20 minute read
Reprising Diversity in Artistic Research
None to nur 3.0: the skin, the feminine
by No Iskandar Bin Othman
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Can losing be beautiful? Must losing be beautiful? Combing fissures of loss within sacred spaces from my MA Thesis, None to Nur 3.0: The Skin, The Feminine attempts to artfully extrapolate a new tapestry of the female identity by necessary retelling of lived experiences through poetry, performative gestures and text, both spoken and unsaid.
The study disentangles the metaphorical void through exercises of participatory collaboration with my students, as they respond through the philosophical strands and material archive dislodged from my own work wherein tropes such as “unmosquing” and “carrying the sacred house within you” became complexes of imagination. These preoccupations echo Rosi Braidotti's Nomadic Theory (2011) that summons us to “organize from our locations, our here, the fleeting present” of that urgent migration- to womb wounded feelings into corporeal home-bodies. This critique/creation methodology within this paradoxical, mutating, nonlinear age, draws me to the positionality of the errān -sprawled into symbolic wanderings within the feminine corpus- both exposing and gathering insights into its diverse fragments, fractures, disruptions, multiplicities, solidarity. I remain curious: where does the thirst of such tenderness borne out from- divine immanence, a radical resistance, an act of survival, a multi-belonging? What gaps will be stitched up, what other wounds will the body relearn, unlearn and participate in through these exhalations?
Through these excavations, a conscious and intentional reflexivity of the ‘I’ as the auto-ethnographer, the pilgrim poet, the artist-educator emerged, allowing for cyclical subjectivity and fluidity of voices and memory to scatter without refrain. The encounters had turned out to be rather ritualistic in ways the body hold words as chants, as deep meanings- fragments loaded with visual, aural, conceptual threads for my auto-ethnographic installation.
The process is akin to floating islands with amorphous borders, enabling me to shift the margins of embodiment and disembodiment- giving power to gendered imagination.
Like the word ‘Nur’, meaning ‘Light’ in Arabic, and often used as a female first name within the Malay Archipelago, this study proposes a re-flowering of conversations of Art and Faith while simultaneously sketching vignettes of A New Sacred Feminine, in its choreography of new subjectivities and countercartography.
Gry Ulrichsen NTNU
Art matters, you matter the connection between mood disorders and artistic ability
by Sharon Choo
Have you ever felt dissatisfied after teaching a class you intently prepared for?
If so, I feel for you, because I go through periods of self-doubt, left in a limbo wondering if I am competent enough to be an art and design educator.
Art Matters, You Matter is bi-directional. You refers to both the student and the educator. The student’s well-being is priority and so is the educator’s well-being. Art Matters, You Matter serves as a channel for me, as an educator to be reflective and reflexive, allowing myself to practice – Mindful teaching.
Growing up, when I think back fondly of the teachers who made an impact, they are not the ones who were the most knowledgeable, nor the ones who had the best teaching methods. The ones who made the greatest impact were the ones who genuinely cared, about me.
At present, as an educator teaching in an art academy, I am often reflective upon my teaching methods, influence and impact I have upon the students. Am i worthy to be a “role model”? What sort of values is important to inculcate to my students? Do my students trust me to guide them in their learning and aspirations? Art Matters, You Matter will serve as a personal evolving guide, to consciously recalibrate my wondering thoughts and regaining perspective of my purpose as an educator. From this exploration two outputs have emerged – a game focused on mindful teaching and an artwork in response to the topic of the project. Awaken to is a work-ofart I that serves as an open space for me to regulate my thoughts, visually represented with layers built upon layers, responding and corresponding to each other. The main textures and colours are overlapping coats of paint, leaving one to imagine the original intent. Cracks of paint, strokes of painterly textures crossing over, embodies the unknown gaps of change, the fluctuation and instability one experiences. Within the chaos, seated is a solid yolk, a stable form, bringing viewers to a focal point, a standstill, to be awakened to, to recalibrate, to be reflective and reflexive, mindful, holding fast the pureness, the original intent amidst the chaotic surroundings.
As a liberating exercise, this exploration reels me in, to the reality of being an artist, researcher and teacher.
"Must I care so much to be a good teacher I get those headaches losing my self I think I am a better teacher now than when I cared so much? too much? for whom? better for me or the student? now I hardly remember their names can trusting the relation relive me form the part of caring that annihilates me? - Grappling with how to enhance my own (and others) awareness of how feelings of doubt, anxiety, vulnerability, shame, guilt etc. should become a crucial part of the teacher-student relation and therefor also a crucial part of the professional teacher role."
