La Domenica
(2025)
author(s): Giovanni Pilato
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Fine Arts
This Graduation Research Project is a script for a catholic Mass. It consists of two
main parts: La Domenica and La Predica (translated from Italian: The Sunday and
The Sermon).
The text and design of La Domenica are based on the handout people receive at the
start of the catholic Sunday Mass in Italy. In La Domenica you can find the scriptures
of the day, the prayers to recite, some general information and relevant quotes for
the day. In this first part I assembled some biblical and non-biblical texts together
with pre-existing prayers and self-written prayers. The texts vary in topic such as the
story of the creation, the passion of Christ, but also Notes on Camp. The content of
those texts is then reflected upon in La Predica. It is therefore advisable to read La
Domenica first, up until The Sermon, and continue with La Predica. After La Predica
the reader can get back to La Domenica to finish the Mass.
La Predica is the script for the sermon: A personal essay on the relationship between
the Catholic traditions and Camp aesthetics. La Predica is a contemporary reflection
on the scriptures which starts with the creation. This story then leads to art creation,
matters of taste and homosexuality in Art. Homosexuality and erotica are then
related to the scene of the passion of Christ, specifically to suffering and death of
Christ as scenes for arousal. The theatricality of Catholic visual tradition is then
analyzed through Susan Sontag’s Note’s on Camp. What follows is a comparison
between queer visual culture, thus Camp, and Christian tradition.
Sounding the dissolution from a Cosmic Space
(2025)
author(s): Giada Dalla Bonta
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Whereas the sonic experimentations at the dawn of the October Revolution have been extensively documented, little research has been conducted on practices at the intersection of sound and art during the USSR dissolution. This article explores the political significance of sonic practices –alongside their cultural, artistic, and sensory dimensions– in late Soviet Russia's unofficial art scene, examining the case study of the New Artists group in Leningrad and their shift from mocking avant-garde legacies to a more organically interdisciplinary approach, presumably initiating rave culture in the region. This shift, along with the re-appropriation of cosmism, is framed as a sonic fiction made of music, dance, art, queer inclusivity that aimed at transcending the Iron Curtain and extending conceptually to the Universe. In particular, the paper aims to highlight the decisive influence, often overshadowed by the figure of Novikov, of musicians Valeriy Alakhov and Igor’ Verichev (New Composers) in such evolution by informing the group's poetic strategies and compositions in accordance with their sonic thinking and imagery. The understanding of “togetherness” as constitutive element of late Soviet underground culture and of the hypernormalized official ideology’s de-territorialization (Yurchak 2006) also demonstrates, through J.-L. Nancy’s theory of communal bodies, the role of participatory and corporeal sonic experiences in creating sonic fictions from “interplanetary sounds” able to penetrate socio-cultural dynamics. The artists’ “ubiquitous” (vsyochestvo) principle of absolute synthesis of the arts is thus extended to the realm of sonic materiality, multisensoriality and sonic agency, articulating afresh its appellation of “new avantgarde” of the empire’s dissolution. This article delves into the New Artists' initial evolution before their transition into the more reactionary "New Academy" formation, as some artistic strategies, successfully subversive under Gorbachev, faltered in the post-Soviet landscape and strengthened reactionary forces now intertwined with the ruling power. A forthcoming publication in the Journal of Sonic Studies (Dalla Bontà: 2024) will delve into this subsequent phase during the 1990s, offering insights into the intricate dynamics driving this seemingly contradictory development in the group and in certain figures in the Russian underground scene.
CAMPing
(2024)
author(s): Liane Paldi
published in: Research Catalogue
For the 'Breaking Free Essay'. A manifesto and personal reflection.
Queer and Gender-Fluid Artists in the Music Performance Universe of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries
(2024)
author(s): Brian Lyons
published in: KC Research Portal
In classical music there has been an effort in recent years to bring to light those whose artistic output contributed to their genre or era but were not as well-memorialized as their caucasian heteronormative male counterparts. So, what about artist-musicians, and those adjacent to them, who lived outside the gender constructs of their contemporary hegemony? What contributions did they purposefully or inadvertently make? What is their reception history and how were these histories documented?
Queer Studies in- and outside of musicology has made strides to recognize the existence of historic queer and gender nonconforming individuals. Generally speaking, the aim has been to legitimize the gender spectrum and to make the lives of these noteworthy individuals known. Still it’s impossible for us to know how these gender non-conformists would have categorized their own gender in the Early Modern and Modern Periods were they to have the same terminology as we have today.
