The 12th SAR Conference on Artistic Research of the Society for Artistic Research from 7th to 9th April 2021 was hosted by mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Visit the documentation of the conference here: roof exposition
The conference was oriented on the three attractors "care", "dare" and "share" and is the first SAR conference to be organised as a live online event.
This intense collaborative effort by Vienna’s three arts universities and the Society for Artistic Research provided an opportunity to join current discourses and share both experiences and insights from artistic research in a focused and interactive way.
The online format also reached out in order to facilitate participation by individuals from new geographical regions and invited artistic researchers to share their work, processes, methods, discoveries, knowledge interventions, new insights, and understandings and to engage in exchange—in actions and words, and in ways complex and simple, conventional and unconventional, robust and fragile.
The keynote speakers were Emma Cocker (Nottingham Trent University), Liza Lim (Sydney Conservatorium of Music), and Jyoti Mistry (University of Gothenburg).
All of the 44 presenters have been invited to question normativity, to involve the most varied formats of knowledge, and to take up positions concerning social and societal issues, responsibility to society, geographic diversity, the social situation of artists, possible conflicts between artistic freedom and research ethics, questions regarding access to artistic research, and much more.
Drawing on her experience of collaborative artistic research, writer-artist Emma Cocker will consider the three attractors — dare, care, share — through the connecting thread of openness. How might artistic research invite and encourage (give courage) towards an attitude or orientation of openness — within the process of enquiry and its sharing; towards others and the world; towards the practice of living and of life? ‘Being open’ has manifold meaning — it can mean (a) not shut or closed; (b) having no protecting or concealing cover; (c) carried on in full view; (d) not closely defended by an opponent; (e) not sealed or tied; (f) having interspersed gaps, spaces, or intervals; (g) accessible; (h) free from limitations, boundaries or restrictions; (i) to speak freely and candidly; (j) to open (one’s) eyes, to become aware of the truth of a situation; (k) willing to consider or deal with something;
(l) ready to transact business; (m) not yet decided, subject to further thought; (n) characterised by lack of pretense or reserve, frank; (o) free of prejudice, receptive to new ideas and understanding; (p) generous; (q) in operation, live; (r) to undo, to release from a closed or fastened position; (s) to remove obstructions from, clear; (t) to get (something) going, initiate; (u) to make or force an opening or gap in, to break the continuity of; (v) to make more responsive or understanding; (w) to reveal the secrets of, to bare; (x) to modify (one’s stance); (y) to accelerate; (z) susceptible, vulnerable. Explored through the prism of openness, how might the three attractors — dare, care, share — open up conversations on the critical potential of risk, attention and being-with operative within artistic research practice?
BIOGRAPHY
Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Her research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the specificity of thinking-in-action therein. Emma’s practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including diverse process-oriented and dialogic-collaborative approaches to working with and through language. Emma often works with other artist-researchers on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context becomes a live ‘laboratory’ for collaborative exploration. Open-ended and process-based, such explorations are often shared with others through artists’ book-works, publications, performance lectures and live events. Emma’s language-based interests include ‘reading on reading’ (exploring reading as an aesthetic practice); ‘conversation-as-material’ (a dialogic inter-subjective practice of collaborative writing) and ‘contiguous writing’, a way of writing in proximity or through adjacency that touches upon rather than being explicitly about. Emma’s writing has been published in Failure; Stillness in a Mobile World; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art; Reading/Feeling; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and as a solo collection, The Yes of the No. Emma was a co-researcher (with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil) on the artistic research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014–2017). She was a contributing artistic researcher in Ecologies of Practice, Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019. Emma is a co-founder of the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group on Language-based Artistic Research (with Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin), and is currently co-editing a Special Issue of the Journal of Phenomenology & Practice on ‘Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research’ (with Alex Arteaga and Juha Himanka).
This talk is my attempt to grapple with epistemological challenges around ecological concepts of sovereignty as an all-encompassing encultured form of knowing and being–an all-at-once-everywhere-everywhen-everything. In Indigenous cultures, the arts are centredas knowledge, as law, as repository of ecological encyclopaedias. Following that lead, I suggest that artistic modalities of knowing are crucial catalysts to how we might investigate the complex ecological challenges of our time because they provide ways ofdealing with highly complex cross-modal all-at-once phenomena. In doing so, I make use of another term: the eco-sensitive as an affective, passionate practice of ecological relationalities. The form of an analysis is already an epistemological structure; the story you tell is a way of knowing that organises the world; the beliefs you hold make their own rules.In search of new story-telling, I offer an experimental analysis of my recent work ‘Sex Magic’ (2020) for contrabass flute, kinetic percussion & electronics, created in collaboration with flautist Claire Chase and composer/instrument builder Levy Lorenzo.Developing notions of the ‘lyric’, of ‘contact noise’ and ‘respiration’ for an Écriture féminine (Cixious) that ‘writes’ on, with and through bodies, I speculate on music’s 'ultraviolet' registers of knowing and making, and through that to its relations to power beyond anecology of ‘caring, daring, sharing’.
