Talk

Midterm assessment: PhD fellow Saša Asentić

Accessibility information:

• Black box (Medialab) and Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo are accessible for wheelchair users.
• The program will be in spoken English without live captions, and interpretation in other spoken or sign languages.
• Audio description of video excerpts and visual descriptions of photos will be integrated in the presentation.
• The audience will be offered space for wheelchairs, as weel as chairs and other alternetive seatings.
• Audience members can leave and return at any time during the program.
• The space will be lit throughout the program. There will be no strobe or flickering lights, nor loud, deep or surprising sounds. Each video projection and sound will be announced during the program.
• Early boarding will be offered for those who would require a specific seat or would like to enter earlier and familiarize themselves with the space.
• Content note: there will be a mention of death of disabled people in the WW2, as well as of antifascists, Slavs, Roma and Sinti, LGBTIQ+, and Jewish people.

Saša Asentić presents his doctoral artistic research project: Aesthetics of Access and Politics of Memory.

My research is situated within the framework of the MEMORYWORK project, a platform dedicated to sharing interdisciplinary artistic research on performative memory work.

A central question of MEMORYWORK is: “Whose stories are heard, retold, and given attention?”. As an artist and cultural activist, I share this concern. My practice operates at the intersection of contemporary dance, performance, and disability arts. The critical examination of dance historicization, the process of learning from various witnesses, actors, and participants, and the analysis of diverse forms of both official and alternative archives play a significant role in shaping my artistic and research endeavors. My approach to dance history is influenced by Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, which challenges the notion of history as a continuous, linear process. Instead, it makes the present moment political, aiming to change and revolutionize it as a legacy for the future. In my artistic practice, I employ reconstruction as a method of resistance against ableism in dance and cultural oppression. Through this process, I re-actualize works, concepts, practices, or events from the past that have been overlooked, forgotten, or erased from collective memory and (dance) history.

Another critical concern of the MEMORYWORK project that I engage with is the examination of “intangible structures” that shape how we perceive and remember the past, and consequently, how we understand the world around us. I believe these "intangible" structures are, in fact, very tangible, concrete, and material. The belief that they are elusive, immaterial, or invisible is, in itself, part of the problem. The normative, ableist, capitalist system disciplines us to think, believe, and imagine in ways that maintain the status quo. These structures influence how we perceive, remember, and understand our past, present, and future. In my research project and artistic practice, I strive to articulate anti-ableist struggle as antifascist struggle, and to mobilize "all that which is left out, discarded, destroyed, weakened, and exhausted—from our capacities to think and materialize collectively demands for a more inclusive justice and societal transformation to all the excluded forms of life, as well as new forms of life, or new subjectivities that produce a space for solidarity and commonality in the claims for equality for all.”

Throughout my three-year research period, I work on further development of accessibility provisions within my artistic practice and create research and presentation forms that prioritize accessibility as a core principle. This principle will serve as a foundation for inventing new modes of work, research, and sociability within artistic practice, which will, in turn, shape the aesthetics of access. Accessibility in this work is treated as a material condition, enabling an aesthetics of access that fosters new memories centered on solidarity and social justice. During my midterm assessment presentation, I will present video, audio, and photo documentation of the artistic results created in collaboration with my disabled colleagues, comrades, and friends.

The key question I examined so far in my artistic research activities is:

How can the aesthetics of access create new memories and change the affective states from which we perceive and remember the past, as well as understand the world around us?

As a non-disabled artist and cultural activist with 25 years of anti-ableist practice in the performing arts, I critically reflect on the potential of the aesthetics of access to create new memories and social facts. Additionally, I explore the role and responsibility of the artist, as a public worker, in building anti-discriminatory and accessible structures within the fields of dance and performance.

This midterm assessment will provide an opportunity to discuss my research progress and future directions.

Opponent: Nina Mühlemann

Supervisors: Merete Røstad, Andrej Mirčev

Artistic collaborator attending the midterm assessment event: Angela Alves

Program:

12h – 15h:

• Welcome
• PhD fellow Saša Asentić presents his work and talk about his doctoral project
• Conversation between Nina Mühlemann and Saša Asentić
• Breaks with refreshments
• Questions and response from the audience

11:30h Early boarding

Bio: Saša Asentić

Saša Asentić (pronounced: Saʃa Asentitʃ) is a choreographer and cultural worker.
He was born in a working-class family in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During the war against the SFR Yugoslavia, as an antimilitarist, he illegally escaped in 1995 from Bosnia and found refuge in Serbia, where he became active within the independent cultural scene in the late 1990s.
Since 2007, his artistic work has been presented internationally in major venues and festivals of contemporary performing arts across Germany, as well as in New York, Paris, Tokyo, Vienna, Athens, Moscow, and other cities.
Asentić is a founder of Per.Art organization, which gathers since 1999 a group of disabled and non-disabled artists, that challenge and counter ableism in dance and culture. Asentić works in the intersection of contemporary dance, performance, and disability arts. His artistic practice is based on the principle of solidarity, and resistance against cultural oppression and indoctrination.
After being a victim of homophobic and xenophobic violence, and fundamentally disagreeing with the corruption in the public sector in Serbia and the right-wing renaissance, he moved to Germany in 2011. He lives and works between Oslo, Novi Sad, and Berlin.

Bio: Nina Mühlemann

Nina Mühlemann grew up in Zurich and studied English literature in Basel and London. In late 2017, Nina completed thier PhD at King’s College London, where they also taught, with a dissertation in the fields of performance and disability studies titled "Beyond the Superhuman – Disabled Artists Working in the Context of London 2012." Since 2018, Nina Mühlemann has been working as a performer and artistic director in various artistic projects. Among other things, since 2020, they have co-directed the project Criptonite with Edwin Ramirez, a crip-queer event series that centers the work of disabled artists.

Since 2022, Nina Mühlemann has been working as a postdoctoral researcher in the project "Aesthetics of the Im/Mobile," where they investigate the artistic practices of disabled artists, particularly in relation to travel and im/mobility.