Research Catalogue

This exposition emerged from my participation in the second interval of the Simultaneous Arrivals (Simularr) Artistic Research Project—a research project inviting international artist-researchers to explore relational, situated, and process-based inquiries in dialogue with core researchers. Core researchers: Nayari Castillo, Hanns Holger Rutz, Franziska Hederer, and Daniele Pozzi. For the second interval, the visual artist and researcher Elena Radaelli and I were invited as visiting artist-researchers. (More information on Simultaneous Arrivals: https://simularr.net/about/) The exposition presents my process during the residency, i.e. my Traces and Paths Towards a Singularly-Plural Companionships. The eight-week residency (3 March-30 April 2024) took place across three sites: Graz (Austria); Lecce, San Cesario (Italy); and Klagenfurt (Austria). The exposition traces this journey through various mediums, including texts, graphics, video and audio material experiments, field encounters, and theoretical companions. My processes, are informed and shaped by my companion collaborators—human (research-creation companions), more-than-human, textual, and material—who co-inform and co-create the unfolding of the research.

I dedicate this work to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for acts of restoration for our damaged planet. In my project, I choose song composition and performance as a way to find pathways for personal and collective restoration. Through the methods of artistic research I write songs inspired by my experience of ecological grief, academic reading, interviews to song composers, and journaling. As a contribution from my work, I present a new compositional methodology, Sonic Geographies of Hope. This methodology calls for song composers to write songs grounded in personal and collective grief of our damaged planet. I suggest that these type of songs can become an act of restoration and create collective resonance for more hopeful ways of existing and experiencing the world. This methodology is heavily influenced by the work of A. Hazelwood and her methodology Geographies of Hope in Praxis (2020). While I draw inspiration from this methodology, my work focuses mainly on emotional geographies. This work represents a starting point to explore song methodologies that can nurture immaterial geographies leading to concrete, structural ecological restoration. It is an exploration to find ways to restore yourself to continue to fight for the dignity of the places, more-than human life and people we love.

In this artistic research I approach performance art as a language formed through the interplay of materiality, duration, and multiple forms of agency. I adopt a linguistic lens, not to reduce performance art only to language, but to use it as an analytical tool to render its characteristics, regularities, and modes of operation visible. A work of performance art emerges within relations between the performer’s corporeality, materials, space, and time. It weaves together visual, conceptual, and embodied thinking, privileging ephemerality and immediacy over permanence. The audience is integral to the work, as performance is an ephemeral art in which performer and audience share the experience in the same moment. Documentation, especially photography and video, enables the reshaping of temporal and spatial relations, as the camera frames, selects, and reconstructs the situation. My inquiry focuses on relations among human, more-than-human, and nonhuman agents. I situate my practice within the field of new materialist and posthumanist contemporary art, where works take shape through multilayered collaborative processes across diverse agents. Performance studies serves as one of the conceptual frameworks.

This exposition contains documentation of the artistic result of Magnhild Øen Nordahls artistic research PhD project Unmaking Abstractions. The exposition also contains the artistic reflection for the same project. On the exposition's landing page the reader can access its different components by clicking different sides of the unfolded cube. The rotating cube in the upper right corner will bring the reader back to the landing page.

PhD Candidate: Sidsel Christensen Project title: INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC REFLECTION: Speculative movements through Spatial, Digital and Narrative Media Period: 2020 - 2024 Host institution: The Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art, Faculty of Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen PhD supervisors: Brandon LaBelle, Frans Jacobi and Sher Doruff

This exposition brings together the epistemologies of art-making and translation. It presents a series of artworks the curators commissioned for a travelling exhibition on ‘Experiential Translation’ (2022-2025). Many of the works were created under the auspices of the Experiential Translation Network, which facilitates collaboration and exchange between translators, writers, poets, artists and scholars from across the globe. The concept of ‘experiential translation’ as elaborated by Campbell and Vidal (2019, 2024, 2025), highlights embodied, multimodal communication as a performative inquiry into meaning-making. Blending art and translation practices, experiential translation values materiality, participation, and co-creation. Rather than mere transfer of meaning, translation is seen as a process of discovery, research, and knowledge production, embracing the unknown and exploring that which escapes language. Encouraging a rhizomatic viewing experience, the exposition is structured into three interconnected thematic 'rooms', Serial Metamorphosis, (Un)repetition and Ludic Translation, which can be visited in any order, or even simultaneously. The exposition includes video art, performance, (interactive) installation, sound art, poetry, painting and photography. This work was supported by the AHRC under Grant AH/V008234/1, awarded to Ricarda Vidal (PI) and Madeleine Campbell (Co-I) . Ethical Clearance Reference Number (King’s College London): MRA-22/23-34543