My practice moves across performance, somatic art, curation, and extended reality. A recurring question runs through all of it: what does the body know that spoken language doesn't? I have been trained in dance, massage therapy, and art history, disciplines that share a concern with the body as both instrument and site of meaning. Touch is the sense most absent from contemporary art, which remains overwhelmingly organised around vision and sound. There is little terminology for touch in artistic contexts, few shared references, no established frameworks for how to exhibit it, fund it, archive it, or evaluate it. This absence is itself an interesting problem and one I want to examine through making, or rather, being.

This exposition gathers four projects approaching that challenge from different directions: a poetic lexicon mapping touch as political and relational act, a short philosophical musing on the tactile as empirical method, a somatic workshop that translates between dimensions (surfacing story from touch), and a curatorial project bringing together artists in Sweden who work at the intersection of technology and the sensing body.

The exposition itself is an argument about form. I wanted the container to enact what the projects are about. The primary reason for this choice is the very fact that I wish to explore whether the tactile can be transmitted through a screen. My touch is translated to a click, one might argue I am thus disembodied. Yet, the gesture of reaching toward an object, of activating something through contact, is still something that is preserved and re-enacted in cyberspace.

The four projects mentioned above propose touch as a form of knowing (or at least a form of finding-out-about) by the somatic sense. They ask what artistic research looks like when its primary instrument is the body and its primary site is the encounter between bodies. By the way, why didn’t I ask what artistic research feels like?

The question is timely. As haptic technologies develop and somatic practices move into institutional contexts (more often than not through a digital channel), the field needs a vocabulary, a set of shared references, a critical framework, and a platform. This exposition is a small contribution to that work: four gestures in the direction of a practice that is still largely unnamed.