Artist Pedagogy and Artistic Thinking: Abstracts 29 August 2026
Heli Kauppila, Frank Brümmel and Minna Suoniemi
Reenvisioning the role of the teacher: artist pedagogy as relational practice
If, as Biesta (2024) suggests, teaching is the one thing a student cannot do without a teacher, what then is teaching? In this presentation, we approach this question through the lens of artist pedagogy understood as relational practice. We ask what this perspective demands from teachers in terms of roles, tasks, and ethical orientation.
To shift pedagogical gestures from transmissive to transformative, we introduce the metaphor of the teacher as a ghost. This figure emphasizes minimal presence without absence: enabling conditions for exploration while leaving agency for students to shape situations and acknowledging the agencies of materials, other more-than-human-agents as well as processes and places. Rather than imposing artistic norms or controlling outcomes, the ghost teacher cultivates openness to uncertainty, porous presence and attentiveness to relational dynamics.
Ghosts leave traces without dominating and inhabit in-between spaces. Such liminality reframes teaching as an ethical encounter rather than a directive act. Pedagogical gestures become hints that invite transformation, creating spaces where embodied knowledge can emerge and persist as movements in participants’ bodies, settling into new contexts of meaning. In artistic practice, embodied knowledge is intertwined in the process of making. Similarly, we see teaching as something that takes place in the process of making, working with materials, bodies and places. This approach raises a critical question: if learning exists naturally, independent of education, what do we do when we teach?
Bios
Heli Kauppila, Doctor of Arts (in Dance) works as a university lecturer and the head of university pedagogy in the arts program at the University of the Arts Helsinki. She has also designed an ongoing postgraduate arts pedagogical program for arts professionals. Kauppila has previously worked as a dancer, and a dance teacher and is active in the field of artistic research. Her research focuses on the dialogical and ethical basis of arts education, the pedagogical intersections of different fields of arts, and the possibilities of arts-informed practices in different learning situations. Currently she is working in the international research collaboration From Me Towards We: Artist Pedagogy as Relational Practice.
Frank Brümmel is an artist and educator with a background in stonemasonry. Brümmel graduated as Meisterschüler (2006) from the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, Germany and received a Master of Fine Arts (2008) from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Currently serves as Lecturer in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, and is developing his doctoral candidacy (since 2021). Brümmel´s artistic research project is centred on the question of Allegory for Pedagogy – Sculpture as an Education Tool? approached from the position of artists as teachers, the necessity of artistic communal work, and the development of fictional archaeological stone artefacts.
Minna Suoniemi (she/her, b. 1972) is a Helsinki-based artist and university lecturer at Aalto University, Department of Art and Media. Her artistic practice draws from embodied experience and feminist knowledge production, and she has worked on themes such as control, body, class and family. Her latest projects examine the materiality of the aging body and the transgenerational bodily experience of being in-excess. Her academic interests include transformative, arts-based pedagogical practices, questions of class in arts and education, and embodied and feminist approaches towards knowing and researching. She enjoys collective writing processes, and her co-written texts have been published.
Maryam Mehraban
The Piano as a Third Space: Artist Pedagogy and Intercultural Artistic Research through Persian Thought
This presentation explores how artistic thinking and artist pedagogy can open the Western piano toward new forms of intercultural knowledge. My artistic research project investigates the piano as a site of cultural exchange, asking whether the expansion of pianistic techniques transforms the instrument itself or rather the performer’s cultural perception. Drawing on concepts of stratification and folding (De Assis; Deleuze & Guattari), I approach performance practice as a dynamic process in which historical, cultural, and technical layers interact and reshape one another.
The research combines archaeological and genealogical methods. Archaeologically, I examine early sources on the piano in Iran—notations, recordings, pedagogical documents, and historical performance reports—to understand how the instrument entered and adapted to Persian musical culture. Genealogically, I analyse how power, musical authority, and theoretical systems such as Dastgāh structures (persian modal system) and alternative tunings shaped pedagogical and performative practices.
The pedagogical dimension becomes central in my collaboration with composer Dr. Saman Samadi on composed piece Xšaθra: Dominion of Stone and Fire. The score integrates two ancient Persian epistemologies: cuneiform inscriptions of the Behistun relief and the metrical structures of the Gāthas. These materials generate new rhythmic, gestural, and interpretive challenges requiring the pianist to embody inscription, chant, silence, and philosophical listening. Such practices create a “third space” of knowledge—neither fully Western nor Persian—where technique and cultural understanding develop simultaneously.
I propose that these artistic methods open new possibilities for artist pedagogy: intercultural voicing models, embodied interpretive strategies, ethical-dialectical touch systems, and forms of practical knowledge that expand how students learn, perceive, and imagine the piano. This contribution argues that artistic thinking is not merely reflective but pedagogically generative, reshaping how we teach, practice, and conceptualise the instrument in a pluralistic future.
Bio
Maryam Mehraban is an Iranian-German pianist, pedagogue and researcher based in Hanover, Germany, focusing on contemporary music. She began piano studies at the age of four and gave her first concert performances at twelve. Educated at the Music High School in Tehran, she also studied the Persian instrument Setar and received comprehensive training in both Western classical and Persian classical music. From 2007, she studied piano at the University of Applied Science, Culture, and Art in Tehran with Dilbar Hakimova and Raphael Minaskanian, performing as a pianist and teaching from the age of eighteen. She pursued contemporary music studies in collaboration with living composers. Since 2015, Mehraban has studied instrumental pedagogy at the University of Music, Drama and Media Hannover under Igor Tchetuev, Teppo Koivisto and Christopher Oakden. Maryam Mehraban is currently a doctoral candidate (Dr. Artium) at the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, where she investigates artistic research and intercultural piano practice.
Jeppe Kristensen
Openings: Rethinking University Education as Entry-point for Not-yet-artists/academics/pedagogues
In 2025 The University of Agder, Norway, relaunched our theatre bachelor program. The new curriculum was a reaction to a common crisis of dwindling number of students, financial restrictions, and an ecosystem of partners, art institutions and potential student job opportunities under pressure as seen broadly among non-metropolitan arts educations throughout Norway.
In this presentation we will present the thoughts behind the restructuring of the BA program and highlight the positives of adapting arts education to provincial town conditions as inspiration to arts pedagogy in general.
We will focus on three main strategies:
Variety: In rethinking education as an entry-point the focus has been on making an education for students that do not yet know what they want within the field. What positives can come from wanting to offer an education of highest possible standard to possible theatre pedagogues, artists and academics in one?
