'I think I now know' captures the author's active and continuing reflection on over two decades of performance art practice through the lens of critical reflection, considering the complex and evolving relationship between artistic practice and research. Given as a keynote at the second international biennial Colloquium on Artistic Research in the Performing Arts (CARPA) organised by the University of the Arts Helsinki's Theatre Academy, this performance lecture questions what and how knowledge of and from performance art practice can be understood through engagement with embodied experience, temporality, and context as defining properties of practice as research. The lecture is conceived methodologically as a meta-performance in itself involving live improvised recall and reflection responding to a rapid series of fragmentary images documenting work from 20 years of practice. In this way, Hunter examines how, when revisited over time, reflective practice resists final knowing and instead enters a space of perpetual becoming, uncertainty and fragility of memory. Framed by thinkers such as Rancière, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Boal, the author focuses on his long-term practice-as-research project, Civil Twilight, a series of walking performances over periods of sunset and sunrise in public squares across Europe, the Middle East and North America, exploring the relationships between history, ideology and cultural identity and how the more recent The Heritage of Militarism / The Militarism of Heritage offers a reflexive continuation of this methodology. By providing an extended first-person reflection on Hunter's performance practice as research, the keynote highlights possible methods and approaches before, during and after action by which we can understand performance art practice as artistic research more broadly, including in institutional and political terms.
Roddy Hunter (Sat,) studied this question.