Aporia
(2024)
author(s): Maria Jonsson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In Aporia we find ourselves within a liminal space. A space where the imagined contains traces of the real, and the documentary is reminiscent of fiction. The origin of the word "aporia" is in ancient Greek meaning literally "without passage". This particular passage (or this journey) can be likened to a quest of finding a way out; to navigate in the dark with no sense of direction. At the same time there seems to be a search for something else, like a meaning or the 'core'. Throughout this journey we move between states of wakefulness and of dreaming. The exposition consists of photographs, moving images, notes from dream journalling, drawings, encyclopedic facts, and also a little fiction. Simultaneous to this journey through time and space and changing of states, an index of cross references is created. This index becomes an auto-biographical lexicon of sorts. The artistic research aims to create a new narrative, emerging from a dissolving reality. An attempt to dissolve the physical world and to enter this new space. Is this new reality less authentic than the actual reality, or could it be even closer to the truth?
Await what the stars will bring or moulding the gap
(2023)
author(s): Verena Miedl-Faißt
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Verena Miedl-Faißt (Center Research Focus, PhD candidate PhD in Art) invites us with "Await what the stars will bring" to walk through her artistic research trajectory. Her contribution poetically narrates on longings, and on beautiful and painful experiences in connection with her artistic practice and collaborative work with her nephew L. Based on Donna Haraway’s concept of kinship, Miedl-Faißt searches for possibilities of relating to each other and seeks ways to make inner processes accessible. The contribution provides insights into her work with children and colleagues and how she creates “materialized relations, co-creations objecting time, space, and loneliness.”
Exercises in Existential Eccentricity. Conceptualising autoimmunity as a variation of the conditio humana
(2023)
author(s): Barbara Macek
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Barb Macek (PhD candidate and fellow (DOC) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Institute of Fine Arts & Media Arts) takes as her starting point self-reflections and her own experiences with the autoimmune disease SLE. She approaches the phenomenon of autoimmunity in relation to fundamental human ambiguity, following the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner. Macek’s contribution, "Exercises in Existential Eccentricity", explores the bio-philosophical dimension of the disease rather than its bio-medical dimension, showing how autoimmunity raises existential-phenomenological questions regarding bodily ownership, the self, and the notion of the body as “one’s own”. From an assumed embodied diversity, she designs an artistic technique, EEE - Exercises in Existential Eccentricity, drawing on the technique of auto-interviewing, autoethnography and poetics to facilitate a dialogue between different inner voices.