Community: The sparse local cultural infrastructure has made it a focus to rethink the program as part of a community building effort. How can an education help and be helped by the local cultural infrastructure through intimate collaboration with schools, cultural institutions or independent artists with the ambition to open doors for students to their future environment?
Identity: Focussing on the individual student’s need to develop her own identity within a broad education, the strategy has been to develop a core of theatre competences that are necessary in all strands of theatre work and build a structure around individual projects where students develop subjectivity, learn through socialization and fine tune own competences in specializations such as directing, acting or dramaturgy as well as pedagogic and academics. How can students using the programme to find individual paths enrich the education for all, and how can the sense of collective emerge as a theatre-related competence for everyone?
Bio
Jeppe Kristensen is professor on artistic merit at Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Agder. With a masters in dramaturgy from Aarhus University, he has worked at the Danish Royal Theatre in Copenhagen as a dramaturg with several of Europe’s most prominent theatre artist such as Jon Fosse and Frank Castorf. He founded and ran the multiple award winning experimental theatre group Fix+Foxy together with director Tue Biering, where they explored new ways of meeting audiences, pop-culture as basis for contemporary theatre and ordinary people as participants and co-creators – with the ambition to create fun, engaging and socially engaged theatre. Since 2016 he has been doing artistic research and teaching BA, MA and PhD levels at the University of Agder,and is currently Programme Coordinator for the Bachelor Program in Theatre, Acting and Directing. See www.fixfoxy.com for performances and https://app.cristin.no/persons/show.jsf?id=629991 for publications list
Ciara Byrne
Working-Class Epistemologies and Friction as Artistic Pedagogy
This paper proposes a working-class epistemology, an epistemic framework that does not yet exist in formal academic discourse, grounded in the idea that working-class narratives operate as epistemic events within art education. Rather than describing experience from a distance, these narratives enact knowledge through their hybrid, fragmentary, and affective forms. Emerging from what Paulo Freire identifies as the contradictory consciousness of the oppressed, they register the internal split between institutional expectations and lived realities. This split produces writing that is part poem, part confession, part anecdote, and part theory, performing the pressures and contradictions of working-class life from within.
Although interdisciplinary art-education spaces invite multiplicity, they remain shaped by the epistemic norms of the universal system. Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s critique of the Universal, Rauna Kuokkanen’s analysis of institutional legibility, and Anna Tsing’s notion of productive friction, the paper argues that working-class narratives encounter the limits of institutional openness at the moment they attempt to enter. Friction arises where messy, affective, and contradictory ways of knowing rub against the tidy, coherent, and rational modes of knowledge privileged in academic settings. Rather than signalling failure, this friction functions as a generative encounter: it reveals the institutional boundaries of what can be known while preserving the epistemic force of working-class forms.
Such narratives often grapple with taboo, grief, desire, ageing, and precarity. When received primarily through empathy, their disruptive power is softened, recentering institutional comfort. Attending to friction instead foregrounds their capacity to illuminate forms of humanity and understanding that dominant epistemologies cannot fully apprehend.
Through case studies in 1990s East Coast rap lyricism, Annie Ernaux’s autofiction, and the poetry of the New Narrative movement, and through my own positionality as a first-generation working-class student, the paper develops a working-class epistemology that treats friction as both methodological and pedagogical strategy. This framework expands how art education can recognise and engage alternative ways of knowing in socially complex contexts.
Bio
Ciara Byrne is a master’s student in the Joint Nordic Master Programme in Art Education and Visual Studies between Aalto University (Finland) and Aalborg University (Denmark). She is currently a visiting researcher with the INTERSECT group at the University of Copenhagen. Her research investigates emerging forms of working-class knowledge, focusing on how messy, contradictory, and friction-filled modes of self-representation enact ways of knowing that exceed dominant institutional expectations. She examines how such epistemic events can unsettle and expand artistic and pedagogical practices within art education.
With experience facilitating community-rooted artistic workshops in South Korea and Finland, Ciara’s practice centres on collaboration, storytelling, and co-created knowledge. Her MA thesis develops a working-class epistemology and applies it through the curation of a collaborative anthology, exploring how shared writing can function as both an artistic encounter and a pedagogical method.
Steven Paige
Making, Art, and Archives
This paper explores the translation or transmutation of my art practice into a series of propositions and directives in thinking and developing a fine art syllabus. This use function of my practice is framed through three key concepts – implicit, tacit and non-formal (studio/process) learning, as defined by Michael Eraut and Robin Nelson. As an artist and educator, I have a preoccupation with archives, libraries and collections. I see my interrogation of these areas as beneficial in developing a pedagogical schema for fine art students to investigate their concerns, desires and drives. This facilitates new contexts and potential intersectional understandings found in archival research and accounts – practically or methodologically. This can include discovering queer, diasporic, or post-colonial narratives, be they present or missing, that challenge our understandings of our contemporary conditions and offer possible strategies of resistance or positive creative renewal. The potential of making and its implications on a given history, were seeing yourself as part of a bigger narrative, enhances and creates social connections and important moments of poignancy. This thinking is not at odds with a student’s material development, be it technical advice and guidance, were gained insights can extend across the multitude of decisions that affect an iterative creative process. In considering the pragmatics of poesis and the archive – making with, through or considering archival accounts, foregrounds learning to take notice of care, ethical obligations and multitude of near and distance voices, urgent and necessary skills to be understood and utilised in an uncertain world.
Bio
Dr. Steven Paige is Programme Leader MA Fine Art at UWE, Bristol, UK. As an artist, educator and researcher, his practice investigates personal and public histories, developing creative reinterpretations of the accounts and activities of archives both real and imagined. His practice includes video and time-based works, installation, performance, print and artists’ publishing. In 2019 he completed an AHRC practice-based PhD, Meeting the Archive through an Interdisciplinary Artistic Practice, University of Plymouth. In 2016/17, he was awarded a Kluge Research Fellowship at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA, within the Moving Picture Library Collections. He was awarded an Archive Research Residency, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York, 2023; Curiously Nonconforming: Desiring the Archival Encounter. He is the lead investigator on the Countering Archives project launching in Bristol Spring 2026 and a SFHEA, and a member of research groups VAMP, CFPR and DCRC, UWE.
