Alternative Temporalities, Inclusive Futures: Artistic Practices and Peace

Application summary

This research project advances a transformative approach to peace by foregrounding lived temporalities and artistic practices as critical, yet under-explored, dimensions of how peace is created and sustained in everyday life. It investigates how artistic practices – particularly visual arts, dance, performance, storytelling, curating, handicrafts and community-based activities – engage with diverse temporal experiences and foster dialogue across social, political, and gendered divides. These practices cultivate community agency and challenge dominant, often linear and institutional understanding how peace is created. Through fieldwork in Iran, Colombia, South Korea, and the Nordic region, the project collaborates with local artists, curators, activists, and scholars to explore how artistic expressions can enact peace beyond formal frameworks. By attending to the temporal and affective dimensions of artistic engagement, the research highlights how peace is lived, negotiated, and contested across different cultural and political contexts in the everyday. Theoretically, the project contributes to the temporal turn in peace research, offering new conceptual and methodological tools for understanding peace as a dynamic and plural process. It bridges critical peace studies with artistic research, emphasising the importance of embodied, situated, and creative practices in reimagining sustainable and inclusive peace.