Art & Research : Symposium : Finite Future. Accountability and Sanctuaries

On June 13, 2025, AHC invited to a symposium in two parts under the shared title Finite Future. Accountability and Sanctuaries. It is based on the artistic research of Michala Paludan and Ghost Agency (Anni Garza Lau and Gro Sarauw).

The symposium engaged the themes of accountability and justice through a discussion of artistic method: how to make abusers of social or planetary space accountable, whether they are human and/or systemic? How to articulate and address harm, also inside of movements or projects that seek justice? How to constitute processes of accountability?

Crucially, the question of temporality tied together the two parts of the symposium. That is, how to think and act in relation to futurity – to events that haven’t taken place, and to agencies and temporalities that do not necessarily exist yet.

Michala Paludan and Ghost Agency are Micro Institutes at AHC.

OM MIKRO-INSTITUTTER
Praksisbaseret forskning er vigtigt for det kunstneriske eksperiment: Det berører centrale aspekter af samtidskunst, så som værkskabelse, metodeudvikling, kunstnerens rolle og økonomi, kunstens offentligheder, og spørgsmål om videns- og erfaringsproduktion i kunsten.

Mikro-instituttet er baseret på idéen om, at den kunstneriske proces skaber et overskud af æstetisk erfaring gennem en mangfoldig bearbejdning af viden, sprog og materialer, ofte i fællesskab med andre, inklusive forskere, specialister, publikummer, sociale fællesskaber. Men ikke alle elementerne i den kunstneriske proces ender i værkets og kunstnersignaturens færdige og afsluttede former.

Eksperimentet med mikro-instituttet består derfor i at gøre selve den kunstneriske proces – i al sin diversitet – til omdrejningspunkt for et forskningsforløb, udfoldet i tæt relation til relevante sociale og faglige fællesskaber, partnerskaber, og offentligheder, og på den måde bidrage på nye måder til skabelsen af kollektive erfaringer.

ABSTRACTS

Making Nature, the death of us 
This symposium investigates questions of futurity seen through the gaze of knowing that nature will be the death of us. The reification of nature and the idolization of alienation have consistently instituted the modern ‘human’ as colonial not by exception but by rule, and catastrophism might yet be but another (self-)dramatization within this scenario. The matter that was made to be ‘nature’, to figure as the outside of us, for use, for degradation, for externalization, will lose its humanized form, but it will not lose its life when we lose ours.

How does this knowledge reflect on our present and how can we think about accountability within this scenario? We want to discuss accountability, a concept originating from the violent deadlocks imported into political organizing by the societal powers that this organizing opposes, within the horizon of imperial extractivism: accountability as a way of addressing a harm that is both inflicted and received throughout. Can accountability processes help to find an understanding of ourselves as being implicated in but no less averse to the imperial endings we are facing? How can we imagine time passing within a horizon of finite futurity? And for whom?

With Michala Paludan, Kerstin Stakemeier, Pinko Collective and Josephine Berry.

Digital Sanctuaries
Justice-oriented practices are typically known for their post-crime research methods with which state and corporate violations are analysed retrospectively and based on evidence. By contrast, Ghost Agency adopts an explorative and preventative stance focusing on present and future injustices to pre-empt their manifestation as crimes — what can be described as pre-crime aesthetics.

This raises vital questions: Can justice-oriented practices extend into proactive domains of future scenario planning and designs towards change? How to comprehend human agency in relation to a reframing of systemic violations and systemic change? Can the present be reclaimed through the proposal of digital sanctuaries?

With Anni Garza Lau, Gro Sarauw, Marisa Cohn, Nicolay Boyadjiev and Christina Varvia.

ABOUT MICRO INSTITUTES
Practice-based research touches on structural aspects of contemporary art, including the development of methods, the role of the artist, and new arrangements of knowledge-making.

The Micro Institute is a unique, experimental format for practice-based research. It consists of a one or two-year research residency for an artist or a curator, alone or in collaboration. The format is built from the assumption that the artistic process creates a surplus of aesthetic experience through a diverse processing of knowledge, language, and exchanges with others – including researchers and social communities. But not all the elements of this process are used in, or wholly represented by, the final form of the work and the artist’s signature.

The experiment with the micro institute lies in the attempt to make this multiplicity of the artistic process itself the pivot of a research framework, developed with relevant publics, partnerships and communities, and thus contribute in new ways to the production of artistic and collective experience.

ABOUT MICHALA PALUDAN
Michala Paludan is an artist who works with how power is produced and negotiated across networks and movements, through media such as video, photography and installation. In her Micro Institute at AHC (2023-25) Paludan has explored the material implications of automation and AI, focusing on how these technologies shape discourse and affect social reproduction, particularly in relation to gendered labour in the domestic sphere. By engaging senses beyond sight, such as touch, her projects have investigated the distribution of behaviour and embodiment between humans and machines, subjects and objects, and representations and their referents. The outcomes have included the exhibition I am Your Body, Chapter 1 – Automation at Kunsthal Aarhus and the publication of the artist book The Unposed (EoAT). Kerstin Stakemeier has acted as mentor for Paludan’s Micro Institute since the fall of 2024 and together they have been exploring questions of futurity seen through the gaze of knowing that nature will be the death of us, and how to create images of the present with this knowledge in mind.

ABOUT GHOST AGENCY
The work of Ghost Agency – Gro Sarauw and Anni Garza Lau – revolves around gender and environmental injustices. Central to their effort of pursuing accountability is a focus on how power misuses technology to manipulate time as a medium for the perpetuation of injustice and impunity. The result of this manipulation is temporal dissonance, in a society that neither acknowledges the present reality nor engages meaningfully with its past or future. Rooted in the specific context of Mexico, they investigate how gender violence and techno-impunity converge in systemic patterns of abuse and explore how the present might be reclaimed through the proposal of digital sanctuaries. In this way, Ghost Agency operates at the intersection of artistic practice, digital technology, and humanitarian inquiry between Mexico, the U.S., and Europe. Ghost Agency has exhibited in Mexico City, Tecate (MX), Los Angeles, San Diego, Barcelona and Copenhagen. Aside from developing cybersecurity technologies and literacies with their team in translocal settings, they lecture and teach at art schools and universities.