Gavin Butt
Learning from Bradford: Albert Hunt’s complementary studies experiment
Albert Hunt, a working-class Oxford graduate, was employed by the Regional College of Art, Bradford in 1965 to teach complementary studies to advanced level art and design students. The college was aiming to offer a new degree-level qualification, the DipAD, but was refused the necessary national accreditation to do so. Hunt was therefore left to teach complementary studies to students on lower-level and vocational courses in foundation studies, textile and interior design, and printmaking. Yet despite this seemingly inauspicious start, Hunt and his students went on to develop a form of “cheerful and militant learning” at Bradford. They performed as the Bradford Art College Theatre Group making irreverent, political performances and experimented with playful forms of deliberative assembly and happenings to facilitate “free” thinking and action inside the education institution. During the 1960s and 1970s Hunt was internationally recognised as a pedagogue, theatre-maker and author of Hopes for Great Happenings but his work has generally fallen into obscurity since then.
How might we assess the value of this episode from the history of regional English art education for rethinking and re-energising artistic pedagogy today? How does the Bradford experiment expose and challenge elitist assumptions about advanced study? To what degree can its radical embrace of joyful collectivity and refusal of institutional and disciplinary hierarchies (of theory and practice; of staff and students etc) be reimagined by those in contemporary neoliberal institutions? How does the example of collaborative working with lower-class and vocational learners, in a provincial city and institution relatively lacking in accreditation and international status, suggest alternative possibilities for experimental education today?
This paper presentation will be richly informed by original archival and oral history research, including the first scholarly access to Hunt’s extensive archive of papers, scripts and props and interviews with his former collaborators and students.
Bio
Gavin Butt is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He writes and makes creative research about visual art, popular music, queer culture and performance. His most recent book is No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk (2022) which was accompanied by compilation LP The Art School Dance Goes On (2023) and exhibition Mixed Up: Music and the Art School (2025). He is also author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963 (2005), co-author with Irit Rogoff of Visual Cultures as Seriousness (2013) and co-editor of Post-Punk Then and Now (2016). His practice research includes co-creation of Performance Matters (2009-2013) and of documentary feature film This Is Not a Dream (2011). He is currently researching the histories and cultures of art education across UK nations and regions.
David Limaverde
Disobedient Art Methodologies as Artist Pedagogy: Rehearsing Climate Justice Amid “Green” Contradictions
This paper approaches Disobedient Art School (.d.a.s.) as an experiment in artist pedagogy in which disobedient art methodologies become a way of learning and thinking together amid “green” contradictions. While many cultural institutions and art schools frame themselves as sustainable or climate-conscious, they often remain entangled with extractive structures, precarious labour, and colonial continuities. .d.a.s. emerges in this tension, rehearsing climate justice not only as a political demand but as a pedagogical practice.
From my position as a Brazilian artist-educator working between activist contexts and higher education, I ask: How can disobedient art methodologies function as artist pedagogy in settings marked by institutional “green” contradictions? Drawing on Paulo Freire’s dialogical pedagogy, Ailton Krenak’s invitations to “postpone the end of the world,” Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s ch’ixi thinking, and Theatre of the Oppressed, I read .d.a.s. as a situated, Global South–informed contribution to debates on artist pedagogy and artistic thinking.
Methodologically, the paper combines artistic research, auto-ethnographic writing, and documentation of Disobedient Art School workshops and gatherings (scores, exercises, group reflections). I focus on three recurring pedagogical gestures that have emerged in this process: unlearning expertise, by rotating roles and redistributing authority among artists, activists, and other participants; staying with conflict and care, by treating disagreement, discomfort, and burnout as sites of shared inquiry rather than problems to be solved; and composting methodologies, by translating, reusing, and transforming exercises across contexts while resisting extractive “best practice” logics.
I argue that these gestures rehearse forms of artistic thinking that are tacit, embodied, and relational, oriented toward climate justice and more-than-human care. The paper does not propose .d.a.s. as a model to be replicated, but as a fragile, disobedient infrastructure that can trouble and enrich how artist pedagogies are imagined within and alongside institutions.
Bio
David Limaverde is a Brazilian artist-educator and artistic researcher based in Amsterdam. He teaches in the MA Art Education and MA Performing Public Space programmes at Fontys Academy of the Arts and directs the foundation Home of Participation. His practice is grounded in participatory methods, Theatre of the Oppressed, and anti-extractive, ecocentric approaches to pedagogy that attend to more-than-human relations. As a collaborator of Fossil Free Culture NL, he co-develops Disobedient Art School (.d.a.s.), a collective framework for learning and rehearsing disobedient art methodologies amid institutional “green” contradictions. Working between Europe and Brazil, his current research explores how Global South thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Ailton Krenak, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui can inform artist pedagogies that hold together conflict and care, and that cultivate shared responsibility in times of social and ecological crisis.
Sina Hensel
Hands that Stirred a Burnt Horizon: Six Pedagogical Provocations for Affective Colour
As a visual artist with roots in painting, I have developed a collaborative workshop practice over the years across art schools, museums, universities, and community gatherings. These workshops offer a way to tell “the multispecies stories of a changing world”¹ through the lens of colour, treating chromatic experience as a site of relation and material memory rather than mere decoration. To support this, I have designed a series of pedagogical provocations—Re-enacting, Colour Walking, Colour Note-Taking, Sensory Note-Taking, Collaboration Reporting, and Colour Archiving. Each provides a framework for collectively unpacking colour as a phenomenon embedded in bodies, histories, and ecologies.
This approach aims to counter extractive modes of learning that treat organic matter and more-than-human entities as resources for human-centred design. Instead, colour becomes a collaborator that asks difficult questions about labour, environmental change, and the multisensory signals we routinely overlook. Through embodied exercises, we re-enact indigo recipes and consider the labourers who once dyed under the heat of Bengal; with madder-stained hands we recall the Rotfabrik; with ochre, we think of workers in 1950s Provence who breathed pigment without protection. We question why salmon and oranges are artificially coloured, and we imagine the shifting chromatic worlds of lichen, microalgae, and cyanobacteria. Even from the relative comfort of studios or parks, these practices help us confront the “intolerable in the everyday”² by sensitising us to colour as a register of ecological change and capitalist logic.
Ultimately, this work understands colour as a generative methodology—one that operates across terrestrial, atmospheric, and aquatic environments and can only be grasped through multisensory attention. Conceived as both agent and witness, colour exposes the mutable signatures of a destabilising climate and opens pathways for multispecies pedagogies grounded in relation, responsiveness, and reciprocity.
¹ Bubandt, Nils, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen, and Rachel Cypher (eds.). Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene: Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2023, p. 7.
² Dumit, Joseph. “Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time.” Cultural Anthropology 29, 2014, pp. 344–362, p. 347.
