I’d like to invite you to a small drawing experiment called Capturing the Ineffable.
Throughout the day, we find ourselves surrounded by different voices, meanings, and situations — and we often respond before we can fully describe what we’re actually doing.
At the back of the hall, you’ll find a set of signs. They don’t carry any fixed meaning — they come to life only when you place them in relation to one another and create your own small “here and now” diagram.
I’d be glad if, during the symposium, you paid attention to where you find yourself at different moments — what affects you or shifts your perspective — and captured these changing situations on the cards available to you at any time.
You can place your finished diagrams in the box labeled “the ineffable”, or keep them with you for the final visual encounter.
Final Visual Encounter
Please come one at a time and in silence.
Sit down, place your diagram on the table,
and let the visual exchange unfold.
When you receive your drawing back,
the encounter is complete.
Please come one at a time and in silence.
Sit down, place your diagram on the table,
and let the visual exchange unfold.
When you receive your drawing back,
the encounter is complete.
part of the AVU Doctoral Symposium 2025
Anotation:
We Know More Than We Can Tell // Capturing the Ineffable
Moving through the layers of everyday realities requires the ability to perceive and to understand different languages. The search for meaning and its sharing with others is a series of translational acts, where meanings emerge and dissolve depending on who translates, for whom, and under what circumstances. Language is a shifting field of relationality: what language is depends directly on where it is, where it flows, and which spaces it inhabits.
Within artistic research, there often unfolds a dynamic tension between verbal and aesthetic language. Words are frequently used to bridge the space between artistic practice and reflection: they can make present, contextualize, and communicate the research process in ways that are meaningful to others. Yet they can also act as fog machines, shrouding meanings in unreadability, where everything is lost in translation—including ourselves. Research thus becomes a process of translation or transposition, where meanings are continually born and lost in the passage between different linguistic regimes.
This year’s doctoral symposium explores “language” as a malleable space of emergent meanings and relations, where knowledge becomes present in the gaps between intuition and rationality, intention and chance, signal and noise. In resonance with Polanyi’s insight that “We know more than we can tell”*, we seek to examine how to capture the ineffable, how to see through the fog, and how to express that which resists naming. What meanings are born and what meanings vanish in the interstices between different forms and shapes of language—artistic and scientific, verbal and embodied, visual and multisensory, human and more-than-human?
xxx
3.12.2025 at AVU, Veletržní - Black Hall
Organisation: Markéta Dolejšová + Hana Chmelíková, Lucie Nováčková, Johana Novotná
photo: Anna Kassahunova