How can vulnerability be understood through artistic research, and what can leaks reveal about bodies and environments from queer and posthuman perspectives?
This hybrid seminar, with the title Arts of Vulnerability, explores these questions through bioart, performance and writing, focusing on material relations, entanglements of life and death, and alternative ways of thinking about bodies and ecologies in the present moment.
The seminar engages with artworks such as Wombs and Lament, in which materials including burnt soil, slugs, cellulose-producing bacteria and bioreagents are used to examine vulnerability and uncontainability. Two key concepts are introduced: arts of vulnerability and poetics of uncontainability, offering artistic and theoretical insights that resonate with the instability of our times from feminist and queer perspectives.
The seminar is open to researchers, artists, students and members of the general public, both within and beyond the university. It is organised by The Eco- and Bioart Lab and forms part of the research activities linked to Forma LiU, a strategic initiative at Linköping University supporting creative, design and aesthetic practices and interdisciplinary collaboration. The seminar will be held in English.
About the speaker
Margherita Pevere is an internationally active artist and researcher working with living matter, ecology and biotechnology. Her practice addresses themes such as death, sexuality and vulnerability through object-making, installation, performance and writing.
She received the COAL Prize / Transformative territories mention in 2024 and was nominated for the Falling Walls Awards in the Art and Science category in 2023.
She holds a doctorate in artistic research from Aalto University, with a focus on bioart and queer and feminist studies. Her dissertation, Arts of vulnerability. Queering leaks in artistic research and bioart, is available here for download: margheritapevere.com/writings
