KuvA Research Days 2025
The KuvA Research Days will be held at the Uniarts Helsinki’s Sörnäinen campus, in the Academy of Fine Arts building Mylly (Sörnäisten rantatie 19, Helsinki). Parts of the Research Days programme can be attended online. The links will be published in the programme. Welcome to think together!
Tuesday 9.12.2025
Objectiles and timelines
Venue: The White Studio
Host: Doctoral programme, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
The day celebrates the past ten years and more to come of KuvA Research Days and dives into the diverse journey of the past, present and emerging doctoral projects. The anniversary coverage includes a curated setting of artistic research in-their-making, on display in the White Studio: a series of ’objectiles’*, framed from within ongoing projects by four current doctoral researchers who have started their doctoral studies in the 2020’s. As part of this day, the Academy of Fine Arts doctoral alumnae will realise their current or past research as a series of ‘timelines’ within the parameters of the White Studio as a play on the ‘poster’ sessions at more traditional academic conferences. The ‘objectiles’ and ‘posters’ form a group display, an exhibition, and a space for symposia presentations all at once.
–*The term objectile was proposed by G. Deleuze to describe objects as events or actions that unfold as they move through space and time. (See Deleuze 1988, The Fold)
Programme (subject to changes)
- 09:00–09:40 Objectiles and Timelines Exhibition, introduced by Maiju Loukola (objectiles), Nina Liebenberg and Ayesha Hameed (timelines)
- 09:40–10:00 Coffee
- 10:00–11:00 Mika Elo, A Decade of KuvA Research Days
- 11:00–11:45 Timo Tähkänen, Objectile 1: Speech in Drag: Queer Listening as Artistic Practice
- 11:45–12:45 Lunch
- 12:45–13:30 Hanneriina Moisseinen, Objectile 2: In Between
- 13:30–14:15 Dominik Fleischmann, Objectile 3: To Fall Like a Leaf
- 14:15–14:30 Coffee
- 14:30–15:15 Arja Kärkkäinen, Objectile 4: Habitable Sculptures
- 15:15–16:15 Poster session: KuvA doctoral alumni and Postdoc researchers: Jan-Erik Andersson Vitruvian Man, Annette Arlander Time with a Pine, Tuula Närhinen Time Flies, Lauren O’Neal At Hand, Vincent Roumagnac Twelve Scenes (Somewhen)
- 16:15–17:00 Panel discussion
Doctoral Researchers’ ‘Objectiles’ presentations
Organised by: Maiju Loukola, University lecturer
‘Objectiles’ (1–4) is a series of presentations of ongoing doctoral research projects and their material manifestations. Brought together as ‘objectiles’ in the vein of the term proposed by G. Deleuze, they embody ‘objects as events or actions that unfold as they move through space and time’. (See Deleuze 1988, The Fold). The open call/ invitation was aimed for the KuvA doctoral researchers who have started their studies in 2020’s (2021, 2023 and 2025), to frame, concretize, and share their ongoing projects, from within, with a wider peer community. In this section, the main role is given to the works, fragments, objects, practices, processes, and other spatial and visual arrangements. The objectiles are on display at the White Studio in the form of a group exhibit together with the ’Posters (Timelines)’ section.
Doctoral alumni poster session: ‘Timelines’
Venue: White Studio, Academy of Fine Arts
Host: Professor Ayesha Hameed & Postdoctoral researcher Nina Liebenberg
As part of the KuvA Research Day we invite alumni of the Academy of Fine Arts Doctoral Programme to submit works for the ‘poster’ session on Tuesday, December 9th, taking place in the White studio. As a broad theme, we invite you to consider ‘timelines’: thinking about linear time, time askew, reversed, growing or shrinking, and thinking about how it might manifest, interact or dissolve in the space of the studio. What temporalities, chronotopes, time-scales might your work inhabit? What resonances do they have with histories, deep temporalities outside of the space of the studio? What kind of timelines might bring your work together?
Wednesday 10.12.2025
Maalaus = vä(ä)rin kirjoitus?
Paikka: Valkoinen studio
Vastaava: Siiri Haarla, professori, maalaus, Kuvataideakatemia, Taideyliopisto
Symposium kokoaa yhteen filosofien, taiteilijoiden ja tutkijoiden ajatuksia väristä, maalauksesta ja kielestä. Miten maalaus voidaan ymmärtää kielenä? Miten sanoilla voi tavoittaa värin? Miten väri kirjoittaa maalauksia? Miten väri on olemassa? Julia Kristevan mukaan maalaus-kieli analogia hajoaa, kun värille koitetaan löytää paikka kielen rekisteristä. (Giotton ilo) Maalauksen kielessä jotain menee aina vikaan, ja jää väliin, – mitä siinä halkeamassa syntyy? Onko maalaus värin väärinkirjoitus? Puhujina tilaisuudessa: Martta Heikkilä, Riikka Stewen, Aki Turunen, Maria Matinmikko, Harald Arnkil ja Siiri Haarla.
