by Artistic Research PhD Candidates of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Supervisor: Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond
“Confusion: As Resistance, As Embodiment, and Towards Relationality” explores the potential of confusion as a strategy of resistance. While confusion is often understood as the limits of comprehension, this project develops an understanding of the political and affective dimensions of confusion that arise from the presencing, performance, and embodiment of confusion.
This approach to confusion – as a double-bound concept of liberatory potential and affective disorientation – is informed by queer- and crip-epistemologies. Confusion is also informed by work that considers the resistant potential of other forms of counter-legibility in an institutional-individual context. Special attention is given to Édouard Glissant’s development of a right to opacity, Jack Halberstam’s queering of failure, and Tina Campt’s articulation of refusal in her theorising of a Black gaze.
In exploring the resistant potential and disorienting affect of confusion, this project uses a three-part research trajectory that includes photographic and text-based work exploring illegibility, socially engaged events that experiment with radical forms of relationality, and cross-disciplinary engagements that build relationships between varied fields of practice and research.
Jo O’Brien is an artist, educator, and researcher whose work explores the queer-crip potential of confusion as both a politicised form of resistance and a call for collaboration. Their practice includes material and social forms of art-making, practice-based and traditional research, and access-oriented pedagogy and community building in the university context. Joe’s work is often collaborative. Their pedagogical research has been supported through fellowships and grants, and they have exhibited and published work in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Ireland, and Austria. They are currently a Lecturer in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a doctoral candidate in the Artistic Research PhD Programme at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where their current project examines the relationship between legibility, confusion, and community.