Research Catalogue

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.

Wang Xiyao (1992) is a leading abstract Chinese painter based in Berlin, whose complex account of intercultural abstraction sees Eastern tradition deep in dialogue with contemporary Western language. It has replaced vivid, multilayered-meanings, deep personal experience, cultural memory, and common history, which have traditionally formalist postulates. Under the mentorship of Werner Büttner and Anselm Reyle and also inspired by Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Julie Mehretu, she began to elaborate a dynamic practice based on rhythmically interplaying color, line, and space. Many works are inspired by poetic and philosophical tradition, employing concepts such as Chinese Liu Bai (留白, intentional blank space) and moving into physical expression through dance and martial arts. In this respect, Wang's working process in creation corresponds to the concept of bodily perception in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and experiential aesthetics in John Dewey, considering immersion in the multisensory approach rather than pure visual contemplation. By an original synthesis in manifold aesthetic and sensory modalities, she thus develops multidirectional experiences, which are fascinatingly active and dialogic in the sense that they stir her viewer into an incessant questioning about form, culture, and consciousness.

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.

Lectures, panel discussions, and conferences are formats for collective listening, but they took on conventions that make listening difficult: reading aloud complicated texts, speaking quickly in order to squeeze as much material as possible, showing slides with long texts, sitting for a long time without moving. Silence is considered awkward, so there is little time to think about what has been said. In this video paper, I dissect the decorum of oral presentation formats in academia and outline how the attention of the members of an audience diverges and converges with that of the speaker. I also share some observations about verbalizing non-verbal ideas, in particular about how a text description at the beginning of a project can tie its loose ends too tightly. At the end of my talk at the Klagenfurt conference, I handed out questionnaires, in which I asked the audience members to mark the sentences which they remembered from my talk. Then, while another presenter was speaking, I drew a graph of mind wandering of the audience members based on the questionnaires and showed it at the end of the session. In the second part of this video paper, I explain the process of evaluating the responses and present the resulting graph.

This research is grounded in the relation between listening and orientation through a kindred gesture: tending towards. Its object of inquiry is the dialogue between Paul Celan’s poems and Gisèle Lestrange-Celan’s etchings in the publication Atemkristall (Brunidor 1965, Vaduz). The choice of this pairing arises from the possibility of bringing together two elements: the breath and the ground. I follow the flux and exchange between breathing gestures and inscription across the poems and etchings, approaching the images not as illustrations or representations of the text but as spatial configurations of encounter—between readers, listeners, makers, and witnesses. Attendance as a gesture of attention becomes palpable when the poet imagines that “the poem is pneumatically touchable” and that “the reader breathes into the poem.” In this turning-towards-the-poem, the etchings invite a reading of the poet’s gesture as it inclines toward another practice and medium. My interest lies in how, within this publication, both media affect and reorient one another, generating a shared space of reading. Extending this form of listening means approaching the relation between word and image as the opening of spaces of attention—listening as inclination, as stance, before any immediate attempt of translation.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we, in our role as lecturers, conducted hybrid workshops with design and art students from ten partner institutions on five continents. Our goal was to explore soundscapes from different viewpoints, and we were deeply impressed by the outcome. The recordings and their accompanying images and conversations dissolved geographical borders along with social, cultural, and structural differences. We found that a re-sonance or con-sonance emerged from this collective work, in which sounds became manifestations of presence and agency; the sociality and simultaneity of the space we shared together remains with us today. With becoming soundscape, we attempted to bring the social resonance we had experienced in the workshops into the lecture hall.