KuvA Research Days

Monday, December 11, 2017 - 09:00 to Wednesday, December 13, 2017 - 18:00

Exhibition Laboratory

Seminaari

This year’s KuvA Research Days encompasses a rich variety of topical issues as well as presentation, discussion, and working modes. Instead of adding another layer in the discussions on the essence of artistic research, we will focus on the collisions and interferences of different ways of framing and articulating decisive moments of artistic practice. Issues related with historical imagination and quotidian rituals are juxtaposed with questions of documentation and notation. The common thread is yours. The third KuvA Research Days takes place December 11–13th 2017, at the Exhibition Laboratory gallery, Merimiehenkatu 36, in Helsinki.

Monday 11.12.2017
Practices of notation – practices of reflection
Host: Professor Alex Arteaga, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki

This proposal offers a framework for the inquiry into a certain concept of notation and the specificities of and the mutual relationships between two varieties of practice: practices of notation and practices of reflection. Notation here is understood as the production of artifacts configured by signs generated and organized in correlation with ongoing events. On this basis, practices of notation are conceived as systematized varieties of aesthetic action performed in different media (e.g. graphic, video, audio, body movement) simultaneously and in immediate contact with the events to be notated. In contrast, practices of reflection are thought to be systematized forms of action that address recurrently the artifacts generated through practices of notation, producing second-order artifacts that might function as hermeneutic tools in relation to the products of notation and, therefore, to the notated events.These topics will be investigated here in relation to a specific research object: the agency of particular components of a situation that enable the emergence of the situation’s atmosphere.

Introductory lecture on practices of notation and practices of reflection: Alex Arteaga and Nikolaus Gansterer

Presentation of the results of the field research
Open-ended discussion with all participants

Tuesday 12.12.2017
Revisiting Utopias of Access

Host: Professor Mika Elo, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
This half-day research event revisits the artistic research of the Academy of Fine Arts Doctoral Students presented at the Research Pavilion in Venice in the context of 57th Biennale during summer 2017. The event consists of a series of project presentations and a book launch related to the Research Pavilion: Futures of Artistic Research. At the Intersection of Utopia, Academia and Power edited by Jan Kaila, Anita Seppä and Henk Slager. The book is a collection of essays, which brings into focus and explains the actual significance and future possibilities of the experimental critiques that are emerging across the field of artistic research. There will also be an launching of a new page in the artisticresearch.fi site hosted by Uniarts Helsinki.The page is a portal that collects current activity in Finnish artistic research, using automated feeds. There will also be a display in the gallery from a project at the Reserach Pavilion in Venice 2017 by Doctoral students Matthew Cowan, Leena Kela, Ilya Orlov and Anssi Pulkkinen from Uniarts Helsinki in collaboration with Doctoral researchers in Visual Arts from the University of Auckland, Roman Mitch, Rebecca Hobbs and Harriet Stockman.

Tuesday 12.12.2017
The gift of seeing

Host: Professor Lea Kantonen, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
The Wixarika people living on the Western Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico have a rich tradition of non-official and unofficial art education dating back to pre-colonial times. Today many Wixarika communities are also founding their official self-governed institutions such as schools and museums and using digital technology in art pedagogy. How does a Wixarika teacher see an art students' quest for seeing? We explore this theme during the half-day event that includes keynotes, workshops, performances, and a screening, as well as dialogues between keynote guests and audience.

Wednesday 13.12.2017
Collisions. The contemporary in artistic research

Host: Michael Schwab, Professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
What is the relationship of artistic research to contemporary art? Can it help to further artistic practices interested in resisting the flow of our times, or is it complicit in making art available now not only as material object but also as object of knowledge? Keynote speakers Jacob Lund, Paul O’Neill, Elizabeth Fisher and Knut Ebeling explore the theme of this whole day seminar from various angels. There will also be a panel discussion with Hami Bahadori, Sezgin Boynik, Minna Henriksson, Marianne Niemelä and Elina Suoyrjö; chaired by Michael Schwab.