Collaborative Processes and the Crisis of Attentiveness
(2015)
author(s): Hanna Kuusela
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Collaborative artistic processes have become increasingly popular in the past decades. Different forms of community art, relational art, and participatory art, as well as artistic collaborations, and art collectives have occupied a central role in the art world. Does this collaborative taken on art, with its focus on the artistic process, entail a move towards openness and communality, or is it rather an obligation put on us? Is the growing interest in the artistic process a fruitful approach that enriches our understanding of art, or is it an unfortunate sign of art being subordinated to capitalism that pressures us to produce constantly new products, without critical reflection or qualitative criteria? This exposition investigates this dialectics between artistic processes and art objects by following my own research process on collaborative writing.
A consideration of projects from the FUNDBÜRO art research initiative
(2015)
author(s): Cynthia Kros, Georges Pfruender
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
FUNDBÜRO: a collective art research laboratory conducted between members of the postgraduate research institute Datdata associated with the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Lyon and Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg that explores notions of the meaning of loss and recovery for objects and subjects in transit.
The exposition describes the progress of three selected projects within FUNDBÜRO, discussing the working methods and the interim outcomes. They are:
1. Field Notes: Cynthia Kros presents a selection of her field notes and contextualises the taking of field notes within theorising of the arts. The format allows playful interaction with thought processes in FUNDBÜRO as a theorising space.
2. 'Chop Shop': this project creatively engages with disassemblage/reassemblage in both regulated and unregulated ways. It replays the vernacular practice of chop shopping in the field of art.
3. 'I had a dream': this project builds on the principles of 'chop shopping' and explores the possibilities of extraction, retelling, and reperforming. As a further sequence of chop shop actions, we interrogate how dreams can become source material for a collective art/theory project.
Our collaborative work allows us to create/produce at and with distance. As we examine our projects in the making and the ways in which they interact with each other, we gain an understanding of generative processes which are at the heart of modern 'urban life'.
Owning Our Madness
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Whyte&Zettergren
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Owning Our Madness is a pre-study initiated by Whyte & Zettergren on how mental illness, PTSD, and historical traumas impact artistic expressions.
Today's society is marked by conflicts, violence, and environmental disasters, which create generational traumas and increase mental illness both locally and globally. We aim to investigate how these psychological effects shape art and how art, by processing and visualizing traumas, can contribute to healing on both micro and macro levels. The project aims to explore this synergy and its role in artistic renewal.
Historically, culture, religion, and rituals have been used to provide comfort in times of mental illness. PTSD treatment with art therapy is believed to help heal the brain's structures and functions damaged by trauma. In the pre-study, we will gather knowledge through interviews and practical sessions. By experimenting with methods to visualize the body's changes during trauma, we aim to develop techniques that combine choreography, moving images, and neurotechnology (EEG and EMG). We are exploring the stage of chaos and transformation that unites the creative process and trauma processing to develop a new artistic method.
The question of the 'mad artistic genius' attributed to the creation of groundbreaking art is long-lived, but is there any truth to it? The goal is to lay the foundation for a future project where more participants contribute to exploring the connection between mental illness and artistic innovation. The pre-study is supported by seed money from Kulturbryggan, Konstnärsnämnden.
Whyte&Zettergren
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Whyte&Zettergren
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Whyte&Zettergren is an artistic duo comprising Jamaican dancer Olando Whyte and Swedish visual artist Rut Karin Zettergren. Their collaboration, initiated in 2018 with the project, Herring, Iron, Gunpowder, Humans & Sugar (HIGHS). With the project they visit locations historically linked to the triangular trade, the economic system underpinning the transatlantic slave trade. At these historical sites, Whyte&Zettergren perform live acts with choreography, storytelling, and ceremonial actions. In the acts they use objects crafted from materials extracted, manufactured, or exported from these locations.
In March 2022, the duo launched a space-traveling program for healing Historical Spiritual Vibrations outside a saltfish factory in Reykjavik. A resistance act inspired by Afrofuturism, dub, and speculative fiction, envisioning space as a realm of freedom. This initiative originated from their participation in the collaborative artistic research project ÓNÆM (2020-2022), organized by Bryndís Björnsdóttir. During the project, they explored colonial interlinks between the North and the Caribbean, first focusing on food, and then moving in to research the relationship between plans for new space exploration and colonization, along with their connections to legacies stemming from the Enlightenment.
The duo's artistic works constitute an ongoing investigation into the historical memory held by a place, material, and body. Their process visualizes the entanglement between geographically distant locations, objects, cultures, and times. Through their creative processes, they seek potential methods for healing historical trauma and strive to craft rites that envision possible futures.
Whyte&Zettergren is currently working on their space program along with a video artwork on historical trauma and the collaborative research project Contingency Sample with Bryndís Björnsdóttir that explore extractivism in the era of the new space age. Their works have previously been performed and presented at various significant venues, including the Great House of the sugar plantation Stokes Hall, Fd Molyne’s Sugar Estate, Fort Charles in Port Royal Harbor (JA), Klippan harbor in collaboration with Tredje Våningen, Gammelbo Ironworks, Malongen - The Nordic Art Association (NKF), TEGEN2, Galleri Thomassen, Galleri Gerlesborg (SE), and the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik (IS)
Scylla’s Opulent Noise Generator (S.O.N.G.)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Scylla’s Opulent Noise Generator (S.O.N.G.)
