Research Catalogue

Trabalho coletivo, realizado durante o YES Project

DESENHO E PERFORMATIVIDADE (WORKSHOP#3)

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.

Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, this documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) draws from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to reconsider what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. It asks, how do we challenge prevailing perceptions of film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality, spatial separation, and to land-based thought? Based on the acknowledgement that we need to rethink our position as humans within the multiple habitats that make up the world, I investigate the ways in which the apparatus of film, rather than being an extension of human perception, attests to the material interdependences and co-productions that hold a potential for converging human and nonhuman perspectives. "Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images" considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, I argue and demonstrate how film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body. "Tidal Zones" are real locations, the habitat of a multitude of organisms, and the home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, life and death, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This space, "Between Life and Images", is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) out of which photography and film grew. The PhD submission consists of four film-works, "The Etna Epigraph" (2022), "Seaweed Film" (2023), "Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us" (2023) and "The Spiral Dramaturgy" (2019) along with the exhibition "The Tidal Zone" shown at Index - The Swedish Con-temporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, from 25 November 2022 to 12 February 2023 and at Havremagasinet, Länskonsthall Boden from 14 October 2023 to 11 February 2024. The films and documentation from the exhibitions are included in the submission, which also includes an “Opening Letter” and two texts called “Filming with the Ocean” and “Methodology of the Spiral”. This dissertation has been carried out and supervised within the graduate programme in Visual Arts at the Royal Institute of Art. The dissertation is presented at Lund University in the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, and the Royal Institute of Art regarding doctoral education in the subject Visual Arts.

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