The article unfolds how the combination of qualitative research and immersive performance has given Inga Gerner Nielsen insight into her audience's aesthetic perception and imaginary realm in a performance installation. It sets out by stating that to ask an audience open questions about a performance only provides testimony of the after-rationalizations of their experience. The author introduces a phenomenological interview method, which draws on sense-memory techniques directing the interviewee to produce thick descriptions; actualizing the lived experience in the interview instead. In response to Norman K. Denzin's call for a performative dialogical social science, she argues why interview material should be conceptualized as performance and how working artistically with the interview setup can serve to highlight the inherent power dynamics. The article ends with examples showing how the interview was turned into a central immersive element of Inga Gerner Nielsen ́s artworks.
Only Here to Adore is an artistic research of the interaction between garden owners and plants. It unfolds in three parts. The first part takes place at Landlyst Plantecenter just outside Hjørring in the North of Denmark where Gerner Nielsen interviews garden owners about what they have purchased at the garden center and their hopes and dreams for their summer garden. These interviews form the foundation for developing scores and a choreography for a performance that Gerner Nielsen and another performer will show at Vendsyssel Kunstmuseum in Denmark. The performance is also filmed by Louise Ørsted Jensen and turned into a video work.
Curated by Skal Contemporary
In the Mirror of Care Work researches skills within Nordic interactive performance practices. Using the mirror as a metaphor for visualisation and connection, artist Inga Gerner Nielsen brings into conversation the work of nurses and interactive performers. By inviting in the perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, Inga engages in discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of her own field.
What do we see when we look in the mirror, and when that mirror is a nurse? Do we, as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? Does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? And what of the nurses’ working conditions should we perhaps try to adopt as (care giving) performers?
The project visited Stockholm (MDT) in September 2023 and Helsinki in January 2024 in a two-day symposium to meet and exchange with local artists about the aspect of care work in their artistic practice .
The project is based in a long-term collaboration with the nursing school at UCN Hjørring & Thisted in the north of Denmark. Together with teacher of the History of Nursing, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Inga gerner Nielsen is developing ways of integrating interative performance excersices and visual art into the teaching of 1.st, 4th and 7th semester nursing students.
