VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
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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
Recent Issues
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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.
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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
Recent Activities
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The Anonymous – A Documentary Memory and Transformation Project
(2023)
author(s): Bengt Bok
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
De anonyma (The Anonymous) is a research project on memory and transformation that is divided into three parts: a book, a audio work, and a film. Over the past twenty years, Bengt Bok has returned several times to a former Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin. The first time he visited the site, he was shocked by the former death camp’s immediate proximity to a surrounding village. A community. Not only today but when the camp was still in use by the Nazis. How could people carry on living so nearby? He subsequently transformed the memories of his personal encounters, experiences and observations both in the camp and in the village into a book, which he, in turn, transformed into a sound work and, finally, into a film. In this exposition, Bok explores what became specific to, and distinctive about, each of the three different expressions or works — in other words, which narrative components remained, which disappeared, and which were added.
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Altodi Poltodi (This shore, That shore)
(2023)
author(s): Savyasachi Anju Prabir, Amrita Barua
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Altodi Poltodi thinks through aspects of permeability and preservation, provoking an image of shadowy protector figures. How do they interact with a landscape, what could they want to protect and where do they mark their boundary lines? Drawing from the ancient stories of Rakhandars, mythic beings that guard or protect Goan villages, this collaborative process weaves personal stories with the land and history of Goa. Altodi Poltodi began as a conversation between two friends on a bridge over a river, in a state of suspension, connecting two shores – those of memory and the present.
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A History of Violence
(2023)
author(s): Kai Ziegner
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Through experimental writing and conceptual photography, my PhD uses my own biography to investigate the consequences of societal transformation processes in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The focus is on the period of regime change known as the »Wendezeit« in the late 1980's to the early 1990's in East Germany. To date, this subject has been analysed primarily by scholars of history and cultural sciences, while approaches to this topic by artistic researchers are still rare.
With my research, I would like to reveal causes for the outbreaks of violence that accompanied this radical shift. The objective of my PhD is thus to submit critical testimony to the silence about seldom-discussed side effects of the transformation during and after the turnaround which Germans call the »Wende«. Based on the example of (my own) individual history, it demonstrates how authoritarian regimes and structures impacted on three generations of citizens, and how they affected the individuals. Throughout an experimental narrative, outbreaks ofsenseless violence are treated as side effects of disruptive transformation processes, just as are ambivalent situations in which actors of social change recognise themselves to be simultaneously victims and perpetrators of violent incidents. Since personal memories and historical documents served as the basis of this work, the central challenge of my artistic research was to carve out generalisable elements from individual examples, and to try out and experiment with various textual and photographic formats to find an adequate way to present the research material. Important sources of inspiration for this process included works like Alexander Kluge’s »Lebensläufe« (‘Case Histories’), Primo Levi’s »Ist das ein Mensch?« (‘If This Is a Man’), Walter Benjamin’s »Denkbilder« [Thought-Images], Klaus Theweleit’s »Männerphantasien (‘Male Fantasies’), Georges Didi-Huberman’s »Bilder trotz allem« (‘Images in Spite of All’), Claude Lanzman’s documentary film »Shoah«, and W.G. Sebald’s novel »Austerlitz«. The result of my research is an experimental book that portrays the multidimensional nature, polyphony and complexity of the subject, and offers the readers an opportunity to deal with the material in the way they desire, and perhaps to make it useful for their own work and research.
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Vietnamese Diasporic Voices: Exploring Yellow Music in a Liminal Space.
(2022)
author(s): Nguyen Thanh Thuy
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition seeks to identify artistic strategies and challenges in intercultural experimentation with nhạc vàng (yellow music)—a Vietnamese popular music genre. It builds on the author’s experience as a professional musician and đàn tranh player on the Vietnamese traditional music scene, and on her long-term international and intercultural collaborations with performers and composers, as a member of the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones. In three video essays, the exposition presents the artistic process developed by the participating artists, and an analysis of how these strategies relate to the rule systems of traditional and popular music in Vietnam.
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Tree of Dawn: Translation as a Method
(2022)
author(s): Aurora Del Rio
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This research is part of my doctoral project Archetypes of Contamination, which focuses on the relationship between symbolic images and processes of environmental transformation. This exposition, Tree of Dawn, develops by looking for the correspondence between radioactive contamination and the traditional Latvian image of the Sun-Tree as found in the Dainas, an ancient form of poetry transmitted orally through songs. My artistic process uses a re-creation and re-interpretation of ritualistic practices. With a focus on radioactive contamination, my research looks at how the experience of contaminated spaces can be read through specific myths connected to the land to interfere with the creation of personal and collective realities. The exposition moves through methods of translation as a way of reflecting on the limits of knowledge, where translation is thought of in the wider senses of transposition, deciphering, decoding, and reading through.
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Tradering, oppløsing
(2022)
author(s): Ingfrid Breie Nyhus
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
TRADITIONING, DISSOLVING: What does 'traditioning' mean, what can the 'traditioned' become? On exploring rules and possible spaces in tradition and creation.
To Ingfrid Breie Nyhus, the apparently impossible combination of folk music and grand piano, is a creatively generative musical situation. The rules of the 'slått' tradition are transposed to a new space in the grand piano, and the rules of the grand piano are destabilized in the meeting with the 'slått'. This exposition unfolds questions, reflections and new questions, from a longer process with the music "Slåttepiano".