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.

Great Sweetness is a written companion of the artistic research project Night of Dark Angels, which investigates how erotic mysticism, queer vampire narratives, and somatic performance can function as modes of embodied knowledge. The text explores “great sweetness” as a recurring motif in hagiographic writings of mystics and in queer vampire literature, where ecstatic pleasure, abjection, and desire exceed normative frameworks of sexuality, subjectivity, and transcendence. Drawing on Lacanian jouissance and Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, the research approaches great sweetness as an excessive affective state—simultaneously pleasurable and disturbing—that destabilizes boundaries between self and other, sacred and profane, human and non-human. Methodologically, the text operates through a situated, phenomenological, and autoethnographic approach, treating writing not as representation but as a performative practice that accompanies and informs artistic experimentation. Great Sweetness functions as a conceptual and affective archive that feeds directly into the development of experimental somatic LARP (Live Action Role Play) scores within Night of Dark Angels. This LARP experiment translates textual research into collective, embodied situations, where figures of mystics and queer vampires are enacted as tools for exploring vulnerability, monstrosity, care, and resistance. Rather than aiming at theoretical closure, the text proposes great sweetness as a mode of embodied thinking—one that foregrounds process, relationality, and affect, and that opens artistic research toward antifascist, feminist, and queer forms of collective imagination and practice.

This research explores creation as a form of violence that operates through interruption, erasure, and bodily pressure rather than through visible conflict or aggression. Through a conference-performance, writing is treated as an unstable action: it begins, stops, fails, and is physically destroyed without revealing its content. The work focuses on moments where creation resists completion, and where decisions to stop, delete, or abandon become central gestures. By placing the performer behind the audience and withholding textual legibility, the research shifts attention from meaning to process, from narrative to tension. Creation is approached not as expression or inspiration, but as a concrete and irreversible experience that acts upon the body and its limits.

Duodji refers to Sámi handicrafts and design. I reflect on the knowledge base of duodji thinking, how duodji is learned within the community, and how I have developed the teaching and research of duodji according to the principles of duodji and art. I also contemplate the essence and presentation of duodji in public spaces through the pedagogical-artistic practice, LaavuStudio."

This exposition takes as its departure the systemic inertia identified within Western Higher Music Education (HME), where education is driven by skill acquisition in a master–pupil format. Such approaches may hinder the growth of adaptable and reflective musicians. We propose an alternative: student-centred learning inspired by artistic research methods. To explicate this, we draw on findings through our own artistic research practices. Our hypothesis is that the model of the artistic, embodied research laboratory, as developed within the field of artistic research, may serve as a potent tool for renewal. By analysing our work as artist-researchers and educators, this exposition offers insights that support rethinking both institutional structures and pedagogical approaches in HME. Our aim is to strengthen student agency in learning situations and set them off on a path of lifelong learning. This research demonstrates that artistic research laboratories can provide practical frameworks for transforming HME pedagogy, offering educators concrete methods for fostering playful, inclusive, and sustainable learning environments whilst empowering students as active agents in their musical development.

Queer-identiteetti ja -tunteet lavalla, sen takana ja opetustyössä Kuvataiteen tohtorin opinnäytetyössäni tutkin queer-kuuntelemisen merkitystä taiteellisena käytäntönä ja tutkimusmenetelmänä. Tässä ekspositiossa haastattelen drag alter egoani Maimu Brushwoodia, jonka kanssa keskustelen sukupuolesta, tunteista ja pedagogiikasta. Haastattelu perustuu tutkimukseni toiseen taiteelliseen osuuten, mikä oli drag-esitys, jonka esitin kahtena iltana Club Kiihko: Uuden toivon illassa Kulttuurikeskus Caisassa Helsingissä 27. ja 28.6.2024. Ekspositiossa on haastattelun lisäksi drag-esityksen videotallenne ja kirjoitustehtävä, jonka tarkoitus on syventää esitykseni teemoja.