In this thesis I will cite figures from plays and broadsheet ballads of the 17th century, the developing opera genre in France in the early 18th century, the “low style” in London society and theater in the early 19th century, through to the Reconstructionist United States. By illuminating queer and gender nonconforming individuals and the performative acts that defined their personal lives, I show that these communities have always existed in some iteration and in many facets of the musical universe. What emerges is a centuries-old artistic lineage between gender non-conforming people that has yet to be fully explored.
Performance as Device for Disorientation
(2024)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
By its very nature, performance is precarious—there is always the chance that everything might fall apart. In an attempt to mitigate the discomfort of this unpredictability, many musicians develop strategies in the hope of holding the reins on the proverbial cart. But what if one chose not to maintain control and instead embraced the wild nature inherent to performance? What kinds of knowledge and aesthetic experiences might emerge in the inevitable moments of collapse? Drawing on her recent research in the project Performing Precarity, an extended collaboration with composer Simon Løffler, as well as concepts by Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed, percussionist/performer Jennifer Torrence meditates on the notion of performance as a device for disorientation—that is, performance as an embodied practice of rupture, of getting lost, and of undoing the order of things.
Terrania
(2023)
author(s): Nat Grant, Nicky Stott
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Terrania is a gothic eco-drama podcast project exploring gender-queer and disability themes in the face of climate catastrophe. This project draws on contemporary environmental realities to explore how (dis)abled, genderqueer bodies might be reimagined in dystopian and utopian futurity narratives.
voice under
(2023)
author(s): Ester Martin Bergsmark
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
If voice over is the superior voice that dictates truth, I examine voice under, the other truths that take place simultaneously. In my doctoral thesis voice under, I explore all the parallel voices beyond the dominating all-knowing voice over. The intention of the project and concept voice under is to open up a wider sensory register in both the creation and the experience of film. By looking closely at, challenging, and playing with different cinematic conventions, I explore how we can recreate seemingly dominant expressions and find spaces for resistance, although temporary.
This document outlines the different modes of publication of the doctoral thesis voice under. voice under consists of two branches: film and text. The Documented Artistic Research Project (Doctoral Thesis) voice under will be made public and archived on September 1, 2023, through the following three materials:
1. Welcome to voice under folder
2. Performative contemplative film screening
3. The book voice under, consisting of a collection of texts
Embodied Bits
(2023)
author(s): Pedro Latas
published in: KC Research Portal
The Master research “Embodied Bits” concerns how trans-human, post-digital and post-internet ideas relate to my Queer experience. It is, in a nutshell, an ongoing research on how the technological world has spilled over into the biological world and how Queer folks are front and centre when it comes to taking advantage of technological developments in order to realise their identities.
The research question is “How do we perform ourselves in the digital realm?”. Though it started as a research on the practicalities and aesthetics of internet/networked-based performances it quickly opened a Pandora’s Box of social inquiry and analysis. Performing ourselves means performing ethnicity, gender, sexuality, cultural identity... There is an inevitability in drawing a direct connection between these topics and how do we, as singular and, paradoxically, plural human beings within ourselves engage with modern day technology. Through technology we are able to build ourselves, to draft new identities, to build again if they no longer suit our needs.
As an artistic research, “Embodied Bits” looks into how digital media has influenced human experience and focuses on the experiences of non-normative bodies and identities, in which I include my own. These topics are interlaced with my own compositional and performative work, always informed and inspired by the previously mentioned ideas and historical context.
NEPTUNE PROJECT: Transforming Personal Narrative Into Political Statement in an Autobiographical Play
(2023)
author(s): Vera Boitcova
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This thesis explores the ways in which personal narratives in dramaturgy can be read as political statements on the example of creating and staging my autobiographical queer play Neptune over the course of two years (March 2021-March 2023). My research questions include:
- What circumstances can evoke a creative desire to transform personal into political through art mediums? To what extent performance art can be effective as a tool to convey political messages?
- How to convey political messages through personal narratives in dramaturgy\playwriting? What makes a narrative political and what can be defined as a political narrative? What does ‘being political’ mean specifically for a queer artist\dramaturge?
- What methodology, aesthetical, directorial and acting choices can be made to further enhance and underline political message of a documentary narrative, specifically in queer context?
