Sensing Agencies on Shaken Grounds at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, The Library
Artist talk, film screening and discussion
Oslo National Academy of the Arts, The Library, Fossveien 24, Oslo, Norway
Forum Dans: Nikolaus Gansterer: Sensing Agencies on Shaken Grounds
In this artist talk, Nikolaus Gansterer offers insight into his practice as an artistic researcher, focusing on two current projects: Contingent Agencies, a long-term artistic research project, and Shaken Grounds.
Both projects examine non-human forces and explore how artistic practices can engage with dynamic environments, shifting temporalities, and states of instability in times of ecological and planetary crisis.
Contingent Agencies (in collaboration with Alex Arteaga) investigates atmospheric forces – such as moods, ambiences, and weather – and their role in shaping sensitive ecosystems on micro and macro scales. Gansterer will present the short film Sensing Contingent Agencies alongside the related publication. The project traces subtle interactions between light and shadow, plants and insects, wind, water, and climate, developing a cinematic and performative approach attuned to barely perceptible agencies.
Shaken Grounds, organized as a research collective with diverse performative approaches (in collaboration with Mariella Greil, Victor Jaschke, Peter Kozek, Werner Moebius, Lucie Strecker), addresses anthropogenic disturbances and seismic forces in the context of the Anthropocene. Bringing together geological processes and political conditions, the project reflects on crisis, trauma, and instability as both material and social phenomena. It asks which practices of seismography and which performative forms can be cultivated to live and act with ongoing tremors across geological timescales, ontological states of vulnerability, and precarious presences.
Across both projects, Gansterer reflects on drawing, movement, and experimental notation as modes of moving-thinking-feeling with complex forces and relational environments, raising ontological questions of coexistence, agency, and presence. The lecture invites the audience into an open dialogue on artistic research as a situated and performative practice.
