This is a short reader to HAUT’s ongoing engagement with the notion of ‘artistic feedback’ and was born out of the critical reflections that were introduced during a two-day seminar PERSPECTIVES ON: WEIRD / STRANGE / QUEER FEEDBACK, held at HAUT on the 20th–21st of November 2025, produced together with TOASTER. The seminar was organised by HAUT’s artistic leader Alex Blum together with Elioa Steffen and Szymon Adamczak from the pedagogical research project Institute of Otherwise Possibilities (IPOP). The seminar also welcomed contributions from Xiri Tara Noir (in collaboration with Sall Lam Toro’s care rider), Mette Tranholm, Marie Mors, Escarleth Romo Pozo and Cosmo M. Soltani. But above all, the seminar was shaped by the thoughtful, generous insights shared by its participants.
‍

The two-day program included discussions on needs-based feedback, presentations of queer feedback methodologies, and guided practical exercises that aimed to open up alternative feedback formats in which artists and institutions can develop nourishing feedback environments in resonance with one another. Environments that are able to grapple with the frictions and asymmetries of knowledge and power as constructive sites of artistic transformation, creation and feedback.

HAUT's noton of feedback

As an institution with the focus to challenge and expand the performing arts, the notion of feedback is essential to our organisation. Continuously, we do our best to insist on asking: How can performing arts institutions improve the elements and structures of artistic development and feedback for the artists? How can we circumvent the power asymmetries and find other, softer forms to nurture artistic development? How can we queer feedback, and consequently broaden and outline what institutional bodies like HAUT can do?
‍

PERSPECTIVES ON: WEIRD / STRANGE / QUEER FEEDBACK was an attempt at directing our gaze towards the processes of artistic feedback and how we might queer them, informed by the accountability that comes with being an institution, since we inadvertently enforce structure and norm on the modes of artistic production and development that we invite to HAUT. Amid ongoing cuts to cultural funding and the rise of state-mandated fascism, we find it crucial to question ourselves and to open a broader conversation on feedback with our artists and audiences.
We ask:

How can HAUT hold space for the specific needs articulated by artists themselves? And how can not only HAUT, but the performing arts scene at large, organise itself around a critical approach to normative protocols and provide more survivable conditions for artists to investigate and develop their work on their own terms?
‍

These questions can of course never be perfectly answered, but rather always dwell in a polyvocal friction of possible answers. Yet, we have insisted on being with these questions, as they are elemental to any artistic development and should be of interest to any institution that focuses on the development of artistic practices.
‍

But why are we focusing on feedback? A plausible answer could be that artistic practices (and the processes of their development) have found themselves tied to the practices of feedback via the academisation of art. Feedback holds a prominent role within Western educational systems and the pedagogies that they offer. In formal education contexts, feedback has a specific role in learning, evaluation and assessment. Traditionally, feedback has functioned as an objective assessment of a work of art or an individual artistic practice. Feedback is made to critically evaluate a work or practice, often by deploying an objective disinterestedness that aims to improve the work or practice in question. Unfortunately, this form of feedback does not take care of the artist's needs, which can directly undermine the development of artistic work. Rather, it tends to erase the positionality of the one giving feedback, and undermines the subject positions that inform the way we approach, support and advice artistic practices and their journeys.

As with many other performance institutions, feedback has been a central element of the artist development formats we have offered at HAUT and is something we continue to work with moving forward. We therefore found it especially important to both question and highlight the meaning and intention of feedback (as well as our own accountability as an institution) to see how it can be adapted and evaluated in resonance with the many voices of the performing art scene.
‍

‍
On Queering Feedback
‍
So what might it mean to queer (verb) rather than just being queer (noun)? This is a contentious question, with as many answers as letters in this book, and much like jazz and porn, hard to identify but you know it when you see it. So what do we look for in an act of queering? Queering seems to be about connecting on the one hand resisting violence with on the other projections of queer potentiality. That is to say it is about bridging acts of stopping (or at least reducing) harm with efforts to create positive possibilities and futures. In the realm of feedback, this can mean recognizing how protocols create (and are often based) normativities and make more space for alternative ways of engaging with artistic work. It can also mean pursuing ways of being with work that are more gentle and caring for the artist or in other ways invite in greater expressions of one’s ideal ways of being.

A Queer Feedback Handbook, p. 23.
‍

When speaking and thinking about feedback, we have focused especially on the non-identitarian practices of IPOP and their understanding of queering as a verb. But what does this mean exactly? One answer could be that queering inserts a criticality into how we go about things and actively focuses on opening the institutional framing to other points of view than its own; positions which might create potential conflicts with the powers of the institution itself. Rather than asking how things might benefit the institutional framework, we might take the notion of feedback from the position of the artist, their own work and survivability: How can feedback become an enjoyable moment that makes their practice more sustainable? How can feedback incorporate the care and aftercare needed for artists to actually use what is fed back to them, to build artistic works and practices that are more survivable?

For IPOP, the pursuit of queering (verb) is not just about LGBTQ+ artists, but can serve all artists and students. One example might be the ways in which normative violence often affects straight, cis people. We see normativity pop up in feedback moments all the time. Whether in the assumption of neuro-typical processing, ableist structures, English as an assumed common language, assumptions about class, etc. Cis, straight people are also often in need of non-normative ways to feedback artistic work. Queering as a verb can remind as well of the notion of “the queer use”, which implies the capacity for thinking and shaping reality outside of the norms and conventions of the everyday: for example, in an action that diverts from the intended use of things.
‍
A Queer Feedback Handbook, p. 24.
‍

Learning from the strategies of queering, ‘to queer feedback’ must also mean that we acknowledge the sources from which the very notion of ‘queering’ something comes: the communities of LGBTQ+ people, their struggles for survivability and societal recognition. In a world of rampant discrimination and violence against queer and trans people, most of all trans women of color, we see it as necessary that we not only open ourselves up to the knowledge that already exists in these movements and communities, but actually focus on supporting and improving the conditions of performing LGBTQ+ artists in general.
‍

One thing we have focused on during the seminar was ways for feedback to incorporate actions, emotions and affects that are otherwise erased from a feedback situation. Can feedback be enjoyable? Can feedback be less about presenting constructive feedback and more about attuning to the loops of feedback we are already entwined in? Can a feedback session be more about holding someone or something (an artistic project, let’s say) and less about dissecting and analyzing it? Can feedback include the work after feedback? Can it hold the mental and bodily digestion of what is being fed back? These are just a small selection of the questions HAUT insists on being with in order to navigate its own responsibility as an art institution This is not to say that certain protocols for feedback are better than others, but to say that feedback shouldn’t come with a one-size-fits-all protocol. Queering means adjusting; it means being in constant contestation over what and how feedback can be.

When focusing on attuning to and resonating with the specific needs of each artist, of finding consensual forms of feedback rather than analyzing the work or practice from a static position of disinterestedness, new possibilities unfold while frictions and asymmetries become palpable. This will be strange and weird, but we must all learn to unlearn the notions of these feelings as being something bad. And once we do that, we might begin to queer our own loops of feedback.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
‍
Ruby Nilsson (SE. 1993) is an artist and writer who has been working in between the fields of performing and visual arts since 2018. She recently started working as an assistant at HAUT, alongside her studies at The Royal Danish Art Academy.


Credits
Talks & Presentations: Mette Tranholm, Marie Mors, Elioa Steffen (IPOP), Szymon Adamczak (IPOP)
Workshops: Alex Blum, Xiri Noir og Cosmo M. Soltani
‍Platforms & Publications: In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities (IPOP), A Queer Feedback Handbook: Experiments in Otherwise Arts Education

‍

‍