Sara Callahan

Sara Callahan

Sara Callahan is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art and visual culture. Her book Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art was published in 2022 by Manchester University Press in the series ‘Rethinking Art’s Histories’. The book is an in-depth analysis of the connection between art and the archive at the turn of the twenty-first century, examining how the archive emerged in art writing in the mid-1990s and how its subsequent ubiquity can be understood in light of wider social, technological, philosophical and art-historical conditions and concerns. Her interest in the future theorization of archives in the contemporary art field is evident in two forthcoming articles (2024): “When the dust has settled: what was the archival turn, and is it still turning?” in Art Journal and “Strategies of critique in contemporary artistic archival practice” in Archivo Papers.

Sara Callahan currently works on a project, financed by the Swedish Research Council, that investigates how photographic motion studies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have been used in different contexts over time, and to what effect. As part of this work, Callahan is an Affiliate Fellow at ICI Berlin in 2023.

In addition to her research, Sara Callahan has long-standing experience working in art galleries and museums in Stockholm and Seattle, and she is an Associate Senior Lecturer, Visual Culture at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University in Sweden.