VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research

About this portal
VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Visit VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research:
visjournal.nu
VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research is a digital journal presenting artistic research, emphasising the importance of reflection that is interwoven with artistic practice, thereby generating new knowledge. VIS is an open-access publication and uses the Research Catalogue publishing platform for its submission and peer-reviewing processes, as well as for its final publication. It has adopted an approach to peer-reviewing in which, rather than the process being blind, a dialogue is established between author(s) and peer-reviewer.
VIS holds an open call for every issue. Up to seven expositions are selected by the Editorial Committee for further peer-review. Submissions in the Scandinavian languages are actively encouraged, but VIS is also open to contributions in English. Following the appearance of its inaugural Issue 0 in spring 2018, VIS has produced two issues in every subsequent year.
The journal is the result of a cooperation between Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) and the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills).
The Steering Committee for VIS
Ellen J Røed
, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Paula Crabtree, Vice-Chancellor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Anne Gry Haugland, Board member at The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Ann Kroon, Active Director of the Research Office, Stockholm University of the Arts
Morten Schjelderup Wensberg, Chairman, The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Geir Ivar Strøm, Policy director, The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Editorial Committee for VIS
Tale Næss, Dramaturg, playwright and author
Magnus Bärtås, Vice-Rector of Research, University of Arts, Crafts and Design
Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen, Artist
Michael Francis Duch
, Musician, professor, and Deputy Head of Research at NTNU – Department of Music.
Behzad Khosravi Noori, Assistant Professor of Practice, Communication and Design at School Of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, Habib University
Eliot Mmantidi Moleba, Research fellow at The Oslo National Academy of the Arts, KHiO
Cecilia Roos, Vice Rector of Research, Stockholm University of the Arts
Contact:
visjournal@uniarts.se
contact person(s):
Heidi Möller 
url:
http://www.visjournal.nu
Recent Issues
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14. VIS Issue 14
VIS Issue 14 was published on 21 October 2025. The issue features eight expositions within the theme “The Heart of the Experiment (and the art of failure)”. Editor: Michael Duch. Co-editor: Tale Næss.
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13. VIS Issue 13
VIS Issue 13 was published on 18 March 2025. The issue features six expositions within the theme “Brieftopia”. Editor: Behzad Khosravi Noori.
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12. VIS Issue 12
VIS Issue 12 was published on 23 October 2024. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology: A dead-alive of Artistic Re-search and History”. Editors: Behzad Khosravi Noori and Magnus Bärtås.
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11. VIS Issue 11
VIS Issue 11 was published on 2 April 2024. The issue features six expositions within the theme “Play, come what may”. Editors: Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen.
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10. VIS Issue 10
VIS Issue 10 was published on 20 October 2023. The issue features six expositions and a recorded conversation within the theme “Circulating Practices”. Editors: Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen.
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9. VIS Issue 9
VIS Issue 9 was published on 14 March 2023. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “of Memory and Public Space”. Editors: Serge von Arx and Eliot Moleba.
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8. VIS Issue 8
VIS Issue 8 was published 18 November 2022. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “of Rules and Alternatives”. Editors: Serge von Arx and Eliot Moleba.
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7. VIS Issue 7
VIS Issue 7 was published 14 March 2022. The issue features five expositions within the theme “Metamorphoses – Tales of the Ever-Changing”. Editor: Anna Lindal.
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6. VIS Issue 6
VIS Issue 6 was published 19 October 2021. The issue features five expositions within the theme “Contagion”. Editor: Anna Lindal.
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5. VIS Issue 5
VIS Issue 5 was published 15 March 2021. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “One more time, let's do it again!”. Editor: Trond Lossius.
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4. VIS Issue 4
VIS Issue 4 was published 14 October 2020. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “Affecting material and technique”. Editor: Trond Lossius.
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3. VIS Issue 3
VIS Issue 3 was published 1 March 2020. The issue features eight expositions within the theme “History Now”. Editor: Magnus Bärtås.
