Await what the stars will bring or moulding the gap
(2023)
author(s): Verena Miedl-Faißt
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Verena Miedl-Faißt (Center Research Focus, PhD candidate PhD in Art) invites us with "Await what the stars will bring" to walk through her artistic research trajectory. Her contribution poetically narrates on longings, and on beautiful and painful experiences in connection with her artistic practice and collaborative work with her nephew L. Based on Donna Haraway’s concept of kinship, Miedl-Faißt searches for possibilities of relating to each other and seeks ways to make inner processes accessible. The contribution provides insights into her work with children and colleagues and how she creates “materialized relations, co-creations objecting time, space, and loneliness.”
Stitches and Sutures. Textile Metaphors and Graphic Topologies as Methodological Artistic Tools
(2023)
author(s): Barbara Graf
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Barbara Graf (Center Research Focus, PhD candidate PhD in Art) takes Jacques Lacan’s notions of the ‘upholstery button’ and the ‘suture’ as starting points to explore textile metaphors as methodological tools for her artistic practice, informed by her own bodily sensory experiences and experience of paresthesia as a person affected by MS. Graf’s contribution "Stitches and Sutures" searches for images of the invisible and explores how deeply subjective experiences can be made accessible and adequately expressed.
Exercises in Existential Eccentricity. Conceptualising autoimmunity as a variation of the conditio humana
(2023)
author(s): Barbara Macek
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Barb Macek (PhD candidate and fellow (DOC) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Institute of Fine Arts & Media Arts) takes as her starting point self-reflections and her own experiences with the autoimmune disease SLE. She approaches the phenomenon of autoimmunity in relation to fundamental human ambiguity, following the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner. Macek’s contribution, "Exercises in Existential Eccentricity", explores the bio-philosophical dimension of the disease rather than its bio-medical dimension, showing how autoimmunity raises existential-phenomenological questions regarding bodily ownership, the self, and the notion of the body as “one’s own”. From an assumed embodied diversity, she designs an artistic technique, EEE - Exercises in Existential Eccentricity, drawing on the technique of auto-interviewing, autoethnography and poetics to facilitate a dialogue between different inner voices.
Situating Personal Values in Artistic Practice: Towards a Reflective and Reflexive Framework
(2022)
author(s): Annick Odom
published in: KC Research Portal
In what ways can a musician use reflexivity and reflection to situate her personal values in her artistic practice? To answer this question and put the results into practice, the author combined archival and digital research, interviews, and fieldwork. By combining new and found materials inspired by Appalachian folk music and the state of West Virginia, the connected auto-ethnographic case study is a reflective attempt of the author to engage critically with her personal values of empathy, inclusion, and equity in her artistic practice. Using the reflective lenses of the author’s autobiography as an artist, the audience’s reactions, fellow artists comments, and literature review, she was better able to reflexively see her own assumptions and missteps, better allowing her to situate her personal values within her artistic practice. Besides creating a reflective framework by which other artists could consider their own artistic practice, she also found that by taking on new roles outside that of the traditional classically trained performer, she had a greater agency to influence and understand performance elements such as design and form, materials, context, audience, and production process.
Herbal Practice: A Symbolic Approach to Artistic Medicine (or, The Artistic Practice as Regurgitating Findings)
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Maria Ilieva
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023, BA Fine Arts
This paper aims to research and study how traditional Bulgarian herbal healing and theoretical matter can influence artistic research and wheth- er they can be applied as methods to the artistic practice, guiding it to take a more self-sustainable form. Herbal medicinal plants have been applied to the daily lives of generations upon generations of humans, as tools to aid and better one’s health, as well as symbols in ritual practices across the globe. In this paper I am contextualizing herbal medicine within the scope of the contemporary artistic prac- tice, through decomposing the process of using herbal medicine into three key steps: gathering, combining and ingesting. I apply art theory based on these topics, to compare the herbal and artistic worlds, using the symbolic, metaphorical aspect
of herbal healing while keeping the logic behind it. Through this process, I aim at making a connection that strengthens the notion of the artistic practice both as a medicinal, as well as a deeply self-centric and self-sufficient practice.