Performance artist, researcher, and activist
Inga Gerner Nielsen is a performance artist, researcher and activist. Her artistic practice emerged through a combination of the three. In addition to making exhibitions and performance installations, she teaches performance and arts-based research methods.
During the´00 years, Inga left the ideal of the kind of withdrawn analysis she was taught to make when studying Sociology. She found immersive performance art to be a direct way to critically engage in societal change. In 2007 she co-founded the activist Copenhagen-based performance collective Club de la Faye. We know Inga in NXT from our time in House of Futures, in which she was she was a partner together with the performance-agency Fiction Pimps. Our biggest project together was the In 100 Years-seminars about the future of sustainability during 2011-2012. Here, Inga used sociological methods to make an action-research of how we could use performance-strategies to form a seminar culture, which welcomed poetic and sensuous modes of knowledge productions as a natural part of creating scenarios and political strategies for the future.
In 2013 Inga directed The Velvet State, Fiction Pimps’ critically acclaimed staging of Roskilde Art Zones. Since then, she has focused intensely on artistic research of what happens in the interaction between audience and performers. Inga has exhibited her works at Sixty Eight Art Institute 2014, as the winner of Leipziger Bewegungskunstpreis at the Hal Aterlierhaus 2015 and in Boy Kunsthal in Sweden. Since moving to the west coast of the northern part of Denmark, she has shown performance installations at KUNSTEN Aalborg Museum of Modern Art, Artspace Tusindfryd, and Kunsthal Nord.
She is now working locally with the group Aalborg Artist Association, AAAA, to better the conditions of artists in the region. And internationally, with the Italian social reading start-up company TwLetteratura on Eutopia Dystopia; A project that has allowed her to return to experiment artistically with the methods of Future Studies first developed with House of Futures. In 2020 Inga Gerner Nielsen got accepted into A.pass, a post-grad education in Advanced Performance and Scenography in Brussels.