Bio
Sina Hensel is a Brussels-based visual artist and doctoral researcher at the Academy of Art and Design Basel, the University of Arts Linz, and Humboldt University of Berlin, alongside her role as research associate in Artistic Methods at RWTH Aachen University. Trained as a painter, her artistic practice focuses on postnatural pigments and chromatic processes in the environment – phenomena that emerge as direct or indirect consequences of human-induced climate change and the Anthropocene, treating colour as a material knowledge shared across lakes, microorganisms, plants, mountains, and birds. Her research advances a radically decentered understanding of colouring practices, arguing that the adaptive chromatic strategies of more-than-human beings offer indispensable insight into how life negotiates an increasingly hot and precarious planet. Her work has been exhibited internationally—from the Venice Architecture Biennale to MHKA Antwerp – and supported by residencies and programmes across Europe and Latin America. She is represented by Annie Gentils Gallery in Antwerp.
Raisa Kilpeläinen and Milla Martikainen
On More Sustainable Performance Design, Pedagogy and the Future Skills of an Artist and a Designer in a World of Polycrisis
The joint paper presentation of Raisa Kilpeläinen and Milla Martikainen focuses on performing arts: performance design and its artist pedagogy and education regarding sustainability, creating a more ecologically sustainable stage and being artist and designer in the era of polycrisis. The presentation is inspired by two versions of a MA level course, A More Ecologically Sustainable Stage (2024), taught by Kilpeläinen and Martikainen at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, and the collected data and feedback from the courses. It also looks ahead to the next updated version of the course in autumn 2025.
The presentation discusses ways to approach sustainability and eco-creativity in (more) ecological performance-making and its pedagogy. The aim is also to reflect on transformative learning and socio-cultural transformation in relation to more ecological art and theatre making.
The presentation is also aiming to map the future understanding, speculative future of performance design and performance making and the future skills: what should be taught and what should be known, how to cope with the sustainability transition in education, practices, artist pedagogy, artistic thinking, as a student, an artist, a designer, an educator and a researcher – on the field, and outside the academy.
The presentation is linked to Kilpeläinen’s doctoral research, on current movements, changes and sustainability in performance design and its education, and to Martikainen’s ongoing eco-actions in the Finnish performing arts field.
Bios
Raisa Kilpeläinen (DA cand.) is an artist-researcher in performance design, specialising in scenographics, lighting design, theatre and drama research and university pedagogy. Kilpeläinen works as a Lecturer in Performance Design at the Theatre Academy of the Uniarts Helsinki. As a researcher, she explores changes in performance designers’ work and art and possible futures and sustainability in performance design. As an artist and writer, she specialises in dramaturgy, light, space, site, perceptions, experiencing, performative installations and concepts, collectivity and sustainability. Kilpeläinen has worked on a wide range and scale of different stages, groups and institutions, also a lot with site-sensitive practices. She is a founding member of KOKIMO Art Collective (2010–). She is also a curator specialised in performances and spatial and light art.
Milla Martikainen (MA) is a scenographer, lighting designer, performance artist and performance maker. She works widely in the performing arts, focusing on sustainable practices and promoting ecosocial transformation. She has collaborated with wide range and scale of platforms from ANTI Live Art Festival to Finnish National Theatre. Martikainen is a visiting teacher at the University of the Arts and has written about sustainability in performance. She is currently a project coordinator for LuoTo project that facilitates sustainability transition in the creative fields and is working in Metsäesitys and Mustarinda associations.
Riikka Talvitie
Liberating the aesthetic potential of composition pedagogy
Contemporary music practices have clearly become more diverse than a few decades ago, as young composers increasingly turn toward music theatre, sound art, and interdisciplinary collaborations. With the growing role of curation, many festivals have engaged with broad societal and research-related debates such as decolonization, equality, and ecological issues. Despite these aesthetic changes, the ideology of modernism continues to influence the aesthetic values and pedagogical foundations of composer education (HE). This lecture demonstration explores the tension between evolving aesthetic practices and traditional teaching methods in composition pedagogy.
The material for this autoethnographic study consists of my composition exercises from the years 1997–2001, during which I studied at the Sibelius Academy under Professor Paavo Heininen. I focus on the role of these exercises in one-to-one teaching, asking what kinds of values and ideologies they convey to future generations. During the lecture, I present: 1) exercises based on normative rules, aimed at learning modernist musical language, 2) exercises that could be opened up to different aesthetic languages, 3) exercises that could lead to interdisciplinary thinking and the discussion of complex social issues. According to my experience as both a student and teacher at the Sibelius Academy, the ideology of modernism seems to be built into the musical material used by composition students, and thus teachers act as important mediators of these values.
I argue that by liberating the aesthetic potential of compositional choices and material, it is possible to find new forms of expression in contemporary music that can help shape our future amid multiple crises. The act of composing can then be seen as a broader form of shaping sound and music in time without aesthetic constraints. This presentation is part of a broader research project on composition pedagogy, in which we compare the curricula of European music academies.
Bio
Riikka Talvitie completed her artistic doctorate at Uniarts Helsinki in 2023. Her research, The Composer in Flux: Towards Dialogic Practice, explored collaborative approaches to composition and critically examined the composer’s role within Western art music tradition. Talvitie’s artistic and collaborative works often integrates text, dramaturgy, and multimedia techniques. In many of her projects, she seeks an activist position. From 2021 to 2025, she served as a composition lecturer at Uniarts and was an artist-in-residence at Saari Manor in 2025, focusing on ecological practices in composing. Talvitie has contributed to pedagogical projects such as Equity in Composing (2019–20), addressing gender equality in contemporary music. Her achievements include the State Prize for Music (2022) and the International Prize for Artistic Research in Music (2025). Currently, Talvitie works as a freelance composer and researcher, with a particular interest in artistic research and the pedagogy of composition in higher education.
Aku Meriläinen, Heikki Heinonen and Tiina Pusa
Navigating the Taboo: Porno-Art, Pedagogy, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education
Our lecture-demonstration examines the methods and pedagogical grounds on which an artist-researcher in a teaching role can present their own artwork dealing with challenging subject matter. Using a case from artistic research on porno-art, we explore how ethically sensitive material can be incorporated into higher education teaching as safely as possible.
We argue that in a time of increasing teaching and research harassment (Tikka & Saresma, 2025), the presentation of all forms of research must be possible to safeguard academic freedom. Through the case of porno-art, we highlight the complexity of teacher–student power relations, explore methods that support safe yet profound dialogue on challenging topics (Pusa & Huhmarniemi, 2025), and reflect on the interaction between personal and political dimensions. As artists have traditionally taught within their own fields in art universities, the emergence of porno-art as a concept and practice (Mikkola, 2013) urges institutions to reassess their relationship to both the field and its practitioners.
