TURNS + RETURNS is a performative and dialogical presentation by the SIG Co-Agency: Artistic Research as Transformative Practice. The session explores co-agency through artistic research practices that are grounded in ecological sensitivity, material thinking, and contextual responsiveness, therefore opening up to resonance and effect, with a curious focus on turns and returns.
Artists and researchers will share brief yet intense insights into their practice, reflecting on their contributions and expectations regarding contexts. Please share some expression of your artistic research— as a band, with an instrument, bring a sound, a word, an object, a scent—serving as an interface for collective reflection and exchange and be curious you others in return will reflect on it …
We aim that this session invites SAR participants to enter a shared zone of practice-based transformation, where the relationship between artistic research, context, sparked by the interest for co-agency, becomes both subject and method.
Please join the improvisation!
PRESENTERS
Alexander Damianisch
Alexander Damianisch is Head of the Support Art and Research Department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He has been deeply involved in shaping national and international practices of and for artistic research, including as founding program manager of PEEK and a long-term board member of SAR. His work focuses on institutional development, research cultures, and the transformative potential of co-agency in interdisciplinary contexts.
Paul Divjak
Paul Divjak is an author, conceptual artist, and researcher whose work bridges poetic practice, scent art, and ecological inquiry. He engages with sensory media, urban imaginaries, and environmental consciousness. His artistic research addresses memory, material culture, and transformative aesthetics through immersive formats and performative interventions. Divjak currently researches at AIL Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab Vienna.
Nikolaus Gansterer
Nikolaus Gansterer is an artist and researcher who explores the dynamic relations between drawing, thinking, and action. His transdisciplinary work in performative diagrammatics and embodied notations investigates forms of expanded sense-making and co-creation. Gansterer is a Senior Artist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and active in numerous international collaborations.
Emily Huurdeman
Emily Huurdeman is PD candidate at Fontys Tilburg (NL), she an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working with lecture performance, text, and film. Her practice critically engages with gender, more than human, language, and systems of representation, creating hybrid formats that challenge conventional narratives. She is a frequent collaborator in collective and research-based projects in the arts and academia.
Anke Haarmann
Anke Haarmann is a philosopher, writer, and artistic researcher. She is Professor of Practice and Theory of Research in the Visual Arts at Leiden University, where she directs the PhDArts programme, and Director of the Centre for Design Research at HAW Hamburg. Her work focuses on epistemological questions of artistic practice, aesthetic theory and the interrelations between research, fiction and ethics.
Jeanette Müller
Jeanette Müller is a conceptual artist and political scientist who explores performativity, relational practices and feminist agency. She works with installations and participatory formats and researches social dynamics, trust and care with regard to living systems, social and technical innovations at AIL. Müller teaches and exhibits internationally, especially in ASEAN and EU countries, often working with interdisciplinary and intercultural teams.