BIOGRAPHY
Liza Lim is an Australian composer, educator and researcher whose interests include collaborative and transcultural practices in music with a focus on perspectives from ecological anthropology, post-human/Anthropocene studies and research into distributed creativity. Her compositional practice is deeply imbued with a sense of the socio-cultural lineages of people, objects and performance practices hence her interest in musical form as an emergent expression of group processes. Her works, and in particular four operas: The Oresteia (1993), Moon Spirit Feasting (2000), The Navigator (2007) and Tree of Codes (2016), as well as the recent large-scale cycle Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) explore themes around ritual, temporal slippage and the uncanny. Her genre-crossing percussion ritual/opera Atlas of the Sky (2018), is a work involving community participants that investigates the emotional power and energy dynamics of crowds.
Liza Lim has received commissions from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ELISION, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, International Contemporary Ensemble and Arditti String Quartet. She was Resident Composer with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005 and 2006. Her music has been featured at the Spoleto Festival, Miller Theatre New York, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Venice Biennale and at all the major Australian festivals. Lim is Professor of Composition and inaugural Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where she leads the ‘Composing Women’ program. Her music is published by Casa Ricordi Berlin and on CD labels Kairos, Hat Art, HCR and Winter & Winter.
What is the political potentiality of artistic research? What are the discerning differences in the currency of care in artistic practices and in collaborative strategies of sharing when artistic research is reoriented from the perspectives of colonial histories and from the global south? What are the measures of dare in the relationship between praxis and poiesis? Could propositions from decolonial theories offer a revitalisation of artistic research that attends to epistemologies that have been neglected or repressed in western art practices.
In this presentation I describe the connections between artistic research and decolonial strategies by proposing methods that facilitate epistemic disobedience, experimentation and counter-institutionalised artistic forms.
As a film practitioner and researcher, I am interested in making visible elided histories and exposing marginal or oppressed experiences. Working with archives is one of the tactical moves in a decolonial strategy – a political praxis-poesis to reclaim certain images and positions that would otherwise not be visible.
I will ground these propositions in my recent project developed as a trilogy on race, gender and sexuality; sourced from a single institutional archive to reflect processes of negotiating what Walter Mignolo describes as aesthesis – in a movement between representation and enunciation.
BIOGRAPHY
Jyoti Mistry is Professor in Film at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She works with film both as a research form and as a mode of artistic practice. Select works include: Cause of death (2020) When I grow up I want to be a black man (2017), Impunity (2014), 09: 21:25 (2011), Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit (2010), and I mike what I like (2006). Her work has featured at festivals and museums including the Berlinale International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Durban International Film Festival, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume Paris, Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunsthalle Vienna, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam.
Select publications include: Gaze Regimes: Films and Feminisms in Africa (2015). Places to Play: practice, research, pedagogy (2017) explores archive as exemplar of “decolonised” film practices. She has edited special issues of the Journal of African Cinema: “Film as Research Tool: Practice and Pedagogy” (2018) and the International Journal of Film and Media Arts: “Mapping Artistic Research in Film” (2020).
She has taught at University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), New York University; University of Vienna; Nafti in Accra and Alle Arts School at University of Addis Ababa. Mistry was in the Whitney Museum Independent Artist programme and artist in residence at California College of Arts, and a DAAD Researcher at Babelsberg Konrad Wolf Film University. In 2020, she completed a residency at Västerbottens Museum in Sweden working with the indigenous Sami collection. In 2016-2017 she was Artist in Residence at Netherlands Film Academy. From 2017-2020 she was principal research investigator on a BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) cross cultural project that explores image-making practices. Currently she is editor in chief of PARSE (Platform of Artistic Research in Sweden) and on the editorial board of L'Internationale Online.
REGISTRATION
Conference fee:
You may apply for SAR-membership here. For both Individual and Institutional Membership, the 2021 fee must have been paid before April 4, 2021.
The Conference fee include all events of the online conference.
The payment procedure is automatically integrated in the registration process
Cancellation policy: We cannot offer any refunds of conference fees.
Registration deadline April 4, 2021
The Society for Artistic Research (SAR) is a non-profit organization that nurtures, connects and disseminates artistic research as specific practices of creating knowledge and insight. SAR facilitates a range of encounters for its community of artistic practitioners in the pursuit of transformative understanding that impacts on political and societal processes as well as on cultures of research and learning.
The mdw—University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna defines itself as an excellence-oriented place of training for artists, educators, and researchers. The diversity of the fields covered and methods employed here makes it possible to combine these to develop new perspectives and opportunities as an answer to social, economic, and political challenges in the European and global contexts.
The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna has been a leading European training center for artists for more than 300 years. As a university, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna is especially dedicated to teaching processes based on research and art alike, i.e. on scientific and artistic research, the findings of which are integrated into the curricula in different ways and communicated to a wider public through exhibitions, symposia, lectures and a publication series.
As a leading center of excellence in art and research, the Angewandte is recognized nationally and internationally. Through its actions the Angewandte provides effective impulses in the shaping of society. The Angewandte makes key contributions to strengthening Austria as an innovation hub. At the Angewandte, difference—contentual, methodical, cultural—is seen as a challenge and an opportunity for engaging in constructive-critical interaction.