Gry Ulrichsen NTNU
Practising feminism
by Kimberly Shen
The project Practising Feminism seeks to actively reflect, reframe, and question knowledge-making through embodied and lived experiences. Drawing from acts of curating and teaching, the project acknowledges that the work of feminism is ongoing and requires constant negotiation – “To become feminist is to stay a student” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 11). Feminist scholarship argues that sources of knowledge are neutral, and it is the political act of who we read, write, cite and speak about that makes visible certain histories and narratives.
Taking personal encounters in pedagogy and curatorial practice as points of departure, I engaged in reflective autonarrative writing. Questions of the regimes of power, positionality within institutional frameworks, politics of care, notions of the gaze, and representation of feminine spaces surfaced persistently, to which I had neither concrete answers nor resolutions to. These ruminations also dovetail into my current artistic inquiry of mediating feminine narratives and subjectivities. The “feminine” is not purely gendered, but rather alludes to an “other” which is not prevalent or dominant, but
A/R/Tography as Post-Qualitative has two sub theories of note:
Non-Representational Theory: not only about think but thinkfeel. This state of understanding is fluid and in flux. Research becomes embodied.
favours heterogeneity, diversity in form, and recognises embodied experiences. By presupposing heteronormative structures and expectations hinged on our roles as women, especially within the cultural context of Southeast Asia, how do we shift or subvert modes of power? To further ground these questions, I engaged in discussions with artists and writers who identify as female or have a female/ feminist-centric practices, and organised informal reading groups with peers, looking at texts by feminist thinkers Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks.
This project presents an opportunity to reflect on my role as an educator and curator – how does feminist thinking inform ways I approach knowledge production and facilitate holistic, introspective, and critical dialogue about artistic practice in the classroom? What are the strategies when organising and curating projects with female artists and their culturally situated practices and narratives? By adopting a feminist consciousness, this project is an ongoing inquiry: to navigate and re-engage a world within teaching and curating that is assembled to accommodate specific bodies of knowledge, institutions, and systems. “The task of bringing the invisible to be more visible is clear in your strategies, and I appreciate the work you have done to dive into your own teaching and creative practices to explore how this is unfolding. Grounding the work in your own lived experiences, the auto-narratives, and the reflections of these encounters give real power to your work.”
Professor Rose Martin NTNU
Mapping violence in the tender domestic
by Noor Effendy Bin Ibrahim
“I found the combination of the mapping of your journey manifested through a timeline and the live performance completed each other in a very precise manner. The timeline gave a significant important backdrop for the scene playing out in the live performance. The presentation allowed me to move between two complementary modes of perception activating me in totally different ways and allowing me to grasp some of the very complex issues at stake. I found the performance lecture a significant contribution to a relatively new but emerging manner of disseminating knowledge in academia.”
Gry Ulrichsen
NTNU Quantitative Research
Qualitative Research
Establishing Performative Research
Haseman’s (2006) manifesto for performative research stands as an alternative to the qualitative and quantitative paradigms.
Performative Research
A/R/Tography in pattern-making as creative exploration
by Chew Han Lim
This research project aims to explore opportunities for teaching and learning creativity through a series of patternmaking activities using A/R/Tography as a research methodology. This research focuses on engaging with threshold concepts, stop moments and qualitative research focused on liminary processes. The liminary process from unknown to known facilitates students from basic pattern-making skills and thinking to more creative pattern-making skills and thinking through the class activities.
The class activities included two stages of pattern-making processes. These pattern-making processes were intended to raise awareness of emotion, reflection at the end of each stage of the process and interaction between the student’s prior knowledge, resources, and the lecturer. The two stages of processes were completed in three weeks facilitated by the myself as their lecturer.
Stage one was studying an interesting pattern design and identify the key pattern making principles applied.
A/R/Tographic Stop Points
The stop point is a moment where we take pause, question, and reflect. It is a moment where we find an idea, provocation or prompt.
Stage two was recreating a variety of designs using the process from stage one. In the facilitation processes, spontaneous interactions were identified between a student and notes that the lecturer had given, a student and prior knowledge, a student and the lecturer, the lecturer and notes, creative exploration and stage one study, and the lecturer and facilitation method. The interactions took place spontaneously where the lecturer as a facilitator was constantly negotiating the scaffolding of the class and students’ self-exploration. One opened-ended question was used at the end of each stage, with the purpose of acting as a stop moment for students to reflect and consider their emotions. Key words were identified from the reflections done by the students to highlight the objectives of risk taking and emotions involved in the exploration process for students as learner and the lecturer as an A/R/ Tographer.