These questions will be examined in a detailed account of writing my own autobiographical play Neptune in the year of war and strengthening of oppression in Russia, and subsequent staging of this play. My play had three distinct layers: meta-level (where the narrator talked about her recent political experiences in the year 2022), memory level (subjective memories of a lost love), and fictional level (different characters acting in thematically-relevant vignettes). Therefore, I want my thesis to be reflective of the same structure: it will have three main chapters - Meta, Memory, and Fiction – with the overall reflection at the end.
Overall aim of this thesis is to trace the process of creating an autobiographical play from its creative conception (and reasons behind it) to turning it into a theatre production, and by doing so, to examine if it succeeded in its initial goal of conveying a certain political message, and if so, how this result was achieved.
SAR 2021 presentation - Dawn Woolley
(2022)
author(s): Dawn Woolley, Jonas Howden Sjøvaag
published in: SAR Conference 2020
What happens to queer community, bodily expression & identity when queer spaces are closed & communities move online? This workshop critically reflects on, & invites participation in, the collaborative project Bois of Isolation: An Instagram platform for people of marginalised genders to share selfies of their spaces & processes of queering gender binaries in the pandemic. The project uses hashtag commons & selfies to challenge the hegemonic visual culture social media can perpetuate: Binarised gender stereotypes, exclusion of bodies deemed ‘other’, & hierarchies of value in which white, able-bodied, heterosexual, young & ‘healthy’ are supreme. Bois of Isolation contributes to communal aesthetic spaces in which bodily & gender plurality & fluidity are expressed & celebrated.
The Creatures Archive
(2022)
author(s): Shana
published in: Research Catalogue
An archive of found images (and sometimes personal observations)
These images are fragments of beings that exist together as several, heaving heaps of genderless sci-fi characters, swimming around in a world.
You will find organisms such as (memes, cryptids, species with Latin names, pop culture toys)
falling like a monster
(2021)
author(s): Susanna Hast, Maryam Bagheri Nesami
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Falling Like a Monster is a collaborative and creative practice of writing and embodying inter-textuality and multi-modality in order to experiment a non-representational archive known as a two-sided article. This heterogenous crafted piece of writing resists the hegemony of academic and artistic narratives and suggests a transformative knowledge and an alternative practice of political freedom. In our writing, crafting, recording, and failing, we are playing with exhaustion, silence and stillness as monstrous counter-strategies.
Notions of Queerness as compositional building blocks in "There are more of them than us - a Queer Concerto for 9 Saxophones and Orchestra"
(2020)
author(s): Michael Wolters
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University
This exposition examines how notions of queerness can be built into the construction of a 15-minute long concerto for 9 saxophones and orchestra.
I am presenting the full orchestral score, a video of the premiere performance and a commentary on the research process.
Radical Inside
(2020)
author(s): Palle Torsson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
The goal of this work and of my research is to broaden our understanding of contemporary creative conditions in relation to how technologically constructed systems enable cultural production. The work explores specific systems and pushes the limits of their intended use.
In the process, I also hope to reveal the relationship between digital systems and transformative subjects. The work Radical Inside explores 3D models from the largest sharing platform for 3D content. A multiplicity of possibilities opens up as a shift in camera perspective reveals the internal structure of the 3D models. The reorientation points to criticism of how society is structured and imagined by the heteronormative gaze. The unusual angle displaces the normative placement of the model within a reduced and rigid system - the taxonomy and categorization of the platform. From within, I can highlight and explore technology as a fundamentally surreal and queer possibility.
luxurious migrant // performing whiteness
(2020)
author(s): Stacey Sacks
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Stacey Sacks is a PhD candidate in Performing Arts at Stockholm’s University of the Arts. Her Doctoral Project *This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything* takes form as a suite of hyper-disciplinary experiments with mask, clown, stop-motion animation, film, photography, sculpture, text, drawing and performance.
Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘critical intimacy’ the performance-essay 'luxurious migrant' reflects on whiteness and privilege and the performance of it. As an intra-cultural, auto-ethnographic excavation it attempts and possibly fails to critically engage with notions of access, authority and power from within the cultural canon. As such it is a creative experimentation with theory and performance, an exploration of the improvisatory impulse and what it means to be ‘on’ the moment.
Since clown naturally contains transgressive elements, the project explores how the genre can be used in a neo-colonial context to subvert or interrupt the dominant discourse, whether satire and parody function as activism and if it is in fact possible to push back white supremacy through critical engagement and play, starting with a robust self-critique.