In this session, artist-researcher Aku Meriläinen will present their artistic work situated in porno-art. In conversation with Tiina Pusa and Heikki Heinonen, who have co-taught the subject with Meriläinen at Aalto University, we examine the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of this setting. We ask:
– How can safer-space guidelines support all participants—not only students?
– How can an artist-researcher take responsibility for pedagogical dynamics without formal pedagogical training?
– What does collaboration between an artist and an art pedagogue offer?
– How does the duration of a teaching situation influence the handling of personal material, particularly in relation to building trust?
Mikkola, M. (2013). Pornography, Art and Porno-Art. Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography.
Pusa, T., & Huhmarniemi, M. (2025). Turvallisempaa tilaa ja rohkeampaa kuvataideopetusta ja -koulutusta. Research in Arts and Education.
Tikka, M., & Saresma, T. (2025). Opetus- ja tutkimushäirintä tulevat yliopistoihin – kuinka varautuneita yliopistot ovat? Tieteessä tapahtuu.
Bios
Aku Meriläinen (MA) is a media artist and artist-researcher who develops practices that move beyond normative expectations, integrating digital technologies with performing arts. In their doctoral research project Crip Sex Worker (Nakurampa in Finnish), conducted at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, they have begun engaging in online sex work as a person living with multiple sclerosis (MS). The project seeks to challenge the dominant male gaze in pornography from queer and anti-ableist perspectives, to explore feminist and more ethical porn practices, and to articulate the emerging concept of porno-art, while advancing the equality of people with disabilities in the realms of pornography and sexuality.
Art educator Heikki Heinonen (MA) is a doctoral student at Aalto ARTS, Department of Art and Media. He works as a visual art teacher at Helsinki Upper Secondary School of Visual Arts and also as hourly-paid teacher in the Art Education Degree Programme. His doctoral research deals with the connections between social justice and socially engaged contemporary art in the context of contemporary art education.
Tiina Pusa (DoA) is the head of education in the Department of Art and Media at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland. Her tasks include teaching, developing curriculum, and conducting research. Pusa’s doctoral thesis (2012) was situated within the discourse of phenomenological based research in art education. Her present research interests consider queer issues in the context of art education and societal and political role of education.
Hannah Sackett, Verena Miedl-Faißt and Marina Velez Vago
A 60-Minute Vacation from Anthropocentrism
This workshop offers a brief holiday from the gravitational pull of anthropocentrism. Think of it as a set of prompts for teachers, artists, and curious movers—a practical guide and an open-ended invitation to lean in, touch, breathe, and listen. For one hour, we attune ourselves to arboreal, aquatic, material, and infrastructural rhythms, entering intra-active worlds and attentive places where the more-than-human is not scenery but something we are continually becoming with.
This workshop emerges from an ongoing Special Interest Group (SIG) active since 2023, bringing together a diverse international network of artist-researchers engaged in eco-pedagogy and artistic research. We explore how artistic practices can foster embodied awareness of the environment and cultivate a pedagogy grounded in relational, ecological, and sensorial experience.
Ecological pedagogy, as we understand it, is an approach that weaves together the social, cultural, and natural dimensions of learning. It challenges anthropocentric modes of knowing by situating the body as an active site of exchange between human and non-human worlds. Drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, we consider artistic research as a practice of “joining with the world” — a tracing and retracing of pathways that connect the body, environment, and imagination.
Over two years, our SIG has co-developed exercises that begin with the senses and expand into ecological reflection and dialogue. These include Paradendrological Activities, an experimental card set for those who suspect trees may have more interesting things to say than humans; Disobedient Objects, where materials are encouraged to misbehave; Drawing While Walking, where the line records both intention and wobble; Listening to Posthuman Sounds, tuning into non-human murmurs, including the soft crackles of plants; and The More-than-Human Fitness Trainer, which imagines ecological kin as coaches who ask for presence rather than performance.
In this 60-minute workshop, participants will engage in a selection of these embodied practices to explore how artistic pedagogies might nurture material sensitivity, interdependence, and ecological responsibility.We invite participants to reflect on how such practices can inform the teaching of art in higher education and beyond, opening spaces for more sustainable and reciprocal relations with the world. The workshop aims to collectively imagine new models of artist pedagogy rooted in care, attentiveness, and eco-somatic awareness.
Bios
SIG Eco-Pedagogy Research Group is an international collective of artist-researchers working at the intersection of ecology, pedagogy, and artistic practice. Formed in 2023, the group includes members from Europe, Canada, and Asia, connected through shared interests in embodied learning, environmental awareness, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Our collective inquiry focuses on how artistic research can foster material sensibility and ecological sustainability through situated, sensory, and participatory approaches.
Hannah Sackett: Researcher at Stockholm University working on Figuring Nämforsen. Also a Visiting Research Fellow at Bath School of Art. Focuses on learning with the world through drawing, writing, and duration.
Andrea Palášti: Artist and associate professor at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. Works with communities through playful, role-shifting actions ranging from misleading tourist guide to more-than-human fitness trainer.
Verena Miedl-Faißt: Artistic researcher, educator, filmmaker, and mother. PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, focusing on co-creation with children and collaborative artistic projects.
Jaana Erkkilä-Hill
Management by Perkele – learning and teaching in art universities
Every practicing artist acknowledges that time is one of the most crucial factors in artist’s development. It is impossible to speed up a creative process or development as a human being. Against best knowledge art universities are speeding up the time spent in education. Degree programme curriculums get more packed with modules that have very little to do with art practice but prepare students for multiple professional identities that are expected from contemporary artists. A moderate amount of time is allocated to so called working life skills that include entrepreneurial studies, communication studies, learning to apply for grants, project-based studies in socially engaged art, pedagogical qualifications, curatorial competencies, event management and production and so on. Students must be prepared for employment market and get ready to brand and present themselves to the art world.
Working life skills for an artist are according to my view skills in art practice and artistic thinking, maintaining self-discipline and being alert about one’s inner life as well as what is going on in the world. Radical art education could be doing less in quantity of taught subjects but more focused and conscious ways in what is essential. If we only knew what that was.
Bio
Jaana Erkkilä-Hill is a visual artist, researcher and professor of visual arts at the University of Lapland. Her more than thirty years of artistic work consists of works realized with different methods of printmaking. Woodcuts and linocuts are central to Erkkilä’s work, and the knowledge of the hand, the feel of the material are important elements for her during the working process. As a printmaker, Erkkilä has never been the creator of large series of prints but has focused on finding the possibilities of visual language in her works. To achieve the final result, even one successful print out of numerous experiments is enough.
