PhD Students

Sven Augustijnen

Fierté nationale : de Jéricho vers Gaza

This PhD speaks about the impossible situation in Palestine and Israel as depicted in Fierté nationale : de Jéricho vers Gaza, the film that I shot in 2019 and completed in 2025, the object of this study. Rather than beginning with a predefined research question, the writing itself functions as a process of analysis,taking an inverted method triggered by a series of dreams related to the film. The questions that emerged during this analytical process are: What were the drives that led the film’s protagonist, Hassan Al Balawi—a Palestinian diplomat in Europe—to go back to Palestine, to take me there and to make a film? And vice versa, what were my own drives, as the filmmaker, to accompany him, to film this journey and produce this work? These questions converge around the issue of loyalty and resistance, and ultimately around what is at stake in the film itself. Through and in comparison with other films shot in Palestine and Israel, and drawing on the method of microhistory and Lacan’s mirror stage, I analyse the entangled relation of the European filmmaker and his subject, a relational dynamic in which Al Balawi emerges neither as the romanticised figure of the freedom fighter, nor as the stereotypical image of the Palestinian ‘terrorist’, but rather as the less mediatised representative of the Palestinian Authority, historically emerging from the PLO and Fatah, and marked by military and political surrender. Al Balawi is not an extremist whose position can be easily deconstructed, but a moderate voice, placed, perhaps tragically, in an impossible position—torn between different symbolic entities of national pride that both determine and constrain him. It is at the juncture where this situation emerges in its full contradiction, that the film’s immanence becomes operative.

Sven Augustijnens profile in Lund University Research portal

Yael Bartana

Shades of Ambiguity

The core question of my thesis is the role of ambiguity in my work.

 Confronting the discourse on the effect of trauma on contemporary politics, I began to sense that there are limits to the political discourse in which I was hemmed in. I felt that I needed a new strategy to help me explore the subject or talk about it in a different way. That feeling led me to create ambiguity and ambiguities in the images and films I developed and the voice that I wanted to articulate. This was a way to move away from the imprisoning, predictable and very limiting discourse of knowing the answers and knowing the questions.

Through looking into my projects - The Polish Trilogy (2007-2011) and Light to the Nations (2023) - as case studies, I ask whether ambiguity as a method can tackle nationalism, bigotry, extremist tendencies and the construct of national consciousness?

How does ambiguity challenge the Status quo in Israel -Palestine that entrench and fortify the position of the side that benefits from it?  

I use ambiguity as a tool to dive deeper into highlighting the problem of nationalism as Ideology; as a force that gives a sense of community; a sense of belonging, but also as a system of inclusion and exclusion. Shades of Ambiguity can be identified through such modes of irony; satire; temporality; spacing; transgression of symbols; utopian visions; queering; and the separation of form from ideology.

Yael Bartanas profile in Lund University Research Portal

Jürgen Bock (defended his doctoral thesis in October 2025)

Through the lens of the history of Maumaus, an art institution in Lisbon dedicated to education, curation and production, my aim is to come to a greater understanding of how art and arts education – with their inherent critiques – have shifted over the last 25 years. My research aims to explore to what extent the history of Maumaus can be considered to mirror developments in the wider art world from the 1990s onwards. The project considers whether Maumaus has been able to provide an alternative to an increasingly accelerated world of ‘cultural industries’ or may paradoxically be understood as an institution that has enabled the system it opposes. I consider the specific socioeconomic and political circumstances under which Maumaus has been able to develop, and what such circumstances – encountered and recognised or consciously created – have in turn both enabled and disabled. The PhD is based on a reflexive analytical approach to achieve an in-depth understanding of today’s phenomena within what seems to be an increasingly professional art world that functions under dictates of performance indicators and productivity, based on instrumentalised modes of enquiry and experimentation.

Jürgen Bocks profile in Lund University Research Portal

Bouchra Khalili

Bouchra Khalili The Hypothesis of a New Community (to Come): Speaking a Collective voice in/from the 1st-personal Singular This Phd research starts from my practice in film and video. Since the early 2000’s, I have devoted myself to the making of works examining through a collaborative method how filmic forms can create a space for subjects rendered invisible by the nation-state model: stateless citizens, individuals forced to cross borders illegally, undocumented workers, 2nd-class citizens from immigrant descent in global north countries. Through my practice, I aim at suggesting forms of belonging freed from the restrictive and normative conceptions of the nation-state model that proceeds by exclusion to define the “right to belong” to a political community.

In all of my film and video works, visual and sonic forms are combined to create a space in which the ones concerned in the first place are represented with and through their own bodies, their own voices, their own words, their own languages - including their native unwritten languages and dialects - their own situated positions (social, political, historical), and eventually their own world views. From the 1st-person singular they formulate a “right to belong” and implicitly convey the hypothesis of a potential new political community to come into being. For this Phd research, and starting from my work and the reflection I have developed with and through it, my Phd research will discuss the following research question: How can film allow us to envision a potential political community starting with and from those who are excluded from the “right to belong”?

Bouchra Khalilis profile in Lund University Research Portal

Jacob Korczynski

My research asks how the activities, associations, and organizing of distribution can be a critical, ethical, and sustainable curatorial practice. In doing so, it acknowledges this mode of collaboration as undertaking two separate but interconnected initiatives: establishing and maintaining a curatorial framework for a group of artists and their distributed works together, and at the same time facilitating the means for their projects to be accessed, executed, and presented across a potentially unlimited number of contexts. This dual approach asks the curatorial questions of who and what enters into distribution alongside the when and where of presentation, which is framed by the overall question: why distribution? My trajectory as a curator which has arrived at this body of research is indebted to extant distribution models initiated by artists. Just as importantly, my research departs from the ongoing histories of those networks in order to situate the artists at the centre of my research outside of a medium-specific approach.

It is important to assert that pursuing distribution as a method of curatorial practice does not simply mean developing an organizational structure that then disseminates extant or upcoming works by artists. Instead it is premised upon the practices of artists who take distribution as material.

Jacob Korczynskis profile in Lund University Research Portal

Emily Wardill

Emily Wardill's practice spans film, video, sculpture, performance, photography and installation. It has been an ongoing enquiry into the imagined image – what it is, what it has been used for and how it leaves indelible motes and shrapnel behind it. This has taken her from examples of entropy to case studies on risk detailing fires attributed to paranormal activity. It has travelled from psychoanalytical case studies on negative hallucination to memory palaces and their relationship to colourless vision. From stained glass as an early device to communicate with the illiterate right up to the filmic technique of 'day for night' - reversing it to reflect on technological vision, performed gender and imagined utopias.

Wardill’s work has been exhibited at KW, Berlin, Secession, Gulbenkian Project Spaces, SMK , de Appel arts centre, List Centre MIT , The ICA, XYZ Collective Tokyo ,The Biennale of Moving Images Geneva, The Serpentine Gallery,  The Hayward Gallery, MUMOK Vienna; and MOCA, Miami. She has shown in the Berlinalle Forum Expanded and the New York and London Film festivals. Her work was awarded the Jarman Award in 2010, the Leverhulme Award in 2011 and the EMAF award in 2021. She participated in the 54th Venice Biennale and the 19th Sydney Biennale.

Wardill has taught at The University of the Arts Helsinki, University of British Columbia , Central Saint Martins, Academy of Fine Arts Munich, School of the Art Institute Chicago,National Art School Sydney, Städelschule,  Goldsmiths University & the CCA San Francisco.

Emily Wardills profile in Lund University Research Portal