Imri Sandström
About Imri Sandström
Imri Sandström is an artist, writer, and artistic researcher. Informed by queer feminist and decolonial thinking and practice, she is invested in issues regarding language, history, performativity, and transdisciplinarity. In 2019 she completed her thesis Tvärsöver otysta tider / Across Unquiet Times and earned her doctoral degree in literary composition from HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University. As of January 2022 Sandström is running the research project Writing Visual Relations.
Writing Visual Relations investigates into possibilities of writing about visual art. Through the literary mode of ekphrastic writing, the research inquires into writing in relation to the non-photographic still image. The research investigates the potentialities of writing the visual, while examining connections, differences and indebtedness between image and text. While there is a tradition within the history of visual art, as well as of literature, to critically engage with image and text, the area is fraught with issues. With the continued focus on writing in the visual art education, with increased possibilities of literary online publishing, and with the growing field of artistic research where writing plays a critical part, these issues are gaining both dimension and ubiquity.
The research is conducted through the transdisciplinary method of performance writing, and draws on new materialist ideas. Considering the area and the actions (such as writing and performing language) performative rather than representational, the research interrogates differences and power relations, while engaging in a non-oppositional venture into the relations between visuality and textuality.