In her visual search for the invisible Jaana Erkkilä combines the everyday and the sacred, the visible and the invisible world. Although the motifs of the works move along the lines of spirituality and nature mysticism, the central theme is also color. The layering of different levels is emphasized by the covering and revealing nature of the colors and shapes cut on wood and lino blocks and then printed on paper or fabric. The images are created from several color layers that can be seen through each other, and the atmosphere is created from the interaction of colors alongside the presenting subject, a process that combines the skills of the hand, the observations of the eye and, at the bottom of all the infinity, years of experience and stable judgment.
Erkkilä has been teaching visual arts since her student years. In recent years, she has focused her research activities especially on artist pedagogy. She investigates how artists who are actively engaged in their own artistic work teach art, and how the experiential knowledge related to the teacher’s own artistic work is transferred by the students to their own growth platform.
Dean Kenning
Where does your artwork come from? What does it want?: Social Body Mind Mapping Reconsidered
The Social Body Mind Mapping (SBMM) technique is a diagram-based workshop activity for art students which I devised and first put into practice in 2013. Since then, I have run more than fifteen such workshops in various institutions for students at different educational levels. The technique has also been adopted by several other university teachers and artists. In this paper I want to reexamine the premise, method and level and criteria of success, drawing on my archive of over two hundred student ‘maps’.
The SBMM utilises a diagramming methodology to integrate and overcome art practice and theory divisions, and to shift students from a unitary, individual level of attachment to their artwork to one which is more expansive and socially orientated. This can be understood as an investigation into the ‘where’ and the ‘what’ of the student’s own artwork: ‘where does it come from?’ – beyond the artist’s ‘head’; ‘what does it want?’ – in terms of the problems it is addressing beyond spontaneous modes of narration. The power of diagrams lies in the ability to abstract from what is familiar in order to reveal non-apparent but operative connections, instigating a more ‘social’ understanding of art’s purposes, constraints and influences.
In reconsidering the exercise as a pedagogical tool stemming from art practice, I will also revisit and examine the various tweaks, changes and extensions I have made as I have advanced the technique, particularly regarding a second stage in the process. These include: map becomes a functioning machine; pairs of students draw each other’s maps; the student ‘becomes’ the artwork; collaborate diagrams involving several students; create an ‘artwork’ (print, sculpture, installation, etc.). The inquiry will be carried out in close reference to actual student maps. In considering the benefits or failures I also want to open a wider discussion about diagramming based pedagogy and the history of pedagogical methods emerging from the art practices of teachers.
Bio
Dean Kenning is an artist, writer and educator. He has developed kinetic/sonic/robotic sculptures and he has a wide-ranging diagramming practice. His works have been exhibited internationally and acquired by the Arts Council Collection. He was the winner of the 2021 Mark Tanner Sculpture Prize. Dean has co-curated group exhibitions including Poor Things at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh and Plague of Diagrams at ICA, London. He has written on the politics of contemporary art and art education and on the theory and practice of diagramming, including on diagramming as a pedagogical tool. He is part of the Diagram Research Group and co-author of Drawing Analogies: Diagrams in Art, Theory & Practice (Bloomsbury, 2025). He is Research Fellow at Kingston University where he supervises fine art practice-led PhDs. He is also Associate Lecturer in Fine Art, teaching postgraduates at Central St Martins.
Maggie Ayliffe (Liverpool John Moores University), Joanne Lee and Danica Maier
Studio-ing Beyond the Studio: Teaching Artistic Thinking for Uncertain Futures
This 60-minute workshare/workshop will explore ‘studio-ing’ as a pedagogic methodology that nurtures artistic thinking and prepares students for creative, critical and socially-engaged futures. Developed by (S)matterings, a collective of UK-based artist-educators, ‘studio-ing’ emerges from Fine Art teaching, which offers process-led approaches to learning that value embodied knowledge, presence, failure and experimentation. Considering ‘studio-ing’ as a verb, our methodology extends the studio beyond a physical space, framing it as a dynamic, inclusive mode of inquiry and co-learning.
Our session will begin with a brief presentation of findings from research tested in conferences, creative sector workshops and institutional contexts. Studio films gathered via an open call to UK educators have been used as catalysts for dialogue, through which diverse participants have reflected on what ‘studio-ing’ makes possible. They have considered its tacit, embodied, and relational dimensions, identifying the conditions that enable or inhibit creative, critical learning. Our analysis makes evident that these are Time and Space, Valuing Process, Co-Learning, Quality and Inclusion. The research suggests that properly resourced ‘studio-ing’ within and beyond Fine Art could develop the capacity to hold complexity, embrace uncertainty and explore problems collaboratively.
The second part of our proposed session will invite participation from the conference community. Through conversation, making and reflection, we will consider together how ‘studio-ing’ might be taught, adapted, and defended. We will offer a space in which we can collectively reimagine how artistic thinking can reshape wider educational contexts in challenging times by foregrounding the value of process, the importance of shared agency and the embodiment of situated learning. Beyond the training of artists, we ask how can a pedagogy of ‘studio-ing’ help to nurture critical, ethical citizens with the capacity to counter growing intolerance and polarisation, and whose openness and imagination offer alternative future narratives to those of authoritarian repression and retreat.
Bios
Maggie Ayliffe is the Programme Leader for Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University. She is a painter, educator, and project manager with over 30 years’ experience of working across Higher Education and Arts and Culture projects. In her previous role as Head of Wolverhampton School of Art, she was the University lead for British Art Show 9 and worked closely with Wolverhampton Art Gallery to host and co-ordinate the show in the city. Ayliffe is currently co-chair of HEAD Trust and has contributed extensively to critical thinking around Art and Design education, inclusivity and widening participation and Fine Art pedagogy. She has also exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Ayliffe’s practice as a painter is rooted in Feminist Art Practice and its relationship to abstraction.
Joanne Lee is an artist, writer and Course Leader for BA Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. She is currently a Research Fellow in the Visual and Material Practices group at University of the West of England. Lee has over thirty years experience in creative Higher Education, teaching Fine Art, Photography, Graphic Design, Illustration, Film and Media Studies and supervising students pursuing practice-based doctoral research. Lee’s own creative practice and research uses essays everyday material culture through photography and writing and is frequently rooted in particular places and concepts of the local. She collaborates on several ongoing projects which relate to post-industrial landscapes and to the human and more than human relationships to rivers. Her research has been published in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice; Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism; Journal of Research in Arts and Education and in the Routledge series Materiality and Popular Culture.