It is hoped that this process of uncovering and embracing the element of risk and failure through reflections
The subject is decentered The researcher-body is entangled and affected Research is a non-representational creation of difference
may be able to fuel creativity and accelerate the designing process. In conclusion, in this research it is viewed that the A/R/ Tography research process can potentially support students and lecturers to reflect, identify and embrace failure, and in turn seek improvement with a disposition of endless learning through failure, confusion, and exploration. “I found these aspects particularly interesting. One is the acceptance of the discomfort of uncertainty. This is not so unusual for an artist, but it is still quite unusual for a researcher, yet it is as important in research as in art because both are about moving from the known to the unknown. The other is the explicit inclusion of emotion. Again, this is still quite unusual in research, even though no researcher can do their work without emotion.”
Dr Helen Kara Independent Researcher
Provoking curiosity: a teacher’s A/R/Tographic investigation of prompting students’ curiosity and creativity in the design class
by Shin Jung Hoon
This auto-ethnographic research focuses on my teaching practice as a spatial design lecturer, where I piloted a pedagogical model that I call “Curiosity Practice”. This “Curiosity Practice” uses a hybrid method of intermingling what is required in the curriculum with other topics of interest, with the intention of motivating students and kindling curiosity in learning. These sessions of “Curiosity Practice” also sought to prompt students to ask questions and ignite self-reflexivity, while supporting students in a creative mindset that may spark interest to apply creative approaches into their work. The beginnings of the research stem from the frustrations I faced as a lecturer with what I perceived to be ‘uncreative’ students in my class. During honest and open dialogues with students, it became clear that there was a misalignment of the students’ creative skills in the classroom and outside of it. I found it difficult to motivate students to work on design projects with passion, curiosity and creativity. Yet I noticed that the students were displaying these qualities in platforms such as social media, in their ways of talking, and habits. Hence, the purpose of this research has been to reflect on my experience as a teaching professional, through my observations and work with students on their process of attaining curiosity and creative mindset. Through the “Curiosity Practice” sessions, students are encouraged to think critically, focusing on the process, behaviour and the artistic exploration technique.
Consequently, it is hoped that from these sessions the sparks of creativity that are developed might transfer to their design projects. I worked with a group of 12 degree students who spent one hour per session for three weeks using “Curiosity Practice” in their design studio before each of the actual lessons began.
Instagram by Hong Weiming, BA Spatial Design 2021 Instagram by Aaron Yuri, Diploma in Design (Interior+Exhibtion), 2018 Curiosity Practice-Screenplay by Sharon Arulkumar, BA Spatial Design 2021
Results of the research focus on my reflections as a teacher. I unpack how I see that the students who attend the “Curiosity Practice” sessions seem to have a unique point of view toward certain phenomenon, actively participate in discussions and also express creative mindsets. The findings and active interactions with the students have allowed me to reflect on my teaching methodology as an educator. I have arrived at the understanding that preconceived and outdated method of teaching will not work in this era, especially in a design school environment. Students are now required to produce high level of creative output, participate in multidisciplinary and trans-disciplinary contexts and developing their skills at a fast pace. This auto-ethnography strives to illustrate my pursue of creative ways of teaching, through a dialogue with the students’ about their creativity. “I really appreciated the honesty and vulnerability in this research project. The self-reflection, even selfcritique, admitting to failure was great… Maybe we need to fail, maybe failure shows us something we would not otherwise see?”
Dr Susanna Hast Uniarts Helsinki
Reflexing on community-based projects
by Ethel Chong Performative Research
From meaning to meaning making
In the Arts Management Programme, the Project Management for Arts Events module aims to teach students how to do a simple analysis of the external environment to manage an arts project. The module takes place in the January to April semester of each academic year in NAFA, which has an advantage. Singapore Art Week (SAW) takes place in January for about 10 days annually. Hence, students taking the module would have to attend any activity in the SAW and then do a 5-minute individual presentation of how they think the event was organised. This activity ensures that students participate in an arts activity in the physical space and prepares them for the final group presentation.
As part of the teaching process, there are 2 interventions to help students think of projects that engage the community. As the module is preparing students to work as arts managers in the industry, they need to know the process of applying government grants for arts projects. More often than not, the government’s preference has been to award grants to arts projects that engage the community. The first intervention is inviting an experienced arts manager to talk to students about local and overseas arts projects he had organised. The second intervention is to use National Arts Council (NAC) case studies to enable students to see what community-based projects have been state-funded. Before the talk, students are already grouped (6 to 8 per group, and grouping is decided by students themselves) to brainstorm possible projects.
