Forum Artistic Research: suspended in language?

Symposium 25–27 June 2026, Gustav Mahler Private University for Music (GMPU), Klagenfurt, Austria

Call for Contributions

Deadline: 02 February 2026

We invite artists-researchers from all disciplines to contribute to the second interdisciplinary Forum Artistic Research with the theme ‘suspended in language?’

Theme

Language is a fundamental component of artistic research. A core activity of artist-researchers involves navigating the complex tension between verbal clarity and a material heterogeneity which resists categorisation. Language itself displays many inconsistencies and frictions. It is at the same time abstracted from materiality and entangled with it, as inscription always happens through embodied, performative, and material processes. Thus, language is simultaneously immanent and transcendent to materiality. As a political and ontologising agent, language affords and forecloses at the same time: it provides the mobility of abstraction away from determinist conditions, but it can also solidify into systems of power and perception. Language can legitimate and delegitimise, clarify and obscure, constrain and liberate.

What would a state of suspension in language mean? What does the operation of suspending entail? The term suspension suggests a variety of possibilities. First, it means bringing something to a halt, taking something out of its course and efficacy, and by consequence also pausing its power. Suspension comes with the tentativeness of a possible resume. In this sense it could be a gesture of deferral of decisions, or of keeping futurity at a distance. Suspension also defies rigidity, it introduces the modality of elasticity, it plays with weight and gravity, it permits playfulness. Have you ever tried talking squid? To be suspended can be either an impasse or a form of support. In a chemical suspension, solid matter is held by a liquid. A “suspension in” thus points at a fluid medium in which something more solidified is held.

With the theme of “suspended in language?” we invite artists and researchers to investigate possible relationships between these two terms. They could also be turned around: language(s) in suspension? Such suspension of language might mean reframing temporal and linear structures within a spatial regime (e.g., a web, a hypertext, an environment). It could point to opportunities for asemic and alinguistic forms of inscription and writing. It could point to a situation we (inevitably) find ourselves in. It could also point to the act of suspending as a conscious artistic operation. Should we actively pursue it, or should we rather escape it?

Call

We welcome presentation proposals regarding all artistic practices that relate to the theme or that explore any of the following sub-themes:

• The relationship between inscription and body
• The relationship between verbal and non-verbal modes of articulation
• The relationship between text and materiality (e.g. asemic writing)
• Text as texture (including visual, sonic, haptic textures, etc.)
• Thinking beyond and within language
• Performing linguistic structures
• Forms of spatial writing
• The limits and opportunities of computational languages and tokenisation
• Language as unique feature of humans vs language of non-human agents
• Losing the capacity to speak, gaining the capacity to babble
• Forms of resistance against / with / beyond language
• Critique of text as an agent of legitimation or delegitimation
• Suspension and language as possibilities for connecting / separating different agents or collaborators
• The possibility of shared practices through non-verbal artistic propositions
• Suspension and suspending as artistic operations
• Elasticity, gravity, and floating, either as objects of research or as epistemic metaphors

Submission

Please download the PDF form, fill and save it, and send it no later than Monday, 02 February 2026 to submit@forum-artistic-research.net. If you submit as multiple authors, attach an extra author form for each additional author. Upon acceptance of the proposal, at least one author must register and be present at the symposium. Submissions receive a single-blind peer review, and we plan an online publication of the proceedings based on a second call after the end of the symposium. See the FAQ for common questions.

About the Organisers

The Gustav Mahler Private University for Music (GMPU) in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee is an academic institution of the state of Carinthia, Austria’s southernmost state at the intersection of the Alps-Adriatic region that connects cultures and language communities. Founded on a long history of music education and emerging from the Carinthian State Conservatory, the Mahler university is a young and thriving institution that stands for variety, internationality and diversity. The second Forum Artistic Research marks its ambition to continuously foster an environment for Artistic Research, with a PhD in the Arts programme currently in the process of accreditation.

contact: info@forum-artistic-research.net
conference chairs: Lucia D’Errico, Hanns Holger Rutz

Gustav Mahler Private University for Music
Mießtalerstraße 8, 9020 Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria