9 questions

In 2014, Swedish performance and visual artist Gustaf Broms composed a list of nine questions that he started to circulate to fellow performance artists, many he had a personal connection with and many more he had never even met. The questions covered a range of paired concepts, the bricks and mortar of performance practice (material/object, audience/receiver, sound/silence, time/rhythm, space/emptiness), and grounded by questions about personal experience, lineage and language. The impulse to gather this collection arose from a conversation Broms had had with another artist; but what makes this volume first and foremost an artist's project is that the questions are asked from the specific perspective of Broms' deep personal understanding that, as a practice, performance resides at the permeable borders between the conscious and subconscious, and the meeting of the concrete world of form and the spiritual realm. For Broms, these are the essential questions. The responses collected are as diverse and wide-ranging as the artists and their own approaches, from the practical, to the abstract to the simply far-flung, in addition to some reassuring and surprising overlapping ideas and connections.