Research Catalogue

The article unfolds how the combination of qualitative research and immersive performance has given Inga Gerner Nielsen insight into her audience's aesthetic perception and imaginary realm in a performance installation. It sets out by stating that to ask an audience open questions about a performance only provides testimony of the after-rationalizations of their experience. The author introduces a phenomenological interview method, which draws on sense-memory techniques directing the interviewee to produce thick descriptions; actualizing the lived experience in the interview instead. In response to Norman K. Denzin's call for a performative dialogical social science, she argues why interview material should be conceptualized as performance and how working artistically with the interview setup can serve to highlight the inherent power dynamics. The article ends with examples showing how the interview was turned into a central immersive element of Inga Gerner Nielsen ́s artworks.

This study examines the relationship between the narratives in audio-visual artwork and the temporality of historical preservation within sociocultural contexts of destruction and re-construction, and rusting, through the concept of Sankofa. The series of photographic artworks titled “Patches of Time” delves into the socio-cultural fabric of memory, historical sites, forest, and the contemporary reconstruction of the past. Together with the written content, I show various forms of media such as photos, sound files and videos that reveal different aspects of the audio-visual practice. The photos and sound compositions are discussed here as ways of doing and making, exposing the experiences that hold aesthetic qualities and a sense of the sublime. The materiality of the photos and soundscapes mirrors an archaeological process, where remnants of the past are not only recovered but also recontextualized within contemporary sociocultural frameworks. Specifically, I investigate the integration of destruction and re-construction which aligns with Walter Benjamin’s notion that reproduction destabilizes traditional narratives, offering opportunities for reimagining history, and reshapes the aura of cultural artifacts. The destruction and re-construction of these photos impacts the narrative gestures of going back and starting anew (Sankofa). The study aims to observe the interconnectedness of art, memory and the mind as historical sites and explore the potential for re-imaging the nature of audio-photographic art.

It is a foundational human trait to long for miracles. We yearn for the unexpected, something new to transcend our everyday life. As anyone who has planted a seed might know, the world is already brimming with wonders. Why, then, is this not enough? Why does it sometimes feel like we have lost the connection to something larger than ourselves, something supernatural or more-than-human? In this text I am exploring the human need for miracles through a queer lens. Through my live performance “The Weeping Madonna” (2025) I am investigating alchemy as a method to acquire knowledge about the world, and whether it is possible to use our imagination as a starting point for collective rituals in order to call forth a new reality; a futurity.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 BA Interactive Media Design

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 BA Fine Arts In this thesis insight from the discourse on metafiction, a mode of writing which breaks and exposes the conventional frames of literary fiction, is used to analyse works of visual art that show a similar criticism towards the conventions of their medium.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 BA Photography The high ecological demands in the age of mass extinction present a precarious position: wanting to change the state of the environment but feeling hopeless in being able to do so. Ecological thinking and paralyzing feelings of environmental doom are carving a gap between themselves. Through this research, I want to plant a seed in that gap. The research is focused on exploring how artistic practice can reshape the understanding of what it means to be ecological and the other way around. Whether it is human and non-human relations or the nature and culture dichotomy, in my artistic practice I am most intrigued by breaking binary thinking and blurring boundaries. I love frameworks and fixed things just because I can break them, bend them out of their form, from still to alive, from permanent to temporary, from fixed to fluid. I wonder how this mutability of art practice can reshape our understanding and approach toward the environment. If art is closely related to subjective experience, how can ecology be as well? How can the spreading of different perspectives help reshape our understanding of ecology? How can artistic practice contribute to the unlearning of monoculture, allowing space for ambiguity and fabulations for the current/future ecological practices? The method for this research is encapsulated in a seed. This seed is no different than a thought. The process of a seed is a fascinating one: the growth from a seed always transcends its body, mutates through the course, transforms but never ends. By comparing this research to a seed, I want to watch a thought grow and transform: from a seed to a sprout, to a fruit, and back into the soil. Shape-shifting as the growth from a seed does, the research text switches between styles of writing. When roots need to sink in and hold the body down standing against treacherous weather, text ranges between essayistic and semi-academic: to ground in theory, contextualize in a field and analyze with examples. Other times I cultivate a more experimental, descriptive, and personal way of writing, which flowers wild and acts as if it’s a contaminating weed: to bring subjective experience and ambiguity into the sunlight. These styles do cross-pollinate. The soil of this research is also nourished by dialogues with its study subjects (whether it is an artwork, project, person, or place) acknowledging the importance of being present, engaging in conversation, and activating senses when trying to understand the environment. Through my research, I will be addressing monocultural thinking and its consequences for the environment on a global scale as well as feelings and their expressions stemming from living on a damaged planet, such as eco-grief, doom-thinking, and guilt-tripping. Following through with the seed’s process of growth and transformation I wonder how mutable is the medium of photography in an ecological sense and whether ecological art can reject the Anthropocene at all. Through visual fragments of boundary-crossing unconventional art practices, I hope to enter dark wet spaces where a fallen fruit starts decaying, where ambiguity, subjectivity, and porosity are the root systems caving the path to a better understanding of the environment, acting through uncertainty and curiosity.