Research

In autumn 2017, as the #MeToo movement spread through societies, women demanded that society should take their negative experiences and exploitation seriously. The events can be compared to the 1970s when artists made films and artwork to visualize, question and change the role and position of women in society. For example, Chantal Akerman made the film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975) which was very important for initiating a feminist debate about women’s work, resistance and their roles in society. The film Jeanne Dielman also revealed the need for a film that was based on feminist theory and practice.

Petra Bauer’s research project Looking for Jeanne is rooted in and reflects on the film Jeanne Dielman and asks the questions: Who is a contemporary Jeanne Dielman? How can the film – through its aesthetics – investigate, question and change unequal conditions and exploitative arrangements regarding women’s work and their role in today’s global society? The research project, in close collaboration with feminist organizations and networks, will produce three films about contemporary forms of feminized work today: sex work, maternity and house work. The three year project follows the theme of the film Jeanne Dielman, accompanied by an annual symposium about social reproduction in our contemporary society, based on theoretical and artistic perspectives in collaboration with reference groups.

The Artistic Research is funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2019–2021)

It starts with a tree. We have identified an “autoimmune tree” at a biotechnology lab in Florida; a pine with genetically increased resin production (the pine’s main immune defense) to the point of drowning in its own resin. We call it a “crying pine tree”. Crying Pine Tree will result in a novel, and it’s the process of producing this novel that constitutes the research. The novel begins with one of the crying pines from the laboratory in Florida moving into the home of New York based fiction writer Katie Kitamura and her family. Over the next three years, the process evolves in an interplay between genetic modification of plants (like said pine tree), bodily experiences of an autoimmune disease, and the writing of a fictional narrative.

The research asks how the figure of the autoimmune can structure the unfolding narrative. That process will be made public through living sculptures and installations, bio-hacking workshops and public readings. Crying Pine Tree enters the emerging field of “synthetic biology”, in which all forms of life become programmable and therefore possible to reprogram – rewrite on the level of genetics. In contrast to the dominant fantasy of enhancing forms of life – improving longevity, efficiency and immunity – we want to explore “autoimmune writing” as a form of over-enhancement, an inscription so effective that it turns on itself. Thus, the research draws on bodily experiences of disease in order to rewrite biological imaginaries of our time. (2019–2022)

In our contemporary society, the operations of transport logistics and intelligent automation technology heavily rely on ghost work – forms of human labour concealed from public view. The circulation of goods and information to our homes and workplaces is aesthetically misrepresented as a clean and frictionless system. It is an inconvenient (and often costly) truth that a system sold on reliability has so many pockets of conflict and uncertainty, which is why these tales of labour conditions are relegated to the ghostly. They are drowned out, underwater echoes of a system usually only seen from above surface, with the sea represented as a network upon which goods and information glide in smooth coordination. Despite the consumer aesthetic, software operations and global logistics industries together represent primary engines for capital accumulation and exertion of state power today. Here artistic research poses a unique opportunity to engage with these conditions of visuality by offering a counter-aesthetic. This project convenes a study circle of logistics workers and artistic researchers to co-design a software tool: a ghost platform. It pursues a complex image combining sound, image, text and virtual elements with discussion of these obscured perspectives. This research co-produces new visions for more sustainable and fair uses of these tools: a counter-logistics. The artistic outcomes will offer collated material for public analysis of ecology, economy and politics.

Funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2022-2025)

How can the Moving Image and the Laughing Body become agents for new thought, acts, and embodiment? The project will examine the Moving Image and the Laughing Body’s capacity for new and alternative modes of thinking, acting and being, and their potential to overturn our habitual course and change the order of things. Through a series of audio-visual montages and contexts, it will experiment with new modes of knowledge production, viewing and circulation, and examine the interconnection between Laughter, the Moving Image and Non-Knowledge.

Like the sudden invasion of laughter that for a moment sets us off course, this project will explore ways in which we communicate beyond instrumental language, subjectivity and reason, to experience what the moving image and our bodies can do and how they can teach us about the limits of our thinking.

The project is run in collaboration with the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg – HFBK) where Annika Larsson has a Professorship. The Artistic Research is funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2018–2020)

In the artistic research project, The Stork from Paramaribo Flew Away Never to Return – Transformation as “the Other”, I will advance my inquiries into how a content/subject matter transforms by being translated in-between different artistic medias and materials. By reflecting on an inherited “hi-Story”, at the time fictional as well as real, I will use both painting, documentation and writing to express different aspects of that same story.

The intention is to relieve the polyphony of “the Story”, by stressing the coherence in-between the specificity of the media and its means of interpretation. The specific qualities that signify a certain media or material, thus decide its validity. I focus on the materialities of painting as the means of expression in my research. The artistic process activates as well as defuses the different materials in its strive to make sense to the content. The factual qualities of the materials as well as their symbolical connotations blend into an ongoing dialogue. In my research project painting and the palimpsestic qualities of the media represent the figuration of time, memory and imagination.

The Artistic Research is funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2018–2020)

Refuse to Kill – Stories of the Conscientious Objectors, investigates a specific phase in Sweden’s recent history through one of the great existential narratives of the human condition: the concept of peace and reconciliation. In this artistic research project we utilise the potential of the large number of experiences and stories from the 35 000 young men who, between 1966 and 1992, made the choice to not enter traditional military service, but instead applied for, and were granted, unarmed civil service.

The conscientious objector movement’s existential issue surrounding the right to refuse to kill relates to both the individual’s freedom and artistic expression in relation to the law – then as well as now. Artists had an important role in the conscientious objector movement; many chose civil service, and artists were very active in the public discourse that led to legislative change. The research project wants to learn through the experiences of the conscientious objectors and reconnect to the artists’ role as agents in a contemporary political landscape.

The Artistic Research is funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2017–2020)

Link to external site

In the interdisciplinary art project, Work a work, a group of artists explore the concept of work from a philosophical, political, and critical perspective through an open and collaborative work process including researchers and union activists.

Changing global work relations and digital labour are transforming the way we perform our identities and understand our life worlds. Crowd-sourcing, micro-tasks, the sharing economy, and an expanding class of temporary and flexible workers strengthen commodification of relations and create extreme forms of alienation. The shift away from permanent employment to short term and independent contract work challenges the labour rights established during the last hundred years to keep class warfare at bay. However, at the same time, social media also strengthens community and enables labour activism on a global scale.

To develop an understanding of this ongoing transformation of what we know as “work”, we start with our own artistic practices and work relations, developing artistic research methodologies. Here we start with ideas about the reflective practitioner, researchers’ situatedness, and art as micro-publics or infrastructuring, to explore how the reflexive artistic work process can be enhanced and supported through collaboration, and how the idea of work can be developed through materialization and art performance. Work a work takes place in workshops, online, in public seminars, and foremost in artists’ practices, through artworks.

The Artistic Research is funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2017–2020)

Link to external project site

The artistic research project intends to examine the role that love plays in the construction of Othered women. The result will be a feminist/postcolonial toolbox in the form of a hybridized reference book that uses literary and poetic forms, as well as theoretical expository writing.

The Artistic Research is funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2017–2020)