Midterm assessment – Sara Eliassen, PhD research fellow at the Academy of Fine Art.

The artist will do a presentation of her project-in-progress Mediating Uncertainties, followed by a conversation with artist/ filmmaker/ educator Didem Pekün. The conversation will be moderated by Jan Verwoert, writer and research leader at the Academy of Fine Art.

Mediating Uncertainties is an ongoing artistic research project, thinking around how ideology is normalized through contemporary images, technologies and moving image culture. The project aims to explore how image- and screen materials can be used to question and counter dominant versions of recent histories. If following on from Marshall McLuhan’s observations that form became content in the twentieth century, what modes of aesthetic resistance could be mobilised today, bearing in mind the many different contexts and urgencies we now face? How might we subvert documents of the past and archival materials with the explicit aim of undoing certain subjectivities, to build new political imaginaries? The project suggests this might require strategies that operate beyond a conception of simply producing an alternate narrative or making a counter move. How might we rather multiply narratives, connections, methods and techniques in order to rethink how knowledges and histories are being produced? In attempting this, the project also seeks to explore the apparatuses of circulation we use, and the possibilities of developing new channels of distribution.