Danica Maier is an artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
Mafalda Carreira
SPACES FOR UNKNOWING – Rethinking Artist Pedagogy Through Sensibility, Experience and Reflection
This proposal presents, through a poster, an ongoing research project that explores educational practices in the arts that privilege experimentation over technique, bringing students closer to both the making and the thinking inherent to artistic processes. It brings together planned and institutionally framed actions with others that seek to challenge educational and political models that tend to standardize practices, limiting learning opportunities and distancing students from their emotions and intuitions. The research investigates ways of artist pedagogy that value being and being-with-others, fostering an ethical and sensitive presence in society and guiding students toward contemporary artistic thinking.
This raises questions such as: How does contemporary artistic thinking develop? How can technique and artistic thought be articulated? And how can teachers (who are themselves artists) guide their students toward critical reflection that engages the sensibility through which they perceive the world?
In this context, research workshops “Between Chances and Possibilities” were developed in collaboration with students in arts education and visual arts programmes in Portugal. The workshop design was conceived as spaces of uncertainty: places where error is accepted and recontextualized, where chance is welcomed, and where the unexpected becomes sensitive material for learning.
The poster proposed for the conference extends this a/r/tographic and rhizomatic research path, investigating through gesture and teaching through doubt, in a process where lived experiences and present voices generate knowledge and embrace the vulnerability inherent to creation.
In the poster, will be presented visual fragments, including images, conceptual maps, and excerpts from field notes that reveal encounters, hesitations, and moments of discovery. The poster thus proposes understanding artist pedagogy as a living space of experimentation, dialogue, and relational ethics, aligning with the conference theme and attentive to the demands of educational contexts marked by uncertainty and social challenges.
Bio
Mafalda Alves Carreira is a PhD researcher in Art Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, funded by FCT (2023.04739.BDANA). She holds a degree in Product Design and a master’s degree in Visual Arts Education and Multimedia, developing a trajectory that articulates artistic practice, research, and pedagogy.
Her professional experience as a visual artist, photographer, designer, and art teacher sustains her interest in situated, collaborative creation processes oriented by uncertainty. Her research focuses on art pedagogies grounded in sensibility, experience, and relational encounters, and includes a study on research practices in art education and their implications for knowledge production. She takes part in projects that explore the invisible dimensions of education in cultural and school contexts, through OCUP_EA (Spaces of Occupation of Non-Normalised Learning in Art Education), collaborating in actions that articulate artistic practice, participation, and critical reflection.
Ana Sofia Santos
Walking-With: Practicing Embodied Cartographies and Collective Bodies
This proposal presents a poster, and in it, the possibility of provocation, which explores walking as a form of artistic thought and as a situated pedagogical practice. Based on projects developed with different groups on walkings around, and between, school, city and art museum, I investigate how the individual body and, above all, the collective body become instruments of attention, care and knowledge.
Instead of understanding the map as a fixed representation, I propose ‘mapping with the body’ as an emerging practice: a sensitive cartography that is drawn from displacements, shared fragilities, and the power of micro-gestures of care. In this perspective, walking is a way of making the world — a gesture that produces relationships and meanings, draws lines of thought.
The poster functions as a visual-poetic essay: it combines images of collective walks with textual fragments that highlight the body as living matter, a sensitive line and a pedagogical device. More than illustrating processes, the poster proposes itself as an object of thought and as a visual provocation that raises questions about the role of the body and the collective in artistic education.
The provocation may extend this gesture, inviting the audience to consider walking as a method of creation and teaching in the arts. By bringing to the conference space, a way of thinking, that arises from movement, shared attention, and embodied experience, this proposal offers new possibilities for rethinking artistic pedagogies in contexts of uncertainty and fragmentation.
The central contribution I wish to offer is the opening up of a field where body, territory, care, and imagination intertwine. Artistic pedagogies as embodied ways of generating knowledge; methodologies that teach not through transmission, but through co-creation, in a gesture of walking-with-the-other.
Bio
Sofia Santos is an artist, art educator and researcher whose practice develops at the intersection between body, memory, territory and walking practices. Her work seeks to investigate ways of creating a sensitive relationship with the world and bringing devices that evoke attention, listening and collective involvement into the artistic and pedagogical fields. With extensive experience in collaboration with schools, museums and cultural institutions, she has developed creative, mediation and research projects that combine participatory practices, fieldwork and direct relationships with communities. She has worked with diverse audiences — children, young people and the elderly — always using methodologies that combine artistic experimentation, walking, sensitive cartography and active listening. She is currently a PhD candidate in Art Education at the University of Porto (FBAUP/i2ADS), where she investigates how walking can become an artistic, educational and relational practice capable of reconfiguring ways of learning and being in the world.
Annika Haas
Learning Critique Through Writing: On Charles Gaines’s “Re-Con” Class at CalArts
In this paper I discuss the “Re-Con” crit class taught by Charles Gaines at the California Institute of the Arts until 2018. The focus is on the relationship between group critique and art criticism. “Re-Con,” i.e. reconsiderations, are the structuring and generative elements of Gaines’s crit class. This does not only entail the usual reconsideration of perception and meaning-making over the course of a crit, but also a conversational process of responding to each other through writing and the discussion of notes and drafts, together with Gaines. A book of essays about the actual crit sessions is the result of each of these crit classes. Based on an interview I did with Gaines in 2024 as well as archival material, I will present this method and shed light on crits as a learning environment for artists’ writing as well as for developing critique-through-writing. At the same time, the essays coming out of the Re-Con classes provoke a reconsideration of the convention of single-authored art criticism: What can be learned from “Re-Con” for a dialogical, or even polyvocal form of art criticism? One response to that question is the project space “table” for contemporary art and critical discourse (2018–2022) that was run by a former student of Gaines’s “Re-Con” class, Kyle Bellucci Johansson. For each exhibition, the space hosted so-called discursive dinners that ought to turn into polyvocal writing about the show through a process of co-editing that was also inspired by the “Re-Con” class. Against this background, I consider “Re-Con” as a travelling format of discourse formation at art school and beyond.
Bio
Dr. Annika Haas is a media studies scholar, art writer, and educator based in Berlin. Her current postdoctoral research project at the University of Hildesheim focuses on artistic practices and forms of critique in response to irreparable cycles of crisis. She is also working on a book about group critique methods emerging in Southern California since the 1970s. Previously, she has worked as an assistant professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). In 2022, she received her Ph.D. on Hélène Cixous’s writing through the body from the Berlin University of the Arts. She is the co-editor of multiple academic volumes, including “How to Relate: Knowledge, Arts, Practices” (2021), and the author of essays on contemporary art, on writing and situated knowledges, and on the relationship between bad feelings and technology (“Feeling Bad AFK”, 2024). www.annikahaa-s.com
Linda Luv
Poetry as Pedagogical Practice: Conveying Affective Knowledge through Ecological Feminist Verse
This poster explores the use of poetry as a method of knowledge transmission in artist pedagogy, focusing on how poetic practice enables the conveyance of affective and embodied knowledge beyond cognitive critique. Poetry is not a mere duplication of artistic work but rather a condensation that offers new layers of meaning and sensory engagement.