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2. VIS Issue 2
VIS Issue 2 was published 23 September 2019. The Issue features five expositions within the theme ”Estrangement”. Editor: Magnus Bärtås.
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1. VIS Issue 1
Risk – and associated topics such as vulnerability, unguardedness, precariousness, failure and uncanniness – are frequently raised as concerns within artistic research arenas. VIS # 1 – Risk in Artistic Research – jeopardy or validation? moves through more artistically-stylised accounts of ‘danger’ towards the more hopeful linkage of risk with discovery and the reconfiguring of the imagination.
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0. VIS Issue 0
Issue 0 features eight expositions created by researchers within the arts. Every contributor has been carefully chosen and invited by the Editorial Committee, with the view of presenting best practice within the field of artistic research.
The expositions have gone through a dialogue-based peer-review which is something that the Editorial Committee would like to continue to develop in the coming issues, a process intended to be significant for VIS.
Every exposition is presented on the VIS webpage and has an editorial text that explains why the contributor was chosen. The actual exposition itself, on the other hand, will be found in the database of the Research Catalogue. The expositions have their own designs and explore widely different topics, depending upon how each researcher has chosen to work within the offered format.
The Editorial Committee would like to thank all the contributors for their inspiring work which sets the tone admirably for what we hope will follow.
Editorial Committee: Cecilia Roos, Serge von Arx, Anna Lindal, Mia Engberg, Trond Lossius, Magnus Bärtås och Darla Crispin
Recent Activities
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Under the Mirroring Surface
(2018)
author(s): Adam Kraft
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In my work I experiment with interventional urban commons, through practices of altering and re-purposing existing structures. The work is both informal and transgressive in its methodology, with the core intention to investigate and participate in the shaping and making of the social city. Art and research can provide keys to accessing such a city in the making; a space where we can challenge the preconceptions of what is possible, and to imagine alternative strategies for the creation of realities.
This article presents a theoretical frame work together with a number of strategies practiced under the Lefebvrian concept of the ‘Right to the City.’
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Documenting Experiential Authorship
(2018)
author(s): Chrysa Parkinson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Layered, scattered and synthetic traces of a performer’s authorship. A series of harmonic partials. Materials include photographs, audio recordings and writings sourced from performances the author participated in between 2013 – 2017.
1. Audio File: Sydney, Warsaw, Berkeley, 2016
Sydney Biennale: Adrian Heathfield/Ghost Telephone, 2016
Warsaw Museum of Modern Art: Boris Charmatz/Expo Zero, 2016
Death of the Documenter: Family Home, 2016
2. Photos (Zan Wimberly) of Sydney Biennale
3. Photos (Chrysa Parkinson) of Warsaw Museum of Modern Art and Family Home
4. Audio File: 7 Questions (4 voice recording), 2016-2017
with embedded questions from: Ilse, Louise, Klara, Yari, Adam, Kim, Hanah, Andreas.
5. Essay with Audio: Liminal Animates, Chrysa Parkinson 2013-2018
6. Audio file: The Glitch, Chrysa Parkinson 2015
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Å LAGE ET LEMURIA
(2018)
author(s): Bjørnar Habbestad, Michael Duch, Lene Grenager, Hild Sofie Tafjord
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Lemur spelar, skaper og kuraterer. Ensemblet arbeider som ein firehoda kropp, ei eining sett saman av sterke individ med eigne ambisjonar og agendaer, samstundes som alle har eit sterkt fokus på kreative gruppeprosessar. Lemuria er vårt fjerde verk i ein serie av prosjekt der titlar, konsept og strategiar frå det 20. århundre sin kunstmusikalske kanon blir omforma og gjenbrukt, i vårt bilde. Verket er ein konsertinstallasjon for ensemble, to songarar og live elektronikk, framført i ein spredt scenografi, for eit mobilt publikum. Verket vart bestilt av Borealisfestivalen og urframført i Grand Selskapslokaler i Bergen, 10.mars 2017.