This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything
(2020)
author(s): Stacey Sacks
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything is a documented artistic research project (Doctoral Thesis) in Performative and Mediated Practices, comprising a series of excavations and vivisections of W(w)hiteness through clowning, making and thinging. This work/play traverses the fields of critical whiteness studies, performance and clowning, visual and cultural anthropology and decolonial critique.
This eclectic mash-up of history, memory and trauma unfolds from my original question: as an actor, which bodies is it appropriate for me to inhabit? Via hyper-disciplinary experiments of the impulse and
what it means to be ‘on’ the moment, the research fabricates a series of clowters, performed entanglements of clown and character passing between various continents, temporalities and situated histories.
SQUIRM is the title given to both the final performance essay as well as to the reflective documentation emerging from this research. As experimentations with auto-ethnography and productive discomfort, the performing essays in SQUIRM document, animate and satirise explorations of W(w)hiteness, privilege and colonial logic. At the intersections of histories, they dig through remnants of collective memory, personal genealogy and shame, in the hope of reassembling new, sharper ways of giving and receiving attention.
From inside the body of this performer SQUIRM is about TONGUE-ING, about licking the future into softness by reinvigorating ancient clown practices to poke at whiteness in the current age. It’s about squirming and laughing through the discomfort of privilege in what feels like a crumbling time.
But mostly it’s about feeling great in a beard.
MIXED DOUBLES: COLLABORATIVE WRITING AND PERIPHERAL STRATEGIES
(2019)
author(s): David Carlin, Peta Murray, JOSHUA MICHAEL LOBB, Catherine McKinnon
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition attends to the theme of peripheral spaces, sites, practices, epistemologies and conceptions. It takes the form of a playful, nonfiction archival document that comprises the interleaving of two scripts within a series of photographic images. It stands as trace for an event—originally described as “peripherally performative”—that took place at an academic conference in creative writing in Australia in 2018 (the annual Association of Australian Writing Programs Conference, in Perth). As a research artefact, the methods and mode of presentation of this work are tangential to normative procedures.
This exposition co-mingles the performed accounts of two collaborative writing projects in which the exposition's four authors—Carlin, Murray, McKinnon and Lobb —had been variously enmeshed: the collectively written book project 100 Atmospheres; Studies in Scale and Wonder (Open Humanities Press, 2019), and the Murray/Carlin speculative research endeavour How To Dress For Old Age: an Enquiry with Costumes. Each of these projects experiments with devising creative methods of collaboration so as to approach research questions multifariously and heterogeneously. Slant, in other words.
What does collaboration offer writers and writing processes? How is vision refracted through a multiplicity of gazes? How does the peripheral make itself felt? In an era shaped by critical ecological transformation, the 100 Atmospheres project—speculative, poetic, provocative—pays attention to future ways of being and becoming. In a tightly scripted dialogue, Lobb and McKinnon reflect on a collaborative process involving an interdisciplinary ensemble of 13 people, that uses ‘cross-over writing’. This process allows for fluid boundaries, multiple entries and exits, and other peripheral strategies, to enliven living and practicing in the Anthropocene. This first script is met sideways by the more improvisatory, contingent approach of Murray and Carlin, who re-construct their process of framing and investigating “how to dress for old age,” as a live and unfolding methodology (including costume changes). They report on how, in improvising with writing methods that involve alternating responses, redirections, and unanticipated shifts in focus / tempo, they have been drawn to sport, theatre and domestic metaphors to negotiate evolving rules of engagement and exchange.
The original performance used a length of rope pinned with images to stand in for a tennis net and a backdrop. This malleable object allowed us to demonstrate materially the multiple experiences of collaboration: combative and communal, public and private. In our written document we will use inset photographs (portraits and images of place), columned text and variable typography: these will interrupt and intersect with the ideas discussed in order to amplify the complex interactions central to the collaborative process.
Our visual and verbal approaches assert tactics of peripherality to examine that which is often overlooked, irrelevant or superficial, and serve as a counterpoint to normative methods. Our approaches argue for a different kind of sensitivity in practice, one which pays heed to the dance of agency between subjects and objects.
