IMAGE <=> TEXT is a seminar series, hosted by The Film, Photography and Literary Composition Unit, HDK-Valand. Our purpose is to investigate the myriad of connections that appears between text and image (in the broadest of sense), e.g. artists’ books, film, narrative photography, material poetics or ekphrasis.
The 13th seminar in the series took as its point of departure the work of writer CIA RINNE. In conversation with Thomas Millroth and Nils Olsson, she discussed working within, between, and through different formats, languages, genres and mediums.
Cia Rinne, based in Berlin, writes minimalist, conceptual and translingual poetry that also take shape as performances, exhibitions, videos and sound installations. Publications include zaroum (2001), notes for soloists (2009), l’usage du mot (2017) as well as sentences (2019, shortlisted for the Prix Bob Calle du livre d’artiste). She is the laureate of the Prix littéraire Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou 2019. Her work have been presented at, a.o., the British Museum, Haus am Waldsee (Berlin), Kunsthalle Kassel, cneai Chatou, Centre Pompidou, inca Seattle, iscp New York, the Turku Biennial and the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn. Cia Rinne wrote the libretto for the opera Liebestod by Henrik Strindberg and Sofia Jernberg (Royal Opera in Copenhagen in 2019), Problems (with Gemma Ragués Pujol for Neue Vocalsolisten, 2023) as well as Science Frictions (music by Cecilia Damström, 2023).
Thomas Millroth is a critic, curator and writer. He has PhD in Art History and was the director of Ystad Art Museum 1995–2008. Millroth is the Author behind more than 40 books, mainly on art and artists, but also on experimental music, sound art, amongst other things. His latest publications are Olivier Herdies (2022), and the monumental volume Artists’ Books from a Swedish Point of View with special attention paid to the contributions of Denmark and GDR (2021). As a curator he has recently worked for Moderna Museet (Malmö), Sprengel Museum (Hannover), Galleri Niklas Belenius (Stockholm), and Lunds konsthall.