Research Catalogue

My practice-based arts research proposes to create a toolkit to decentralize art activism using hand-crafted textiles from an intersectional, feminist, decolonial and anti-capitalist framework. When I say that I want to decentralize art activism, I aim to increase access in terms of location, timing and risk, so that people who do not live in major metropolises, centres of power, who work when most protests happen, or who for various reasons are not able to risk possible arrest that normal protests may present, can still engage in artistic protest. My praxis will embark on a series of art activist actions that utilize various methods of decentralization, creating a handbook that displays and analyses these methods. The ways in which textiles are particularly suited to decentralize art activism, through subterfuge, slow time, and haptic relationship will be explored within the praxis. Answering the seemingly peripheral question of whether or not art activism is compatible within a gallery space imperative for the main theme of my research, which is decentralization of art activism. If art activism harmoniously exists within a gallery exhibition, then the easiest way to decentralize it is to send the art activism to exhibit elsewhere. My initial findings within the research suggest that act activism mostly cannot exist within sanctioned art exhibitions and therefore exhibitions are not an effective way to decentralize art activism. My toolkit is inspired by practical how-to-guides of art activism (Boyd and Mitchell, 2012; Duncombe and Lambert, 2021; Aylwyn Walsh et al., 2022) and through textile practises such as Tanya Aguiñiga (B. 1978-), the Craftivism Collective (2009-), Aram Han Sifuentes (B. 1986-), and Sandra Suubi (B. 1990-). The critique on capitalism’s infiltration into the artworld and art activisms roll because of this that is reflected in Alana Jelinek’s ‘Lifelike art’(2013), Gregory Sholette’s ‘bare art’(Ch(Charnley, 2017)); and Brian Holmes’ ‘Liar’s poker’ (Holmes, 2010) and it helps shape my art activism practise.

300 meter essä, 2024 Video 20 min Hudiksvalls sjukhus

In progress Dorsal Practices — Murky Back Thinking is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. How does cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? The dorsal orientation foregrounds active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

The publication Envelope offers insights into ongoing PhD projects by candidates in the PhD programme PhD in Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in an innovative format. The major thrust of “Envelope” presents content supplied by doctoral researchers based on their individual artistic research and provides insights into ongoing work processes. These visual and textual traces reveal the state of the Art within its ongoing research processes. This open format seeks to reflect on experiences through exchange, as well as document relevant developments in the field of art and research. Participating projects: Sanja Andelkovic: Voice-Shifting as a Method: Eco-Gods in Future Orthodox Chants, Supervisor: Gerhild Steinbuch Margit Busch: A Garden for a Fish, Supervisor: Virgil Widrich Johanna Bruckner: Xenopoetic De/Compositions: The Affect-Body as Interface, Supervisor: Jakob Lena Knebl Andrew Champlin: Technique Concerns: Ballet Practice Against the Western Archive, Supervisors: Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond George Demir: Ancestral Junctures: On the Expansion of Ancestral Mythologies, Supervisor: Hans Schabus Rah Eleh: Xenofuturism: A Proposal for a Liminal Futurism, Supervisor: Bouchra Khalili Wolfgang Konrad: Before the Truth in Documentary, Supervisor: Luzius Bernhard Joseph Leung: Post-digital Angst – An Arts-Based Research on the Manifestations of Angst in the Digital Milieu, Supervisor: Gabriele Rothemann Cristiana de Marchi: Casting a Shadow. On Disappearance, Emptiness, and the Haunting Power of Absence, Supervisor: Judith Eisler Jo O’Brien: Confusion: As Resistance, as Relationship, and Towards the Relational, Supervisors: Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond Marthin Rozo Castaño: Art and Conservation in the Post-Conflict, Supervisor: Cristina Garcia Grinda + Efrén Diaz Moreno Konstanze Stoiber, Untitled, Supervisor: Brigitte Felderer Fabian Weiss: Ideal Self: How We Use Photography and Technology to Present and Optimise Ourselves, Supervisor: Margarete Jahrmann Ksenia Yurkova: Figures of Reticence as a(bio)political Strategy, a Forced Necessity, and the Impossibility of Artistic Expression, Supervisor: Jakob Lena Knebl Conny Zenk: RAD Performance – Driving Voices of Resistance, Supervisor: Ruth Schnell Feel free to zoom in on each poster for ensured readability.

PhD project: Before the Truth in Documentary, Supervisor: Luzius Bernhard Envelope is a publication of the PhD in Art programme at the University of Applied Arts Vienna

PhD project: Art and Conservation in the Post-Conflict, Supervisor: Cristina Garcia Grinda + Efrén Diaz Moreno Envelope is a publication of the PhD in Art programme at the University of Applied Arts Vienna