About the Horse – In the visual arts and the posthumanist world

24 November 2022

Lectures and talks inspired by Tove Kjellmark's exhibition "The horse, the robot and the immeasurable"

Main hall, Färgfabriken 

Participants: Martin Olin, art historian and head of research at the National Museum and Cecilia Åsberg, professor and director at The Posthumanities Hub, Linköping University

Conversation leader: Daniel Urey, process manager

Tove Kjellmark’s exhibition The horse, the robot and the immeasurable has roots in art history, but also opens up a new nature that challenges an anthropocentric approach to the world and the traditional hierarchies between animals, humans and technology.

Martin Olin, art historian and head of research at the National Museum, talks about the horse in visual arts and cultural history. For thousands of years, the horse has been a motif in the visual arts. Through the associations with war, hunting and ceremonies of various kinds, horses had high prestige at the princely courts, especially from the Renaissance until the 19th century, and great resources were spent on acquiring, training and equipping horses.

Cecilia Åsberg, professor and director at The Posthumanities Hub, Linköping University, takes a posthumanist perspective and invites discussion about the conditions of different species and non-human forces as co-creators of human existence and the world at large – the one we are a part of. Because the world has become humanized, too humanized, she says. For example, what would human societies be without, say, “horsepower”? Picture: David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, Karl XI’s life horse The Little Englishman, Ed. ca 1680–1689, oil on canvas (National Museum).