How to Use Gay Nazis in Job Interviews: Queer Media, Striptease-Lectures and the Art of Existential Sodomism
(2018)
author(s): Alexandros Papadopoulos
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
A video-performance on homoerotic nazism is transformed into a deranged guide of professional and erotic survival. Based on an actual interview with a gay Nazi, this project encompasses academic essays, lecture-performances and a series of digital and urban sensations. All these forms expression explore how social media can stage a horny war against fear, hatred and uncertainty. Physically and intellectually provocative, this is an analysis of the relationship between facebook, austerity-horror and queer desire. This polymedia project includes a short clip and ritualistic acts of self-exposure. This dialogue between storytelling and art-theory re-stages the shocking testimonies of the experimental short-film/video-performance (The Homonazi Effect). Centered on factual -- violent, flirty and cyber -- encounters with Athens-based gay neo-Nazis, the Homonazi Effect encompassed an alliance of platforms: blogs, queer festivals, popular magazines, academic writing and social media. Visual components of the artwork, and particularly, the author’s impersonations of his ‘homo-Nazi’ interlocutor were re-used and re-adapted with various storytelling and self-writing formats – co-creating a fragmented intermedia collage of confession and defeat. Social Media rituals twisted the meaning, context and impact of the initial story – re-situating its visual dramatics within an aesthetic backdrop of failed job interviews, zero-hour contracts and traumatic escapism. A cinematic narration dissolves into a project of self-writing, one that establishes an exhibitionistic archiving of failure. The boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, history and imagination and digital and non-digital dramaturgy collapse. A new queer utopia is now disruptively staged on the performative intersection of precarious routine and austerity-age dreamland.
HOME
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Vera Boitcova
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
HOME is part of Vera Boitcova’s ongoing doctoral artistic research that explores the notions of home and belonging within queer migrant dramaturgies. Expanding this inquiry, Boitcova brought together four queer migrant artists currently based in Helsinki to reflect on themes of displacement, absence/presence, and the complex meanings of belonging.
The project consisted of four workshops designed by Boitcova to methodologically experiment with the languages of queer migrant dramaturgy. These workshops aimed to create a space for collaborative experimentation and exploration, where participants could test how personal practices and lived experiences might be translated into shared, performative forms. The sessions also facilitated the discussion of artistic methods and ideas related to home and belonging among fellow queer migrant artists in Finland. The participating artists were selected through an open call posted by Boitcova in March 2025, with selection criteria emphasizing the specific focus of the project (exclusively for queer migrant artists) as well as the artistic merit of the applicants.
The outcome of the workshop series was the creation of five individual, site-specific, performance-based works presented on Suomenlinna Island in and around HIAP Gallery in June 2025. Each piece responded not only to the physical and symbolic context of the island but also acted as a form of cultural translation, transforming personal and collective experiences of displacement, identity, and belonging into performative language. The second outcome was participation in a group exhibition at the same gallery titled Unfolding Island Ecologies, which featured video documentation from the creative processes behind each artist’s work.
This exposition presents materials created and collected during the workshops leading up to creation of the performances. It documents the ongoing effort to develop a performative language capable of expressing queer migrant narratives centered around the concept of home. It attempts to capture dramaturgical methodologies-in-progress and the process of translation of personal artistic practices into shared experiences. The exposition is structured into five sections: brainstorming exercises, workshop designs, artistic tasks, writing prompts, and reflective texts. Each section was designed to highlight different methodological aspects of the process and to offer multiple perspectives on this exploration.
The Weeping Madonna
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Henrik Koppen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
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.
How to Masculine
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Haevn Aalbersberg
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025.
BA Fine Arts.
The research paper is meant to reflect on the Western masculinity standards of today’s society in a not so traditional way, truckspotting.
To be an outsider of the norm is sometimes hard. How to navigate through the linear when all you want to do is worm around and just be yourself. I would like to offer a guide on "how to masculine" through a queer/trans point of view. Searching for and through extreme forms of masculinity and exploring them from deep within. Hopefully finding out along the way what I find to be so fascinating about the masculine, and why it has always been such a big part of my existence.
Terrania [submitted to RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research - 2023-03-15 23:09]
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Nat Grant, Nicky Stott
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Terrania is a gothic eco-drama podcast project exploring gender-queer and disability themes in the face of climate catastrophe. This project draws on contemporary environmental realities to explore how (dis)abled, genderqueer bodies might be reimagined in dystopian and utopian futurity narratives.
