Research Catalogue

In the Mirror of Care Work researches skills within Nordic interactive performance practices. Using the mirror as a metaphor for visualisation and connection, artist Inga Gerner Nielsen brings into conversation the work of nurses and interactive performers. By inviting in the perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, Inga engages in discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of her own field. What do we see when we look in the mirror, and when that mirror is a nurse? Do we, as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? Does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? And what of the nurses’ working conditions should we perhaps try to adopt as (care giving) performers? The project visited Stockholm (MDT) in September 2023 and Helsinki in January 2024 in a two-day symposium to meet and exchange with local artists about the aspect of care work in their artistic practice . The project is based in a long-term collaboration with the nursing school at UCN Hjørring & Thisted in the north of Denmark. Together with teacher of the History of Nursing, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Inga gerner Nielsen is developing ways of integrating interative performance excersices and visual art into the teaching of 1.st, 4th and 7th semester nursing students.

Research Portal of Janacek Academy of Performing Arts in Brno

The exhibition Estranhamento (Strangeness) aims to share the visual art work developed by researcher Catarina Casais, associated with her doctoral project Políticas de Estranhamento: Práticas de resistência e revigoração docente (Policies of Strangeness: Practices of resistance and teaching reinvigoration). These drawings, linocuts and embroideries seek connections between her artistic practice and research work, promoting possibilities for reflection on the teaching profession in the visual arts and the teaching demonstrations that took place between 2020 and 2024. The challenge in developing these works is to think, based on the materiality of the teaching demonstrations, about possible languages through the techniques and materials used. These languages reflect a desire to think about the daily reality of visual arts teachers and the moments of protest related to their professional practice. Linocut, embroidery and drawing become ways of addressing the issue of visual arts teaching and its politicisation within the school environment, inviting everyone to visit the thinking laboratory that has been developed over the last academic year at Atelier Sem Forma.

The artistic research project TiO₂: The Materiality of White (MoW) is led by Associate Professor Marte Johnslien, Department of Art and Craft, Oslo National Academy of the Arts. The project builds on her PhD project White to Earth, completed at the same department in 2020. MoW is funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir) through the Programme for Artistic Research for the period 2022–2026.

The artistic intervention "Foot Baths for All" (2024) emerged from an ethnographic exploration of collective forms of life on wastelands in Switzerland. Ethnographic insights regarding self-organized care, occupation, informal infrastructure, gift economies, and the shared use of water and electricity were fictionalized and recontextualized in the inner city of Zurich, in order to explore new forms of appropriation and participation in urban life. This exposition aims to share the results and experiences of this research through multiple formats: a video documentation, a how-to guide, and a text that offers insights into the ethnographic research and its translation into an artistic intervention, conceptualizing "Foot Bath Urbanism" as an artistic method for city-making from below. This project is situated in the field of artistic urban research. It is based on an expanded notion of art that moves beyond institutional contexts to intervene directly in public urban spaces through installations and performative practices, following approaches such as “New Genre Public Art”. The how-to guide is connected to instruction-based art, challenging conventional notions of authorship while emphasizing accessibility, participation, and interactivity, rooted in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Fluxus movement.

This essay examines the subjective perception of time during the performance of long musical forms from the perspective of the performer. The starting point is the composition "Haltezeit", which works specifically with the stretching of time. Two improvisational performances without an audience will be used to explore how the perception of time changes in the course of performances lasting several hours and how this influences improvisational behavior. Practical experience is combined with concepts from the fields of philosophy, performance studies and musical improvisation research. The artistic experiments show that physical states such as tiredness or tension as well as external disturbances significantly influence the subjective perception of duration. While inner restlessness led to an extended experience of time and more frequent improvisational interventions, calmness and concentration favored a condensed, meditative experience of time with less frequent changes. Artistic practice thus becomes an experiential space for a qualitative perception of time beyond measurable structures. The essay sees itself as an open research gesture that invites us to perceive time more consciously as a flowing continuum in a performative context.