Ohjelma (luonnos)
- 9.00 –9.15 Kahvi
- 9.15–9.30 Aloitussanat
- 9.30–10.15 Martta Heikkilä: Korvaamaton väri
- 10.15–11.00 Siiri Haarla: Maalarin mu(i)stelmat
- 11.00–11.45 Riikka Stewen: Väri vapauden ja (vallan)kumouksen äärellä
- 11.45 –12.45 Lounas
- 12.45 –13.30 Aki Turunen: Maalauksellisia polttimoita
- 13.30–14.15 Maria Matinmikko: Essee värin liepeillä, liehuu
- 14.15–14.45 Kahvi
- 14.45– 15.30 Harald Arnkil: Väri ei ole kieli
- 15.30–16.00 Loppukeskustelu
Thursday 11.12.2025
Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries 1
Venues: The White Studio and KuvA/Tila Gallery
Host: Henk Slager, Visiting professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
A series of discursive and performative presentations that resonate with the projects presented in the eponymous Research Pavilion exhibition at the Kuva/Tila gallery, curated by Henk Slager. The following questions form the starting point of the Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries research exhibition: What will the future look like? How can we imagine future in a time that seems determined by various crises? And what will be the role of artistic research in this? Presentations provided by: Amanda Beech, Bassam El Baroni, Noora Karjalainen, Marleena Huuhka, Jaime Belmonte & Paola Guzman, Kristiina Koskinen in conversation with Iris van der Tuin, Dom Schlienger in conversation with Tere Vaden, Veli Lehtovaara, and Heidi Hänninen with a guided tour to public art projects in Kontula. Read more about the curatorial project
Programme (subject to changes)
Venue: White Studio
- 9:00– 9:30 Coffee
- 9:30–10:45 Amanda Beech (CalArts Los Angeles, keynote residency). Presentation of the project Map of the Bomb: Different registers for difference and a conversation with Bassam El Baroni (Aalto University).
This is the story of the transformation of the left. A future beyond reach, a world that we live in and cannot grasp. Our estrangement from time and agency is painfully underscored in today’s crises of post truth politics and climate change catastrophe. But what if the “noise” we detect is actually just a complex pattern, a schema that underlies all action and is yet to be discovered? What if… we could understand reality? More information on Amanda Beech homepage. - 10:45 – 11:00 Coffee
- 11:00–12:00 Noora Karjalainen (Uniarts Helsinki): The Disobedient Rhythm
Throughout history, countless attempts have been made to fix, cure, or integrate deaf people into the ways of the hearing world. What if deaf bodies and lives were seen as already whole, valuable, and complete? Doctoral researcher Noora Karjalainen, a member of Ursa Minor Ensemble, engages in conversation with the group, exploring how deafness shapes unique rhythms of sensing, knowing, and being, and how these ways of being enact the making of the world. In the gallery space, they bring these reflections to life, performing a score from their research project The Disobedient Gene. More information on Noora Karjalainen homepage - 12:00–12:30 Marleena Huuhka (Tampere University): The Virtual Stage of Resistance: Performance and Play as Mediated Manifestations of Resistance Amidst the Gaza War
This postdoctoral project looks at social media posts depicting street performance situations, play and sports by Gazan people during current war, analysing them as performative, mediated manifestations of resistance. In the work produced for the Research Pavillion (Harmahtava, iltavaloa hehkuva taivas / سماء رمادية تتوهجبضوء المساء / A Greyish Sky Glowing with Evening Light) Huuhka examines the ways LLMs such as ChatGPT sterilize disturbing, controversial content and neutralise scenes of war-related destruction into background noise. - 12:30–13:30 Lunch
Venue: Kuva/Tila Gallery
- 13:30–14:00 Jaime Belmonte & Paola Fernanda (Uniarts Helsinki): Aquatic Universes
Aquatic Universes is a collaboration between composer Jaime Belmonte, visual artist and experimental filmmaker Paola Fernanda and eleven musicians from the Global Music Department of the Sibelius Academy. The aim of the collaboration is to research the liminal spaces of composition and installation art, creating a transdisciplinary work that questions the traditional boundaries between artistic methodologies and disciplinary paradigms. Drawing upon the exploration of personal relationships with bodies of water, the group constructs a collective imaginary that depicts a multifocal conception of what is water. The collaborative process, guided by the ontological turn as a method of artistic research, involves a constant sharing of stories and experiences that shape images, sounds and live interventions. The result is an idiorrhythmic constellation of the aquatic universes that each one of the participants carries within them. More information on Jaime Belmonte’s homepage
- 14:00–14:45 Kristiina Koskinen (University of Lapland) presentation Becoming a Forest, and a conversation with Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University)
Becoming a Forest is an artistic research project about understanding and presenting a forest. The project includes a short film, Definition of Forest (2024), portraying a forest by beginning with its formal definition. The film dives into the shared living of humans and forests, with unruly voiceovers and sensual visual material leading the viewer down conflicting paths, refusing to offer a singular, cohesive perspective or a definitive understanding. The forest, as matter, is active and full of perpetual processes and messy entanglements with the human world. Drawing from new materialist and documentary film theory, the research project explores how a short film can witness, reimagine, and discuss concepts of nature. The film is exhibited with scheduled interventions by a dancer in the gallery space, activating the environment through movement and presence.
