Research Catalogue

The purpose of this exposition is to collect data of what Performative Theology can be and become primarily within an academic research but also beyond. The expo will be a timespace nurtured by members the Network for Performative Theology, established 6 October 2022 in Oslo.

WAP/Walking As Practice Program takes place where the forest meets the sea in the Northern Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden. It is a program for self-identifying walking artists. Exploring and sharing strategies for proximity through artistic expressions in the field of walking practices, creating a transformative, dynamic space for art that engages with life and nature. This involves critical and poetic explorations influenced by the immediate surroundings. We participate in each other’s walkshops or interventions, and we also host Share Sessions to familiarize ourselves with each other’s practices. Additionally, we introduce the Research Catalogue for final dissemination, where each artist create their individual exposition.

Art activism is powerful. Also known as activist art, protest art, visual activism, artivism and creative activism, it changes lives, situations and is and has been a powerful weapon across a whole spectrum of struggles for justice. Teresa Sanz & Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos(2021) relay that art activism has the unique ability to bring cohesion and diverse peoples together and it can, as Zeynep Tufekci notes, change the participants (2017). As Steve Duncombe & Steve Lambert (2021) posit, traditional protesting such as marches or squats are no longer as important as they once were. As a result of my own lived experience in activist activities, I very much agree with Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell (2012) that the reason people use art activism is that it works, by enriching and improving protest. In the past, when I lived in a metropolis and was not a parent, I used to be an activist. Now I no longer have immediate access to international headquarters at which to protest and I have to be concerned with being arrested, I am hindered from protesting. This project is an attempt to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism. By devising methods which include at least one of the following: that do not require on-site participation, that can take place outside the public gaze, that reduce the risk of arrest, that open up protest sites that are not “big targets”, that include remote locations, that involve irregular timing, my thesis aims to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism to those who are underserved by more mainstream methods of conducting art activism. Textiles have unique properties that enable them to engage in subterfuge and speak loudly through care and thought(Bryan-Wilson, 2017). They have strong connotations of domesticity, the body and comfort that can be subverted within art activism to reference lack of this domestic warmth and protection(O’Neill, 2022). Being a slow form of art-making, they show care and thought, attention in the making, so that the messaging is reinforced through this intentionality in slow making.

This article explores the shifting temporality of John Cage’s 4’33” as it propogates through the digital landscape of YouTube. Originally conceived as a timed, almost site-specific performance of shared presence and ambient listening, 4’33” can function surprisingly well online in an environment dedicated to speed, repetition, and distraction. Drawing on seven diverse video performances—ranging from the historically grounded to the amateur and experimental—I examine how silence and time are embodied, marked, framed, and performed in online space. These performances inhabit a paradox: they are situated within a system designed to fragment attention, yet they demand stillness and duration. In doing so, they unsettle the assumptions of immediacy that govern digital spectatorship. Rather than treat 4’33” as a fixed score, I argue that each video becomes a site of temporal negotiation. The performers use silence as a gestural and visual act, creating tension between embodied time and platform time. They foreground listening not only as acoustic attention but as a durational stance—an insistence on presence within an artwork that privileges absence. The result is a form of quiet resistance to algorithmic rhythm, the embracing of non-playing, a reclaiming of boredom. These online performances suggest that 4’33” has not lost its edge. Instead, it has adapted, becoming a mirror for contemporary conditions of time, presence, and attention. Silence here is not absence, but an expanded field—where listening, duration, and performance are reimagined in and against the temporal asynchronicities of the digital. (painting by Morna McGoldrick, 1964)

This article examines an expanded conceptualization of time-based art beyond artworks that unfold consecutively over measurable durations. Typical time-based art was characterized with clear beginning and ending such as performance, cinematic art, moving image, sound art, and computational installation. In contrast, this analysis investigates how static art possesses temporal qualities through alternative means. With the incorporation of “time-based materials” - substances that transform their external forms over time – we establish an alternative time-based art characterized by an imminent temporality. Historical paintings like Goya’s "The Third of May 1808" and Bruegel’s "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" reveal early attempts to the depiction of time through compositional arrangement and juxtaposition of events. The author extends this tradition by exploring how certain materials possess intrinsic “temporal directionality” – a predictable but fluctuating transformation process. Examples include oxidation of metals that undergo the process of rusting and patination, creating visual changes that occur gradually and unpredictably, embodying what the author terms an imminent quality - known to happen but uncertain in exact duration. The author makes use of his own artworks as case studies: "Simulacra" (2015), a juxtaposition of photographs of copper armors against the actual deteriorating objects; "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" (2022), a translation of Pieter Bruegel’s painting into an installation using patinated copper; and "Public Cemetery" (2023), an incorporation of natural phenomenon like rain and typhoons as temporal agents. These works demonstrate how materials that vulnerable to intrinsic transformation can create temporal experiences that transcend conventional time-based art definitions, offering new possibilities for expressing time through the interplay of possibility, impossibility, and imminence.

This project is about zero time, which is no time, but can also mean the time of change or a new beginning. The phantoms in question are not ghosts or spectres, but placeholders; they stand for something absent, like the mathematical concept of zero. An important example for such a phantom is phantom pain. This term refers to the perception of painful sensations in a part of the body that is no longer there, for example because it has been surgically or traumatically removed. The key point is: The limb, organ or eye is missing, but the pain is still there, and the pain felt there is real. The reality of pain is essential in the context of this work. Not just phantom pain, but the broader concept of phantom experience is the subject of Phantomology. Phantom experiences are experiences that were not really experienced, such as traumatic events in early childhood; events that were not integrated into the ego system and therefore did not become part of our – accessible – memory. The aim of the Phantomology project is to develop artistic strategies for dealing with these phantoms, guided by the question of how to grasp and investigate them as something absent. The challenge is that it is ultimately about nothingness, timelessness, and our striving to fill voids as a basic human desire, this desire to give content to the gaps we are constantly confronted with in the timelines of our lives.