Using the example of my ecologically feminist poetic performance “Versemmelt?! – Poems between Bread, Dust, and Power”, I illustrate how poetry opens new knowledge spaces at the intersection of theory, performance, and affect. The poems stage a dialogic “standoff” between figures representing Mother Nature, Patriarchy, Egoism, and Prosperity, embodying complex power dynamics and social-environmental issues. This poetic form creates space for both critical reflection and emotional resonance.
The approach resonates with practices by artists like Rebecca Horn, who use writing not just to describe but to intensify and reframe the meaning of their artistic work. Poetry here serves as a tool for artists to articulate and sometimes “de-sensualize” their practice textually, offering fresh perspectives and pedagogical potential.
Currently, I am conducting workshops where poetry is employed as a mode to make knowledge affectively accessible and experientially felt, especially regarding ecological and feminist themes. This poster presents initial findings and invites discussion on integrating poetic strategies within artist pedagogy to foster reflexivity, empathy, and deeper engagement with urgent societal challenges.
Bio
Linda Luv is a multimedia artist whose research-based practice explores art, everyday life, and body politics. She earned her MA from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (2018) and completed a practice-based PhD at the University of Art and Design Linz in 2025. Her work focuses on performative interventions in public and private spaces, addressing themes such as everyday routines, care work, queer motherhood, and neurodivergence. Through her art, she challenges normative body images and creates alternative spaces for perception and encounter.
Linda’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Kunstraum Benzeholz, and WHA Galerie Linz. She also teaches and publishes scholarly texts on performance art from an artist-researcher perspective. As co-founder of the independent project space Flur in Frankfurt am Main, Linda engages curatorial work grounded in feminist and intersectional values. She currently lives and works in Offenbach am Main.
Noemi Gunea
Improvisation as Methodology for Thriving in Post Capitalism
I am a neurodiverse actress and performance maker whose artistic formation is grounded in somatic practice and long-form improvisation. These embodied methods inform both my creative practice and my approach to artist pedagogy. My doctoral research develops a pedagogical toolkit for training actors in postdramatic theatre, understood here as a form that displaces the primacy of the dramatic text and instead foregrounds liveness, relationality and the co-presence of bodies, images and actions.
Following Hans Thies Lehmann, the postdramatic is not merely a stylistic shift but an epistemological one, offering modes of performance that resonate more closely with contemporary social conditions characterised by instability, decentralised authority and complex systems of organisation.
Within this context, improvisation is proposed as a central methodological resource. Drawing on a year of advanced improvisation training with the Free Association and analysed through an auto-ethnographic approach, the study identifies key improvisational principles that support the kinds of tacit, situated and embodied forms of artistic thinking necessary for postdramatic work. Practices such as accepting and elaborating offers, yielding within moments of tension and recognising emergent collective patterns cultivate adaptive decision making, heightened situational awareness and an orientation toward collaborative meaning production.
The research argues that these improvisational capacities are valuable not only within the theatrical apparatus, where outcomes emerge through contingent interaction rather than textual determination, but also within the wider economic apparatus described by postcapitalist theorists such as Paul Mason and Kate Raworth. Contemporary labour conditions increasingly require flexibility, relational intelligence and the capacity to navigate uncertainty, all of which are rehearsed within improvisational practice.
The resulting toolkit translates these principles into pedagogical structures designed to support actors’ creative processes, professional judgement and collaborative practice. Although developed for postdramatic performance training, the framework also offers transferable insights for non-actors, particularly in relation to collective problem solving, distributed authorship and adaptive modes of working within shifting socio-economic environments.
Bio
Noemi Gunea is a neurodiverse Romanian performance artist and actress based in London. She makes surreal comedy work about wellness and economics, drawing on her background as a comedy improviser and as a yoga teacher. She has shown her work at the British Museum, Tate Modern, Royal Academy of Arts, South London Gallery, Arebyte Gallery, Pleasance Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre and Camden People’s Theatre. Her work has been shortlisted for New Contemporaries (2025,2024), UK New Artist of the Year (2022), BBC Audio Drama Award (2020), Aesthetica Prize (2019).
Assi Karttunen, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Anu Koskinen, Magnus Quaife, Pilvi Porkola, Sarah Rowles and Timothy Smith
Artist Pedagogy and Artistic Thinking: Contributions from Research at the University of the Arts Helsinki
For the past five years artist pedagogy, with the additional emphasis of artistic thinking, has been a research focus area at Uniarts Helsinki. This panel presents insights into this research area by researchers at Uniarts who have investigated this topic from diverse perspectives panning across visual arts, performance, theatre, writing, and music. They will introduce approaches and outcomes from their specific research undertakings and share how they envision the future of artist pedagogy and research related to it. The panel aims to generate discussion about how artists teach new artists in higher education and how these processes can be investigated.
Bios
Assi Karttunen
Aino-Kaisa Koistinen is a poet-researcher-teacher working with feminist practices of “writing-with” – writing that seeks to acknowledge how different human and more-than-human actors (co-authors, scientific and artistic traditions, texts, embodied histories, landscapes and environments) influence the artistic, poetic practice. Koistinen holds an MA in Literary Studies, a PhD in Contemporary Culture Studies, and the Title of Docent in Media Culture. Currently, they work as university researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki Research Institute.
Anu Koskinen
Magnus Quaife
Pilvi Porkola
Dr. Sarah Rowles is a postdoctoral researcher in fine art pedagogy at Uniarts Helsinki where she is looking at how the MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts prepares students to become professional artists. In 2024 she completed her Doctorate at the Institute of Education, University College London where her thesis examined ‘The role of undergraduate fine art education in the production of professional artists’ in a UK context. Sarah is the Founding Director of Q-Art, an events and publishing organisation that shares approaches to teaching art across higher education institutions. She has worked as a lecturer in art education and fine art contextual studies, and as a researcher in art education and pedagogy.
Timothy J. Smith (they/them), PhD, MFA, is a multiply neurodivergent artist, educator, and University Researcher at University of the Arts Helsinki. Their research engages critical disability and neurodiversity studies approaches to arts education. Their artistic practice explores stimming as a methodology, which informs their teaching and research.