In conclusion, out of the 9 final projects among the 3 classes, 6 are communitybased. One project promotes sustainable fashion among consumers. 2 projects are visual arts exhibitions, one showcasing artworks on the theme of mental health, and the other exhibits artworks by children with autism. Teaching the
Language to Languaging
module over 14 weeks, I am glad to have helped students to scope their projects based on the industry’s standards with a better focus if the projects were to apply for government funding.
This research showcases 2 methods in which students’ learning processes can be streamlined when they are exposed to real-world information, and not having students plan arts projects in a silo, as they need to understand how their involvement in the arts can affect the community. The artistic impetus happens when the art of crafting projects become more relevant to Singapore and the current context in which the arts are placed in terms of importance. My research will offer insight to teachers who may be teaching a similar module and the motivations involved to help students think of projects that are more community-focused.
Dr Susanna Hast Uniarts Helsinki
Drawing for singers: drawing as an alternative vocal pedagogical tool
by Daniel Fong
Dr Susanna Hast Uniarts Helsinki
Disembodying from the embodiment : a research into music performance and its physical dramatisations
by Dr Nellie Seng
This research has sought to raise awareness of the alignment between physical embodiment being action, and sound. Quite often, one hears the comment: “looks so musical” in a concert or in a performance class. In short, the embodiment of a feeling; the act of musical performance has become a physical manifestation of that feeling which has eventually been taken to the forefront of the stage. It could be said that an audience now expects visual excitement, but visual excitement may detract from the focal point of music being a highly auditory sense. Ironically,
Performative Research discusses the transition:
From what research is
audiences no longer listen but rather, they watch music.
As a musician and teacher, I have often commented that students have not “embodied a musical work and its meaning”. However, is it not odd to ask for music to be embodied since the auditory sense is essentially invisible? In this research project a black screen was put up to block the performer from the audience. Therefore, the audience could not “watch” the performance during performance class, they could only listen to the performance. When students were asked to comment on
To what research does
From (centered) subjects to relations
what they heard, their reply was they felt the performance was musically ‘bland’, or that they heard aspects that were not desirable. Yet the actions that might have ‘caused’ these undesirable aspects of sounds were deemed to be visually exciting. The intent of this exploration is to bring students’ focus back to listening, and through that focus bring about an awareness of their physical movement as a platform for sound production and to consequentially think further about embodiment. “Nellie’s work has links with concerns in the wider research world about embodiment and sensory methods. Researchers are becoming interested in different kinds of sensory data such as by using soundscapes to study urban life.”
Dr Helen Kara Independent Researcher
Composing out: unfolding basic gamelan concepts through collaborative composition
by Alicia de Silva
Composing is often viewed as an important activity in music education. It can allow students to be creative and expressive and could be used to encourage collaboration and participation in a classroom. It also works as an avenue for students to explore musical meaning, and even develop their own artistic voice.
In most instances, the immediate goal with composing is to be about the creativity, compositional process and/or the final product. These are important, and good starting points when using composition as an educational tool. However, I believe more attention could be given to composing as a teaching tool.
Jackie Wiggins’ (1990) book, Composition in the Classroom: A Tool for Teaching is an early publication on this.
Though a large part of the compositional approach that Wiggins writes about stems from a more traditional/classical Western music approach, which differs from what I did in this project, it reinforces a personal theory I hold: that through the process of composing a piece of music, or even just creating a small fragment/motif, students can be made aware of some basic music concepts, develop a basic proficiency in playing an instrument, and perhaps most importantly, cultivate a sense of ownership in their learning.
With this context in mind and using A/R/ Tography as a framework, this presentation details my reflections and observations of a group of first-year music students. These students were required to work as a group to compose a piece of music for a culture that they had minimal knowledge of (in this case the Javanese Gamelan), and have it performed after a period of about ten weeks.
In this project, I decided to put my personal theory to the test. I questioned whether these students were able to deepen their knowledge and understanding about the Javanese Gamelan and its key concepts
Trying out motifs and ideas
Hearing the group composition through the process of composition. Would this process of composing, and ultimately (public) performance allow these students to play these instruments better? Would this process of composing, and performing together deepen their awareness of ensemble playing?
Through these questions, observations, and reflections, I also discuss some strategies formulated to make the act of composing more intentional for the students. Finally, through this presentation I hope to share how as artists-teachers, we may use our creative practice to delve deeper into learning and shape the learning environment in our classrooms.
Professor Rose Martin NTNU
