Encountering

Gatherings and trajectories

Drop-in writing/studio trajectories with contributors

This summer, the apophatic.art community comes together through a series of open virtual sessions — drop-in writing and studio time to sit with what apophatic thinking means in and through your work. We open on July 8 and 9 with a shared kick-off, followed by weekly smaller co-working virtual sessions.

The abstract 'What is?' question might be treated as the leading question (the classical τί ἐστιν?) that apophatic thinking subverts. It may be counterproductive to lay down definitions, but we can reflect on why and seek to invent alternative approaches to orienting thought to what escapes and exceeds our conceptual control.

Vision Lab Dream Incubation Studio

This summer, Vision Lab, one of the partners of the apophatic.art initiative, will offer an independent six-week Dream Incubation Studio for a small cohort of working artists, scholars, writers, musicians, performers, filmmakers, and contemplative practitioners working at the intersection of mystical tradition and serious creative practice. The studio engages with comparative mysticism, the apophatic tradition, visionary and prophetic poetics, and contemporary philosophical work on imagination, perception, and unknowing. Please contact us for more information.

Conferences

In late June, Merel and Ryan brought apophatic.art to the Society for Artistic Research conference in Galway, Ireland — joining a global gathering of artists, researchers, choreographers, poets, and other practitioners from across Europe, North America, and beyond. We opened a workshop on Mutable Data with a simple provocation. From there, we moved into the project itself: its questions, its strategies, its contributors' voices. The conversations were generative. Several participants expressed interest in joining the project, and we came away with new connections and a renewed sense that apophatic thinking has something real to offer the field right now. The next day, we took part in a roundtable on the future of artistic research — a conversation that felt unexpectedly aligned with the questions apophatic.art has been sitting with. We were moved by contributions from all panelists, like Synne Tollerud Bull, Margit Wirth, and Gwen Rakotovao. Earlier that day, Henk Borgdorff's keynote closed with a vision of knowledge and knowing that resonated deeply with apophatic thought — a reminder that the field is finding its way toward questions we recognize.

Mutable Data: Artistic Apophatic Research

This workshop opens space for grappling with precarious, mutable forms of data by deepening the potential of artistic research through apophatic thought — the recognition that some realities exceed description and can only be approached through indirection, pointing, negation, and silence. Across three parts, participants engage existing artistic strategies, also drawing from the Soft Data/Base project (Woodring 2025). Pushing beyond passive notions of quantified selfhood endemic to platform capitalism, this segment focuses on the transformative potential of contextualizing certain forms of artistic practice as mutable data in a time of personal data leakage and extraction.

A not-quite round table: apophatic artistic research at risk

Apophatic approaches have shaped artistic practices for centuries, yet contemporary artistic researchers rarely invoke apophatic thought as a lens. Apophatic studies thus occupy a precarious, minoritized position, its rich conceptual knowledge at risk of being lost — and with it, a valuable resource for artistic researchers (Visse, 2024, 2025). Participants will engage with unique apophatic concepts such as excess, propensity, indirectness, and maturation through artistic research. The not-quite round table sits with a multimodal, curated publication and exhibition, circling an ongoing project — a multimodal, curated publication and exhibition on apophatic artistic research, spanning visual art, performance, media, and time-based art, and hybrid practices including bioart, land art, and conceptual art; spaces where naming often falls short.