CONDOLENCES, COFFEE, AND CONFETTI: UNDERSTANDING GRIEF IN THE PRACTICE OF ARTISTS
The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn global attention to the social, political, and cultural conditions that shape how, what, and whom we grieve, while also exposing persistent inequalities in grief theory and practice. At the same time, growing dissatisfaction with the individualization and medicalisation of grief has led to an increasing call for alternative grief practices that go beyond private and therapeutic settings. Artists have increasingly filled this gap by developing practices that challenge existing, medicalised scripts of grief and propose other ways of dealing with loss more collectively. However, scientific understanding of how such collective practices come about, and how grief is embedded in the artistic practice of artists, remains limited. This PhD project therefore examines how contemporary artists conceive collective forms of grief and how their practices renegotiate and challenge existing frameworks of grief. Based on qualitative research, it explores how artists develop, materialise, and present art around grief, with a particular focus on the strategies and contexts that shape artistic practice.