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1 place 33 rooms – Portrait of a house
(2018)
author(s): Christine Petersen
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
1 place 33 rooms
“Memory, including collective memory, is linked to houses. When we eradicate a place in the exterior world, we lose a major pathway into our own history.” Lena Lindgren, Morgenbladet, 2. November 2012
The project is based on a real place, a house in Oslo. I am interested in how our memory connects with places and houses, in expanding our understanding of what a house and a place are, seen from the perspective of our own cultural background, time and history – and in the perceptions and experiences that are associated with it. In the significance of how the rooms are organised in relation to each other and what happens if the room is freed from the context in which it stands. It is rare to experience an isolated room that doesn’t relate to anything else, torn from its place, time and spatial context. The neutral room simply doesn’t exist. A key aspect of architecture is the experience of going from one room to another. The way the rooms are organised in relation to each other affects the sense of what it is like to be in the house. From the starting point that architecture begins with a single room, I have explored what criteria a space has to fulfil to be called a room and how big it has to be. Everyone relates to rooms – whether it is a private room like a bedroom, kitchen, dining room, or a public space such as a café, library or railway station. The work comprises six physical installations, plus the book and archive “33 fortellinger” (33 stories).
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This is not / Dette er ikke
(2018)
author(s): Anne Marthe Dyvi
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The language of art is often poetic and abstract.
Reduced and lawless in terms of grammar. I experience the poetic and abstract language as closer to the experienced world than the more concrete and descriptive language that is the norm in the majority of formulations in society. In my artistic practice at the moment, I work with color, movement and time. In the video medium. To say that art is a language is also an assertion, or a worn metaphor. We have no written language rules we agree upon in the arts, no defined alphabet. And maybe that's exactly what the making of art is? Creating form, while challenging form? Being the practitioner, and in that sense defining, in a landscape of concrete and abstract, in definite and indefinite and fluid and solid.
To create while shaping the form of it, is something else than performing within a given formation.
This contribution to a digital catalogue for artistic research are selections of my work, and thoughts, related to it translated into pieces of texts.
Some pieces of text along with some video pieces as well as a print from a video, a so-called 'still'. They are selected to function in different constellations, and for several reasons. A collage as a method and a way to relate to my own work, and with the selection, emphasizes the content of the texts. I apply my own thesis discussed in the text upon my contribution 'here' *. My contribution appears in Vis – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research. The digital is representation. It is not. It is equally important to me that this contributed in form acknowledges that making a presence in an internet-based database is not without hyperlinks. It appears because the other is.
* Where is 'here', what is 'here'?
(Video and video with sound.)
The visual material in this exposition is from the videos 'La ditt liv vitne'(2017), 'Essay on Colour'(2017) and Perceptual Cycle (2016). By Anne Marthe Dyvi.
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Rethinking the Performer: Towards a Devising Performance Practice
(2018)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The performer’s perspective and the impact of collaboration on the performer’s artistic practice is often overlooked in frameworks designed to analyze collaboration in contemporary music. The conception of what a performer is ‘for’ in the development of a new musical piece is, at least in part, what constitutes a performer’s artistic practice, whether that is the performer as an interpreter and executor of scores, as an adviser to the composer, and/or as a co-creating deviser. The interpreter-adviser-deviser model is conceived as a framework for considering the ways composer-performer collaborations can influence and contribute to the construction of a performer’s artistic practice and subjectivity. Collaboration is not only a method of creating new works, it's also a method for creating artistic practices. Drawing on examples of devised practices as exhibited in Jennifer Torrence’s artistic research, practices which are communicated through reflections, dialogues, images, and videos, the article ultimately argues that it is the performer as deviser that offers the most radical rethinking of the purpose, role, and potential of the performer in contemporary music collaboration.