VIS #11 – THEME: Play, come what may

Truth is an ever-changing concept. In an age of information overload and intensity, the familiar can be destabilised, mutated, displaced and reformulated. In the shift between what was and what will be lies a potential where the real and the imagined intertwine. A place where unfamiliar contours of space, time and matter can take immediate shape, only to be dissolved and inverted in new calibrations.

How do we relate to the concept of reality? As an artistic researcher, how do you work with concepts of truth, falsehood, originality and imitation in a time of ever-changing flux? What role can manipulation play as a processual tool in artistic research?

Can we reduce our self-censorship by using doubt and aimlessness as methods and materials and/or themes during a research process? Since some things may be easier to do than to say, to realise rather than to conceptualise, we are curious about research projects where the experiment is central. How can the remnants, leftovers and debris of the experiment become relevant material? What might become important?

Displace, disorient, and play, come what may.

Maria Jonsson
Aporia is an exploratory experiment where fiction meets documentation. A middle ground where the imagination bears traces of reality and the documentary is reminiscent of fiction. The subjective claim is equated with the objective statement. What emerges is created from reality, but forms a new narrative. An attempt to dissolve reality and create a new one to enter. Is this new reality less true than the real one – or perhaps more true?

Jennifer Torrence (with reflections by Simon Løffler)
In Performance as Device for Disorientation, Torrence asks: What happens when one chooses not to maintain control, but instead embraces the wild nature inherent in performative representation? What knowledge and aesthetic experiences can emerge from an inevitable moment of collapse? Percussionist and performer Jennifer Torrence reflects on performative acts as a tool of disorientation – performance as an embodied practice of interruption, delusion and suspension of order. The exposition is based on Torrence's recent research project Performing Precarity and a collaborative project and dialogue with composer Simon Løffler.

Anna Nygren
The Deer, the girls, or Play & Fail (RÅDJUREN, FLICKORNA, eller PLAY & FAIL) is based on a thesis in literary studies that was never completed and is now trying to be recovered in the form of an artistic research project, the exposition examines scientificity and distance and what it means to stay within the frame from a queer/lesbian and neuroqueer/autistic perspective, starting from an emotional (un)knowledge and an attempt to skew ideas and boundaries between failure and play.

Vidmina Stasiulyte
SOUND TO WEAR is a rudimentary game with the embodiment of sound. Stasiulyte’s project delves into a sensory exploration of the spaces of possibility inherent in the relationship between body and object. Can we listen to fashion? Can we play fashion as music? The research opens up new ways of thinking about design – with the ears rather than the eyes. The research comes from a listening perspective and is a way of rethinking and redefining fashion, starting with the realisation that garments are sound. The exposition invites readers to compose their own soundscapes by playing the sound of Stasiulyte’s garments in different compositions and time intervals.

Eszter Mag 
Taming Amorphalia is an introduction of the intuitive processes behind/during the development of ProjectMorpheo – a Master’s Project at Stockholm University of the Arts. As ProjectMorpheo was a participatory event (aiming to further discover the connections between the content of the sub- and unconscious and everyday materials that surround us), Taming Amorphalia is also an attempt to communicate the background of this research in a dialog-like, interactive way by using the form of a text based role play game.

Anthony Morton och Ray Franz
The Place of Shade is an artistic research inquiry into contemporary Norwegian culture in South Africa. Norwegians began operating within the British colonial framework around 1840 – the same period as the migration to America. Lutheran missions, whaling, farming, business and family characterise this almost 200-year Afri-Norge diasporic heritage. Following the depletion of Whales in the Nordic seas, Norwegian immigrants almost single-handedly established the whaling operations in Durban from 1908 onwards. Their legacy remains an integral component of the city and the province’s socio-cultural fabric to this day. With this in mind, the ghosts of Larsen, Hermansen, Egeland and more from New Pier to Kwambonambi were sought and found. 

Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen, Editors of VIS #11

VIS Editorial Committee 2024: Behzad Khosravi Noori, Cecilia Roos, Eliot Moleba, Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen, Magnus Bärtås, Tale Næss, Michael Duch.

Header image from the exposition “SOUND TO WEAR” by Vidmina Stasiulyte. Photo: Jan Berg.