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VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research

Visit VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research: visjournal.nu

VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research is a digital journal presenting artistic research, emphasising the importance of reflection that is interwoven with artistic practice, thereby generating new knowledge. VIS is an open-access publication and uses the Research Catalogue publishing platform for its submission and peer-reviewing processes, as well as for its final publication. It has adopted an approach to peer-reviewing in which, rather than the process being blind, a dialogue is established between author(s) and peer-reviewer.

VIS holds an open call for every issue. Up to seven expositions are selected by the Editorial Committee for further peer-review. Submissions in the Scandinavian languages are actively encouraged, but VIS is also open to contributions in English. Following the appearance of its inaugural Issue 0 in spring 2018, VIS has produced two issues in every subsequent year.

The journal is the result of a cooperation between Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) and the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills).

The Steering Committee for VIS
Ellen J Røed
, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Paula Crabtree, Vice-Chancellor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Anne Gry Haugland, Board member at The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Ann Kroon, Active Director of the Research Office, Stockholm University of the Arts
Morten Schjelderup Wensberg, Chairman, The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Geir Ivar Strøm, Policy director, The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)

Editorial Committee for VIS
Tale Næss, Dramaturg, playwright and author
Magnus Bärtås, Vice-Rector of Research, University of Arts, Crafts and Design
Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen, Artist
Michael Francis Duch
, Musician, professor, and Deputy Head of Research at NTNU – Department of Music.
Behzad Khosravi Noori, Assistant Professor of Practice, Communication and Design at School Of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, Habib University
Eliot Mmantidi Moleba, Research fellow at The Oslo National Academy of the Arts, KHiO
Cecilia Roos, Vice Rector of Research, Stockholm University of the Arts

Contact:
visjournal@uniarts.se



contact person(s): Heidi Möller

url: http://www.visjournal.nu

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  12. VIS Issue 12 VIS Issue 12 was published on 23 October 2024. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology: A dead-alive of Artistic Re-search and History”. Editors: Behzad Khosravi Noori and Magnus Bärtås.
• 11. VIS Issue 11 VIS Issue 11 was published on 2 April 2024. The issue features six expositions within the theme “Play, come what may”. Editors: Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen.
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  10. VIS Issue 10 VIS Issue 10 was published on 20 October 2023. The issue features six expositions and a recorded conversation within the theme “Circulating Practices”. Editors: Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen.
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  9. VIS Issue 9 VIS Issue 9 was published on 14 March 2023. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “of Memory and Public Space”. Editors: Serge von Arx and Eliot Moleba.
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  8. VIS Issue 8 VIS Issue 8 was published 18 November 2022. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “of Rules and Alternatives”. Editors: Serge von Arx and Eliot Moleba.
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  7. VIS Issue 7 VIS Issue 7 was published 14 March 2022. The issue features five expositions within the theme “Metamorphoses – Tales of the Ever-Changing”. Editor: Anna Lindal.
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  6. VIS Issue 6 VIS Issue 6 was published 19 October 2021. The issue features five expositions within the theme “Contagion”. Editor: Anna Lindal.
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  5. VIS Issue 5 VIS Issue 5 was published 15 March 2021. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “One more time, let's do it again!”. Editor: Trond Lossius.
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  4. VIS Issue 4 VIS Issue 4 was published 14 October 2020. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “Affecting material and technique”. Editor: Trond Lossius.
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  3. VIS Issue 3 VIS Issue 3 was published 1 March 2020. The issue features eight expositions within the theme “History Now”. Editor: Magnus Bärtås.
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  2. VIS Issue 2 VIS Issue 2 was published 23 September 2019. The Issue features five expositions within the theme ”Estrangement”. Editor: Magnus Bärtås.
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  1. VIS Issue 1 Risk – and associated topics such as vulnerability, unguardedness, precariousness, failure and uncanniness – are frequently raised as concerns within artistic research arenas. VIS # 1 – Risk in Artistic Research – jeopardy or validation? moves through more artistically-stylised accounts of ‘danger’ towards the more hopeful linkage of risk with discovery and the reconfiguring of the imagination.
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  0. VIS Issue 0 Issue 0 features eight expositions created by researchers within the arts. Every contributor has been carefully chosen and invited by the Editorial Committee, with the view of presenting best practice within the field of artistic research.
  The expositions have gone through a dialogue-based peer-review which is something that the Editorial Committee would like to continue to develop in the coming issues, a process intended to be significant for VIS.
  Every exposition is presented on the VIS webpage and has an editorial text that explains why the contributor was chosen. The actual exposition itself, on the other hand, will be found in the database of the Research Catalogue. The expositions have their own designs and explore widely different topics, depending upon how each researcher has chosen to work within the offered format.
  
  The Editorial Committee would like to thank all the contributors for their inspiring work which sets the tone admirably for what we hope will follow.
  
