Call: Performance and Performativity in Art and Society

29.04.2026

Call: Performance and Performativity in Art and Society

Performance forms the foundation of theatre, live art, performance art, and other performing arts. In visual arts and visual culture studies, the notions of performance and performativity open into further debates around presentation and presentability – in various contexts of arts and the artistic research that arises from them.

Performance and performativity as/in art and as/in research is also inseparably woven into the increasingly complex fabric of society. At the same time, in our society, art, artists, and institutions are subject to unprecedented political opposition, even hostility.

As societal conditions change, the relations between performance/performativity and politics/the political also shift continuously. Key political theorists such as Chantal Mouffe (2005, 2013), Jacques Rancière (1999, 2010), and Slavoj Žižek (1999, 2000) argued some time ago that we have entered a post‑political era in which antagonism is denied in order to achieve consensus. Performance theorist Janelle Reinelt (2019), for her part, already nearly a decade ago emphasised the need to rethink “a more integrated, collective, and multifaceted approach to the concept of political and to practical politics”. In the current societal situation – as the mainstreaming of the far right continues, among other developments – we can already observe a shift away from the post‑political phase. At the same time, the political dimension and the question of political agency appear to have returned to the performing arts and to artistic performance.

In this issue of RUUKKU, we invite artists and researchers to ask, examine, and propose, how the relations between performance, performativity, the presentation/presentability of art, society, and the political emerge and take shape in our time, from the perspective of artistic research. Editors of this issue: Tuija Kokkonen, Maiju Loukola, Nora Rinne, Timo Tähkänen.

Expositions may address, for example, the following questions and areas, but also many others:

1) What is the significance of embodied, material, often slow and messy, site‑ and time‑specific performative and presentational practices in artistic research? What methods and forms do performance-based and other performative artistic practices offer artistic research at a time when approaches allowing research to be conducted entirely at the desk are also gaining strength?

Possible topics include:

  • Performance‑making as method, research approach, and argument

  • Performativity, presentability, expositionality as method and research approach

  • The effects of site‑specificity, temporality, and materiality

  • Forms of documentation as part of evidence

  • Ethical and institutional tensions

2) What are the practices, forms, and meanings of performance and performativity in society today?

Possible topics include:

  • Performance, performativity, the political, politics

  • Other species, interspecies relations, and the politics of performance

  • Critiques of normativity, queer approaches, performativisation

  • Class issues in performance and in the art field

  • The relevance today of the concepts of the performance society and the performance paradigm

  • Children, young people, and performance

3) What are the current modes of presenting artistic research – where, how, and through what materialities does research manifest itself?

Possible topics include:

  • Forums, spaces, bodies, materialities, and contexts for presenting and performing artistic research

  • Curatorial politics in the performances and presentations of artistic research

  • Established, emerging, and potential practices of performing and presenting

  • Process-based work and its performative forms within artistic research

Established in 2013, RUUKKU is a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal for artistic research. It is published on Research Catalogue (RC), an international publication platform and database that enables multimedia elements. RUUKKU is published and supported by the University of the Arts Helsinki, Aalto School of Arts, Design and Architecture, and the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland. The primary languages of publication are Finnish, Swedish, and English. https://ruukku.journal.fi/

We ask contributors to prepare a draft research exposition on the Research Catalogue (RC) platform: http://www.researchcatalogue.net/. The draft should make clear the content of the exposition and provide an initial outline of the exposition architecture – that is, how the developed exposition will be structured. Proposals should be submitted via the RC catalogue (“publish”, “submit”, “Ruukku”) by 30 September 2026. Note: using RC requires obtaining user permissions and registering (see “register”). Based on the drafts, the editorial team will select the research expositions to be developed further. The deadline for the revised expositions will be confirmed as the editorial process progresses, but finalised expositions will be sent for peer review during 2026.

Detailed instructions for submitting expositions (also drafts)  at https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/661336/1813576