Artist Statement/ Biography

As a researcher and artist, Merel’s work is about investigating moral spaces in society: spaces where moral judgements are temporarily postponed, focusing on the manifestation of the work as it appears. Paradoxically, moral spaces create space for an artistic practice where there is no 'ethics', no guideline, no predetermined right or wrong. Merel believes that attentiveness to what dwells outside our conceptions and language can offer us another approach to the challenges we face. In her work, “to live the question” is vital. In more recent projects, Merel zooms in on the topic of artistic inquiry and precariousness. Her multi-layered, dialectic approach to theory and practice includes materials, varying mediums, people, and institutions. A fusion of language, drawing, painting, installation and social collaboration, her work results in conversations, writings, workshops and exhibitions, all focused on moral life, like the topic of care and precariousness.

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Merel Visse, PhD., is an Associate Professor at the University of Humanistic Studies in The Netherlands, where she received a grant for female scholars to develop her ideas on the encounter of aesthetics and ethics. Merel's work has always been interdisciplinary and inclusive of ethics, philosophy, aesthetics, the literary sciences, and participatory methodology. In 2016, her arts-based project Nested Tensions in Care, developed at the School of Visual Arts in New York, inquired into socio-political tensions in everyday life from an ethical viewpoint of care. The work was published in 2017 by the AMA Journal of Ethics. Before that, Merel developed a performance approach to ‘Autoetnography as a praxis of care’ and more recently, her work ‘Liminal’ (2017) was part of a group exhibit at The Art of Belonging in The Netherlands.