VOICE: An Imaginary Ir/Rational Figure of Any Thing
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The voice presented in this NO PAPER PRESENTATION cannot be imagined as separated from any bodily act or matter. It intoxicates all along without an end. This voice emerges out of No Thing (Calcagno 2003). It would not claim to be in a specific relation to gender, class, ethnicity or other classification, yet this voice can be identified as "an imaginary figure of any thing"; a paradoxical voice performed and presented out of unexpected encounters with whatever meaning there might be. This voice can be traced to 17th century Venetian music drama stages - considered to be a symbol for Nothingness as specifically performed in operatic mad scenes. This NO PAPER presents a development of an artistic doctoral project on 'how to perform vocal nothingness' (Belgrano 2011). In the current study a Baradian (feminist) diffractive methodology is applied (Barad 2007, 2012), allowing vocal practice to intra-act continuously with any matter or meaning encountered along the road, by "re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings)" (Barad 2014). Through this performative approach VOICE argues that vocal identity can be viewed as an entangled dance - where sound, thoughts, judgements, senses, madness, matter, chaos, vibrations and so on cannot be separated from one another - "endlessly opening itself up to a variety of possible and impossible reconfigurings" (Hinton 2013). The result that emerges from this trans-spatiotemporal study is a sensuous queering of operatic vocality that allows individuals to experience a monstrous voice as Any Thing or No Thing, following a discourse on Nothingness that had a fundamental impact on 17th century operatic vocality and on the birth of music drama.
A Dead Writer Exists in Words, and Language is a Type of Virus
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Linda Stupart, Jakub Jan Ceglarz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Virus" synthesises four years of performative and traditional research—engaging a range of contemporary artists, institutions, and writing practices to reformulate possibilities for art criticism and institutional critique within artworlds. This practice-based research offers new possibilities for embodied art criticism. The work makes visible, interrupts, and challenges the violent and patriarchal structures of the artworld, offering new modes and practices of feminist and queer artmaking, critique, and resistance. As well as the novella, "Virus" comprises sculptural elements, videos, performance, and a series of prints of spells written for/against the artworld.
This research contributes to performance art, situating itself on the borders of ritual, language, and performativity. The spell works are at the centre of a ‘re-emergence’ of witchcraft in art, and new possibilities for performance-as-criticism. "Virus" is a singular output in multiple fields—literary criticism; experimental writing; contemporary art; eco-feminism; queer theory, and objectification studies—and its multidisciplinarity contributes to each of these fields. Its assertion as an art object, in the form of writing, is an integral moment for the conception of the ‘Art Writing’ discipline.
The spells appeared in a major survey show of feminist art touring the UK (‘Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance’, 2018–19), as well as survey shows about witchcraft and contemporary art in Vienna and Cornwall. Stupart performed spells as research outputs at the University of Melbourne; 4S: Society for Social Science annual conference, Sydney; Edinburgh University; Reading University; and as an exemplary of practice-based research in the BCU PGCert lecture program.
"Virus" is the subject of two conference papers: Ass. Prof. Helen Hester (‘Towards a Theory of Thing-Women’, 2017) and Dr Holly Pester (‘Common Rest’ 2016). It is on university reading lists including: Royal Academy of Art, Copenhagen; Reading University; University of Cape Town; Queen Mary and Goldsmiths, London University; and LCC.
Terrania is a gothic eco-drama podcast project exploring gender-queer and disability themes in the face of climate catastrophe. This project draws on contemporary environmental realities to explore how (dis)abled, genderqueer bodies might be reimagined in dystopian and utopian futurity narratives.open exposition comments (0)
What happens to queer community, bodily expression & identity when queer spaces are closed & communities move online? This workshop critically reflects on, & invites participation in, the collaborative project Bois of Isolation: An Instagram platform for people of marginalised genders to share selfies of their spaces & processes of queering gender binaries in the pandemic. The project uses hashtag commons & selfies to challenge the hegemonic visual culture social media can perpetuate: Binarised gender stereotypes, exclusion of bodies deemed ‘other’, & hierarchies of value in which white, able-bodied, heterosexual, young & ‘healthy’ are supreme. Bois of Isolation contributes to communal aesthetic spaces in which bodily & gender plurality & fluidity are expressed & celebrated.open exposition comments (0)
Falling Like a Monster is a collaborative and creative practice of writing and embodying inter-textuality and multi-modality in order to experiment a non-representational archive known as a two-sided article. This heterogenous crafted piece of writing resists the hegemony of academic and artistic narratives and suggests a transformative knowledge and an alternative practice of political freedom. In our writing, crafting, recording, and failing, we are playing with exhaustion, silence and stillness as monstrous counter-strategies.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition examines how notions of queerness can be built into the construction of a 15-minute long concerto for 9 saxophones and orchestra. I am presenting the full orchestral score, a video of the premiere performance and a commentary on the research process.open exposition comments (0)
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.open exposition comments (0)