  Editorial Committee: Cecilia Roos, Serge von Arx, Anna Lindal, Mia Engberg, Trond Lossius, Magnus Bärtås och Darla Crispin

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  Lineage (2020) author(s): Otto Ramstad published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  The project Lineage draws lines between the learning practices of experimental dance and somatic work, and personal ‘artistic genealogy’. ‘Artistic genealogy’ is a creative process Ramstad has been using to build relationships to his Norwegian ancestors and the land they inhabited and about which he knew very little. Lineage strings together these seemingly separate ways of gaining knowledge: official archives and private stories, his archive of somatic approaches and attempts to research land somatically – to think about what it was like to live in a body in rural Norway 100 years ago and ask how this affects how we are living in our bodies now. This exposition reflects a project that includes a video installation, a studio practice, and a performance which uses his archive of videos, stories, and movement. Here he shares thoughts about how we care for and engage in our personal histories and how this engagement changes how we are living in our bodies now. In this exposition you will see or hear the following people, listed in their order of appearance: Otto Ramstad, Lisa Nelson, Maura Gahan, Margit Galanter, Kristin Van Loon, Steve Paxton, Emmett Ramstad, Hans Steinar Gjerdet, Carle Lange, Olive Bieringa, Uma Rabbit Bieringa Ramstad, Andrea Parkins.
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  Demmin – letting a city sound (2020) author(s): Mareike Nele Dobewall published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  The project ’Demmin – eine Stadt zum Klingen bringen’ (’Demmin – letting a city sound’) explores the history and stories of the German city of Demmin in a dialogue between the local choir, Peenechor, and the site of Haus Demmin. During a two-week workshop the choir and Mareike Dobewall explored how to vocalise other stories, of the inhabitants of Demmin and the two decaying buildings known collectively as Haus Demmin (the ruins of an 11th century fortress and a former mansion). In a sonic dialogue between ageing voices and decaying architecture a vocal performance in the open air was created. Stories, history and fairy tales took new shape through vocal music, and un-listened sound was given presence. The site-determined performance allowed for the memory and the imagination of the visitors and the participants to rise up and become a part of a holistic experience.
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  Listening in/to Exile: Migration and Media Arts (2019) author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition responds to the current flux of migration and the resulting condition of estrangement. The projects – an augmented book project and a corresponding media artwork – respond to mass migration, hyper-mobility, placeless-ness and nomadism, which are blurring the boundaries between the local and the global, the corporeal and the digital, the private and the public. Through an exploration of the poetic and critical capacities embedded in everyday listening the two projects attempt to shed light on the aesthetics of addressing the notion of exile, alienation and estrangement. The exposition let the viewer/reader engage with the artistic matter; namely, the field recordings and on-site writings - artistic acts of poetic contemplation grounded in a personal experience of the urban alienation, with the aim of movement towards self-understanding and emancipation.
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  Spin, Puppet, Spin: Drawing Estrangement (2019) author(s): William Platz published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  The life studio is an eccentric place and this exposition is populated by eccentric characters. The drawings and photographs contained in this research have all been created by studio puppets. Each puppet's awkward methods of working — stabbing, pulling, twisting a clutching hand — magnify the work’s unorthodox strategy. Puppets will illuminate the idiosyncrasies, malfunctions and estrangements typically surfeited in the life studio’s private sphere. This research responds to the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann (‘Spin, puppet, spin’) and George Méliès; puppet/art hybrid exhibitions; the Puppet Master horror franchise; and the lay figure of Gustave Courbet. Puppets are not alien in the life studio. Although they were typically concealed in the artist's process and hidden from public view, they were common fixtures until the 20th century. This exposition estranges artists and models from the life drawing apparatus and invites puppets to make pictures.
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  The Baby Bucha Project (2019) author(s): Anna Ting Möller published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  In this exposition, I confront my feelings about having been transnationally adopted. I do not consider adoption a ‘win-win situation’, and I encourage people to think critically about the practice as well as the glorification of it. The colorblindness with which I was encountered as a PoC growing up with white parents was an existential complication for me. I was plagued by feelings I could not understand at the time and grew isolated. I want to visually express the feeling of being estranged and alienated from one’s own body and the fear of drowning in one’s own skin. I have often felt compelled to unzip my skin suit and leave it next to my trousers in a heap on the floor. In this project, I grow my own skin in a vat – or more specifically, I grow a kombucha culture in tea and sugar. During the fermentation process, the kombucha culture creates a cellulose material that resembles human flesh. The process is a slow one, and developing the material demands a great deal of love and nutrition. In return, I get a self-produced material that enables me to work independently.
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  Testifying for the Invisible: Documentary Poetics of Estrangement (2019) author(s): Susanna Helke, Alejandro Pedregal published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition is a semi-dialogical inquiry into the potential of the methods and poetics of estrangement in documentary and political cinema, where we focus on the representation of the “neoliberal condition” in present-day society. We reflect on and rethink ideas that stem from various theories and strategies of emancipatory practices in cinema and literature. Here we acknowledge the tensions between conventions in for example social documentary, political cinema, and different conceptions of realism versus the idea of estrangement as an artistic strategy. The struggle to emancipate spectatorship and readership from the passivity and uncritical temptations promoted by the spectacles of the hegemonic culture industries has been a central concern in theoretical debates and artistic praxis that involves estrangement as a technique. How do Jacques Rancière’s notions on emancipation and radical equality challenge Brechtian ideas and methods of estrangement? How could the lineages of Third Cinema and testimonial literature help to rethink these matters today? What are actually the relevant means of estrangement in contemporary documentary art and literature?
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