Launching of Art/Sensation organization, November 2020. "Emphasizes the importance of emotions in and around art."
Art/Sensation is a nomadic curatorial platform that emphasizes the importance of emotions. We enrich established knowledge in the art world by highlight feelings surrounding art. We collaborate with institutions in the form of lectures and curatorial hubs.
Art/Sensation works in relation with art and artists in exhibitions, texts and meetings. We aim to curiously investigate new aspects of how how the viewer can relate to art, rather than solely attribute meaning. We collect, explore and listen to situations and investigate how emotions can be rewritten and conveyed. Art/Sensation experiences and describes what emotions and bodily affect can be in and around art.
In 2021 Art/Sensation will launch Cube, a virtual 3D exhibition space, focusing on activating the artist and artworks with sounds, lights and connections with social media.
Art/Sensation Cluster brings artists and thinkers together in meetings, commencing 2021.
The Art/Sensation archive includes articles on the research of emotions and publishes works and texts by artists and curators who are working with the way in which feelings play a role art. The archive is an area for inspiration as well as a source of knowledge in the field of affect studies for writers, institutions, schools, artists and future research in humanities. The initiative is a collective act with contributions from artists, curators, writers and researchers.
Susanne Fessé is the founder and artistic leader at Art/Sensation. She has presented her work “Writing about emotions: a study of how theory of affect can be applied at the intersection of place and work” at the AICA Online International Conference 2020, AICA Turkey, 2020 and at “Art - What is it good for? Education, mediation, criticism,” an international conference arranged at Linnaeus University, in Växjö, Sweden, 2020.
In 2021, her work was presented at Landskrona Foto Festival, The Hasselblad Foundation and at The Department of Sociology, Lund University as part of the international symposium A System Among Others? Power, Balance, Self-reflection on and with the Photographic image. The symposium will take place on-site at Landskrona Theater, Landskrona, Sweden on the 30th September & 1st October.
Art/Sensation also involves Elin Mejergren as creative director and Caitlin E. Littlewood as text editor. We have an advisory board consisting of researcher Vendela Grundell Gachoud, artists Lundahl & Seitl, and curator Ashik Zaman.
Talking and writing about emotions in art and culture is one of the contemporary subjects around the world that is part of the so called “affective turn”. Art/Sensation works in the field of affect theory in art, which is at the forefront of research in postcolonial, feminist and queer studies, as well as in other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, technology and economics. Affect theory can highlight emotions and bodily affect in and around art and culture.
Connect with Art/Sensation
Art/Sensation invites institutions, museums and schools in the field of art and culture to collaborate in the form of exhibitions, meetings, lectures, and critique classes.
If you work as a researcher in the field of affect studies in humanities, are an artist applying emotions in your work or you are a curator with a special interest in feelings, you may have the opportunity to contribute to our research archive.
Art/Sensation receives operating grants from Swedish Arts Council.