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Scylla’s Opulent Noise Generator (S.O.N.G.) is a collective of multi-disciplinary artists living and working in different time zones. S.O.N.G. believes in collectivity to build worlds and imagine art for the future. SONG’s core members are Rut Karin Zettergren (FI), Choterina Freer (U.K.) and Anna Kinbom (SE).With three core members, they regularly expand the framework: inviting multiple artists into their polymorphic practice.
S.O.N.G.’s art practice takes many forms such as: collective drawing and writings; video installations; game creation; performances; seminars; and rituals. Past exhibitions and performances include BFI London Film Festival, Woven Places, AR-exhibition by Swedish Art Associations, Futureless Festival in Stockholm, Tallinn Feminist Forum, and Work Hard! Play Hard! Minsk. With 0s+1s Collective (2013-19) which focus was cyberfeminism they exhibited in Casa Victor Hugo, Cuba, Södertälje konsthall, Göteborgs konsthall and Gotlands Konstmuseum.
Herring, Iron, Gunpowder, Humans and Sugar
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Whyte&Zettergren
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Herring, Iron, Gunpowder, Humans & Sugar (HIGHS). With the project they visit locations historically linked to the triangular trade, the economic system underpinning the transatlantic slave trade. At these historical sites, Whyte&Zettergren perform live acts with choreography, storytelling, and ceremonial actions. In the acts they use objects crafted from materials extracted, manufactured, or exported from these locations.
In a Place like this
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In A place Like This sets out to investigate and expand the issues and critical discourses within Sandborg and Higgins' current collaborative research practice. The central focus for the research is concerned with how art, in this instance photographic and painted image making and text, can be used as an agent or catalyst of understanding and critical reflection.
The research methodology is constructed through photography, painting, drawing and text. This utilises the form of an artist publication as a point of critically engaged dissemination: a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion.
The research question is focused on how the production of the image and the act of making images can communicate or describe moments of erasure or remembering in terms of historical and personal narratives with direct reference to moments of violence and place.
This is seen not in terms of a nostalgic remembrance of the past; instead as one that is rife with complicated layers and dynamics where recognition is denied the ability to locate a physical representation. Embedded in this is an exploration of particular questions concerning the ethics of representation: the depiction of ourselves and other? In this sense it brings into question an examination of the act of remembering as a thing in itself, through the production of the image and text, contexts of knowledge and cultural discourses explored through the form of an artists publication.
HOW TO (NOT) PRODUCE - Fragmente zu sorgender Kunst als Gegenkultur
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Lotte Dohmen
connected to: EU4ART_differences
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
„after the revolution who is going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
...
what is the relationship between maintenance and freedom?
what is the relationship between maintenance and life‘s dreams?“
- fragt Mierle Ladermann Ukeles in ihrem „Manifesto for Maintenance Art“ (1969). Als alleinerziehende Mutter und Künstlerin im New York der 70er Jahre, bleibt ihr aufgrund ausufernder Sorgeverpflichtungen der Zutritt zu Kunsträumen verwehrt. Die Beziehung zwischen instandhaltenden und schöpferischen Prozessen ist eine konkurrierende, nach wie vor. Sorgearbeit muss aus der künstlerischen Sphäre ausgelagert, verschleiert oder wegorganisiert werden, darf in Förderanträgen nicht auftauchen und steht in zeitlicher Konkurrenz zur kreativen Arbeit. Neoliberale Dispositive führen dazu, dass Produktion grundsätzlich höhere Wertschätzung erfährt als Erhaltung, doch wo nähern sich die beiden Bereiche einander an?
Ukulese Ladermann konterte die Zurückweisung mit einem feministischen Manifest, in dem sie Windeln wechseln, Wäsche waschen, Wohnung putzen und Essen kochen, all diese sorgenden Tätigkeiten zur Kunst erklärte. Die künstlerische Recherchearbeit folgt diesen Spuren der Maintenance Art in die Gegenwart, versammelt weitere zeitgenössische best practice Beispiele, reflektiert anekdotisch über aus-Fehlern-lernt-man-Produktionen und versucht sich an einer nicht-hierarchischen Versammlung dieser Fragmente.
Fragmente, die die Dichotomie zwischen Lebensträumen, kreativer Selbstverwirklichung und Freiheit auf der einen Seite und reproduktiver Arbeit, die die Dinge am Laufen hält auf der anderen in Frage stellen. Fragmente, die nach der Kunst im Müßigen, im Notwendigen und Unproduktiven suchen, die Strategien entwickeln entwerfend und gleichzeitig regenerativ zu Arbeiten. Fragmente, die sich um den Prozess sorgen und nicht um das Produkt.