SESSION: Esotericism, Creativity, and Artistic Practice

The academic study of esotericism is undergoing a phase of expansion and diversification, and its intersections with art are awakening wider interest. However, many efforts remain superficial, such as attempts to incorporate Hilma af Klint into the canon of abstract art as a ‘pioneer’ or the inclusion of women surrealists like Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun into the master narrative of surrealism. These approaches often fail to critically reassess deeper frameworks and risk reinforcing established hierarchies.

This session explores more nuanced ways of understanding the esoteric dimensions of artistic practice. By shifting attention from finished artworks to processes of creation, it considers artistic practice as a form of knowledge production in which boundaries between artist, medium, and external forces become porous.

The session highlights how esotericism can challenge conventional ideas about authorship, genius, and linear progress, while also drawing attention to the gendered frameworks that have historically marginalised women artists and other underrepresented voices. It brings together historical and contemporary perspectives to examine how art and esotericism intersect in transformative and often unexpected ways.

Session Convenors:

Nina Kokkinen, Donner Institute

Marja Lahelma, Finnish National Gallery, Ateneum Art Museum

Session Speakers:

Nina Kokkinen, Donner Institute

Marja Lahelma, Finnish National Gallery, Ateneum Art Museum

Artistic Process as Esoteric Practice

This paper focuses on the artistic process as esoteric practice, examining the issue from an art historical and theoretical perspective. Our starting point is the understanding of art making as esoteric and, more specifically, transmutative practice. This indicates that the artist recognises the (embodied and material) practice as a way of evoking aspects of reality that would otherwise remain unknown, revealing hidden knowledge and generating a more profound vision of reality. At the same time, the artistic process transforms its practitioner, and art becomes an instrument of spiritual development or transmutation, often with a redemptive function.

Building on the art historian Dario Gamboni’s observation that modern art often foregrounds ambiguity and incompleteness in ways that redirect attention to the act of making, we show how such process-oriented approaches can be interwoven with esoteric modes of practice. By shifting focus from the finished object to the dynamics of creation, we consider the artistic process in its totality as esoteric practice, one that includes embodied and material engagement as well as the belief systems that motivate it. The process is frequently described by artists as guided by forces beyond conscious control, such as cosmic or natural energies, intermediary beings, altered states of mind, or the agency of materials. This kind of experimental approach can be defined as esoteric when it becomes spiritually developing, empowering and possibly redemptive for its maker; when it transforms the artist and their perceptions of reality.

Rhiannon Vogl, University of Toronto / York University

Telepathic Objects: Transcendence and Esotericism within Conceptual Art

In 1970, artist and writer Jack Burnham declared that “Conceptual Art’s ideal medium is telepathy.” Specifically concerned with the transmission of ideas via information technologies, communication systems, and electronic networks, Conceptual Art has traditionally been associated with research, analysis, structuralism and objectivity. And yet, I contend that is not the full picture. This paper argues that within the counterculture of the long 1960s (1958 – 1974), the desire for dematerialization within Conceptual Art must be considered alongside, and even as part of, that period’s rise in New Age esoteric beliefs, particularly in that subculture’s desire to transcend the physical realm through a trust in spiritual and metaphysical practices. This paper will present research on how the artistic tendency towards dematerialization in Conceptual Art was networked together with, not only shifting ways of perceiving the self that new technologies allowed, but also this radical social desire for transcendence. While technology and transcendence may seem entirely at odds, this paper shows how they were networked together within the Conceptual Art movement, and how Conceptual artists were making use of advanced communication technologies to access, explore and visualize extrasensory realms that are themselves already dematerialized. Not unlike how we are grappling with our entanglements with social media or A.I. technologies today, these artistic practices oscillated between the utopian and dystopian, the liberatory and the fearful. This paper, therefore, argues for a more nuanced understanding of the ambiguous and curious relationship between Conceptual artists, developing information technologies and New Age esoteric practices.

Mari Laanemets, Estonian Academy of Arts

Mysticism in the Machine Age: Galina Bitt and Esoteric Practices in Soviet Technological Utopianism

While the late-Soviet collective Dvizhenie (Movement) is typically framed through narratives of cybernetics, technological progress, and kinetic abstraction, the work of artist Galina Bitt reveals a crucial yet overlooked esoteric and mystical dimension within its experimental practice. This paper argues that Bitt’s contribution complicates the rationalist image of Soviet techno-avant-garde art and illuminates the entanglement of symbolic, spiritual, and technological imaginaries in late-Soviet culture.

Alongside research with engineers and collaborations in kinetic and cybernetic environments, Dvizhenie developed poetic and speculative practices rooted in Russian Symbolism, cosmism, and esoteric thought. Bitt’s central role in the group’s future environments IBKS or “mystery” actions in woodland settings — populated by fantastic beings and ritual structures — reflects Symbolist concerns with metamorphosis, collective experience, and expanded perception. Rather than peripheral experiments, these activities coexisted with Dvizhenie’s technological projects and informed its visions of future environments in which sensory transformation and imagination played a key role.

Bitt’s sketches, notes, paintings and conceptual work demonstrate that the group pursued not only new environments but new forms of consciousness. Her case foregrounds gendered erasures in Soviet art history, where women’s contributions to experimental collectives often remain undocumented or minimized. Re-centring Bitt provides an alternative genealogy of Soviet technological aesthetics — one that highlights the interplay of science and mysticism, communal life, speculative evolution, and non-rational knowledge production. The paper contributes to broader esotericism studies by reassessing creativity as a mode of spiritual and imaginative inquiry beyond teleological accounts of modernism.

Christina Ntanovasili, Aarhus University

The Spiritual or the Cosmic in Art? Hilma af Klint and the Need for Further Historical Revision

Although the rediscovery of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) has been followed by an inclusive—albeit debated—art historiography and a renewed interest in the influence of spirituality on the development of Western modern art, the cosmology and philosophy of both esoteric movements and the artists who followed them remains a largely underexplored topic. In this paper, I trace a lineage of Western thought—from Heraclitus and Plato to Spinoza and Nietzsche—within the doctrines of Theosophy and Anthroposophy, examining how cosmic ideas influenced af Klint’s artistic practice. Specifically, I look at the correspondences between cosmogonical and mythological themes as they appear in af Klint’s early abstraction (the painting series Primordial Chaos, 1906–07), glossaries, and the recurring cosmic motifs in her later works, alongside the esoteric teachings of Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Based on observations from visual analysis, discourse analysis, and archival research, I argue that early twentieth-century spiritual movements should be understood as cosmosophical, and that the art they inspired sought to materialize their cosmologies into an embodied practice directed towards an attainable reality. As a visual and verbal translation of cosmosophy, af Klint’s cosmic abstraction functions as an artistic means of dissemination and initiation, and on this basis, I propose that the spiritual in modern art requires historical revision.