–130. Peer-reviewed article.

“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 (July 2021). Essay for exhibition catalog.

“Toxic Environments, Sensitivities and Planetary Times: A Conversation with Susanne M. Winterling,” Mousse Magazine (August 2018).