PhD Students

Sven Augustijnen

Fierté nationale : de Jéricho vers Gaza

The object of study of this thesis is Fierté nationale: De Jéricho vers Gaza, a film that Sven Augustijnen shot in 2019 and completed in 2025, which follows Hassan Al Balawi—a Palestinian diplomat to Europe—as he returns to Palestine on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat, former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). 

Rather than beginning with a predefined research question, the thesis proceeds through an analysis that unfolds in the writing itself; it departs from a series of dreams that he had in relation to the film. In dialogue with the historical narratives constructed in other films shot in Palestine and Israel, and drawing on the microhistory method and Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, he analyse the entangled relationship between the European filmmaker and his subject, through which Al Balawi emerges neither as the romanticised figure of the freedom fighter nor as  the stereotype of the Palestinian “terrorist,” but as the representative of the Palestinian Authority (PA), caught between the revolutionary legacy of the PLO and the paradoxes of governance under occupation. A moderate voice, Al Balawi epitomises, perhaps tragically, an impossible position, torn between symbolic formations of national pride that both sustain and constrain him. 

The filmmaker himself is no less implicated, carrying a camera on his shoulder and driven, consciously or unconsciously, by the intertwined legacies of European guilt and the historical betrayal of Palestine. Ultimately, the thesis explores whether documentary cinema can reveal latent symbolic structures and historical configurations, and thereby become a tool for understanding the question of Palestine differently.

Sven Augustijnens profile in Lund University Research portal

Yael Bartana

Reverse Zionism

Yaels dissertation develops and articulates Reverse Zionism as both an artistic practice and a critical methodology, emerging from her sustained engagement with the visual and ideological legacy of Zionism. Through reflexive analysis of works created between 2006 and 2024, she explores how the appropriation, inversion, expansion, ambiguity, and pre-enactment of Zionist imagery can generate alternative, speculative, and restorative narratives. Rooted in her own biography – growing up in a moshav in Israel, socialized into the national myth, and later working from Europe – Reverse Zionism interrogates the constructed national, territorial, and theological consciousness of Zionism without collapsing into anti- or post-Zionist binaries.

Drawing on archival research in the Zionist National Archives and the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, she traces how early Zionist propaganda films mythologized the transformation from diasporic Jew to “New Jew” while erasing Palestinian presence. She appropriate this cinematic grammar, redirecting its ideological charge toward critical and speculative interventions. In works such as A Declaration (2006), Summer Camp (2007), and The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection (2008), she re-stage national symbols to destabilize their authority and open space for counter-histories.

This methodology extends beyond Israel/Palestine in And Europe Will Be Stunned (The Polish Trilogy) (2007–2011), which relocates Zionist and National Socialist visual vocabularies to Poland, producing uncanny reversals of exile, return, and nationhood. Later works, Malka Germania (2021) and Light to the Nations (2024), interweave fascist aesthetics, Jewish messianic thought, and science fiction to imagine non-linear, cyclical temporalities and speculative redemptions.

Reverse Zionism reuses ideological imagery to create a counter-imagination that reveals the exclusions, contradictions, and latent utopias of nationalist narratives. By merging fiction and reality, historical and speculative time, this practice aims to transform political memory into a space for potential repair (Tikkun) as a political act. This dissertation positions Reverse Zionism as a transferable artistic methodology for confronting and rewriting dominant histories, destabilizing ideological closures, and proposing potential and speculative futures.

Yael Bartanas 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

Tarik Kiswanson

For over a decade, Tarik Kiswanson has explored notions of rootlessness, regeneration, metamorphosis, and memory through his complex and interdisciplinary practice. A legacy of displacement and transformation permeates his works and is indispensable to both their form and the modes of sensing they produce. Tarik started the PhD programme in 2025.

Tarik Kiswansons 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

The Imagined Image and Misremembered Bones

The Imagined Image and Misremembered Bones is a study into the status of an image that is reliant on a form that is absent. What can a study of imagined images observed in different fields tell us about imagery itself, the proximity of image and imagination, the relationship between thought and the plastic, and the plasticity of thought?

Emily Wardill’s practice spans film, video, sculpture, performance, photography, and installation. It has been an ongoing inquiry into the imagined image—what it is, what it has been used for, and how it leaves indelible motes and shrapnel behind it. This work 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 Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Secession, Vienna; Gulbenkian Project Spaces, Lisbon; National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen; de Appel, Amsterdam; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; XYZcollective, Tokyo; Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement, Geneva; Serpentine Galleries, London; Hayward Gallery, London; mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. She has shown in the Berlinale Forum Expanded and the New York and London Film Festivals. Her work was awarded the Jarman Award in 2010, Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2011, and EMAF Award in 2021. She participated in the 54th Venice Biennale and 19th Biennale of Sydney.

Wardill has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; Malmö Art Academy; University of the Arts Helsinki; University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Central Saint Martins, London; Academy of Fine Arts Munich; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; National Art School, Sydney; Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main; Goldsmiths, University of London; and California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Emily Wardills profile in Lund University Research Portal