Artistic research in a nordic context

Annette Arlander

pp. 152-162

in: Robin Nelson (ed), Practice as research in the arts, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Finland was one of the first countries to engage in artistic research, as we prefer to call it.¹ Perhaps because of the historical respect for a pioneering spirit (take your spade and go out in the forest and create yourself a field), Finnish artists and educators tended to do first and to think later. This approach can have its drawbacks but it can also be seen as a practice-led inquiry on a meta-level. If we had waited for philosophers to agree upon a solid ontological and epistemological basis for artistic research, we might not, even now, have begun. However, theoretical debates as well as practical experiments in artistic research have been going on for more than twenty years.² I remember participating in a symposium in 1994,³ which according to the proceedings Knowledge is a Matter of Doing (referring to Grotowski) was "the first in Scandinavia in which both scholars from universities as well as artists and teachers from institutions who actually train practitioners were invited."⁴