Nordic Journal of Art & Research

Researching public art and public space, part 2

2024-03-31T21:32:37+02:00

This special issue is devoted to research on the changing paradigms of public art, and of public spaces. Today all art can be characterized as public since it is mediated via relational networks. The shift of paradigm from modernist art to contemporary art coincides with this shift of paradigm – from consumption to communication – in the sense that advanced art practices had already absorbed the change from individual mediation to relational networks. In the communication network of relations, artists and works are constitutive elements. Without the works and the artists, the relational network does not exist, and vice versa: Without the network of relations, neither artists nor works are made visible. This constitutive reciprocity of relations is decisive both for theorists doing research on public art and art in public spaces, as well as for artists who are doing research in public spaces.

How do you know?

2024-03-07T12:08:55+01:00

How meaning is created, circulated, and manipulated in the post-truth era is not self-evident. How are we to distinguish between the distribution and power of constructed information and knowledge production? These were questions at the core of the discursive project on epistemology entitled How do you know? at KHiO Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2017/2018. How do you know? was initiated by professor Apolonija Šušteršič, a Slovenian architect and visual artist whose work is related to critical analysis of public space, and Maria Lind, a Swedish curator, art writer, and educator. In this project, they focused on current ways of thinking and how these generate significance across fields such as art, philosophy, science, and education. In the following conversation, Šušteršič and Lind use their experience from How do you know? to look back on how they have worked together on several occasions since 1997. The conversation is conducted in response to a list of topics proposed by Olga Schmedling, editor of the current issue of Researching public art and public space, part 2.

The stitch project

2024-03-03T17:59:27+01:00

In this article, I shall discuss participation – the artist's role and responsibility in participation, and the potentials of participatory textile projects in the public space. In doing so, I will focus on The stitch project (2012–). This project involves public interaction through acts of tactile textile making such as stitching on a tablecloth. I have based this study within a context of understanding matter and the embodiment of participation from feminist (Ahmed, 2006; Butler, 1988) and new materialist (Barad, 2003; Coole & Frost, 2010; Garber, 2019) perspectives. I am interested in the interactive aspects of The stitch project and how these aspects relate to the concepts of diapraxis (Nunes, 2019) and al masha (Hilal & Petti, 2018). In regard to these terms, I aim to examine the potentials and challenges of participatory textile art projects, like The stitch project, by examining their social and material aspects as well as the complexities of inclusion and participation.

Finding objects, connecting dots

2024-03-03T21:57:42+01:00

Between 2017 and 2019, I created three temporary artistic interventions in public spaces in which passers-by could discover, interact with or ignore different materials related to libraries as social, public systems. During my work with the first, Expired Outdoors (2017), serendipity emerged as a principle I became interested in exploring further. In two consecutive installations, serendipity gradually manifested itself both as an interface between my installations and their audience and as a creative strategy guiding my choices of contexts and materials. Upon invitation from editor Olga Schmedling, in this article I discuss aspects of serendipity in the three projects, proposing to understand serendipity as instances of interruption rather than as accidental discovery.