In the context of the research days, a conversation will take place about applying agential realism and intra-actions with Iris van der Tuin, Utrecht University. Read more about Kristiina Koskinen on University of Lapland profile page
- 14:45–15:15 Coffee
- 15:15–15:45 Dominik Schlienger (Uniarts Helsinki), presentation GaiaStage and conversation with Tere Vaden (University of Tampere)
GaiaStage, a low-carbon, pedal-powered music stage runs grassroots events on a small scale such as interactive sound installations, as environmental activism, as events at town fêtes or workshops for schools. With the use of the name “Gaia” we consciously associate the project with Bruno Latour’s use of the “Gaia Theory”, describing how living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a complex, interdependent system that maintains and may perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. The GaiaStage installation at RP6 addresses these interdependences in an interconnected world by tracing how social actions situate technical events. We demonstrate that a stage is not the stuff it is built from but the sociality it generates.
Dominik Schlienger will present this project in a conversation with Tere Vaden in which special attention is paid to the embodiment of energy and naphthology. Read more on GaiaStage homepage.
- 15:45–16:30 Veli Lehtovaara (Uniarts Helsinki): Nature Untitled | The Pier
In this performative presentation Lehtovaara introduces a year long research project The Pier, which begins from this exhibition and travels outdoors onto lakes, ponds and sea during 2026. The presentation contains choreographed movement, speech and sound and is followed by a conversation with the audience.
The pier serves as a choreographic research vessel, a structure for physical study and practice, a meeting place, a stage, a sculpture, a resting place, a shelter and a platform for observation. The structure affords a direct connection with the environment (water, climate, land) as well as meeting with other bodies in multiple constellations. Lehtovaara works in collaboration with artist Jani Hietanen (sound). Read more about Veli Lehtovaara
- 1630–16:45 Break
Venue: White Studio
- 16:45–17:00 Sophie Durand (Vilnius Art Academy) Presentation of the journal LANDING
LANDING an international platform that facilitates critical and creative artistic inquiry, with a special focus on research methods and an ethos of research. LANDING publishes descriptions of how practice-based/led research is done on the ground, in the studio, in the world, with and through materials and other forms of life. (Rather than existing in the space of abstract theory and speculation.) Elaborating on and making-visible the mechanisms behind the scenes of an inquiry, including situating the author. Rather than wanting to take away the magic from art-making, we believe that art can play an increasingly important socio-political role by talking about how processes are interrelated, using arguments and articulations that move beyond the logo-centric. The second issue of Landing titled: Extending the Echoes focuses on ways with documentation in arts based research. Read more on Landing homepage.
- 17:00–17:15 Heidi Hänninen (Uniarts Helsinki), Mapping Kontula Art School (Kontula Metro Station 2025)
Welcome to Kontula! Through the street art tours on the site in suburb Kontula and documentations in the Research Catalogue one can have a look inside to KAS! Kontula Art School’s socially engaged public art practice. “Kaupunki on meidän koti” (“City is our home”), the last artistic part of the artistic research by community artist-researcher Heidi Hänninen, includes paintings from 36 KAS community members, both adults and juniors, implemented for the renovated metrostation in Kontula. In her research (street) art practice is the method of working (socially engaged art making practice and artworks in the public environment), but it is also an intervention for (social) change.
Read more about Heidi Hänninen on Uniarts Cris research portal.
- 17:15 Guided tour travel to Kontula
Friday 12.12.2025
Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries 2
Venues: The White Studio and Kuva / Tila Gallery
Host: Henk Slager, Visiting professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
A second series of discursive and performative presentations: Christian Nyampeta, Sophie Durand, Rut Karin Zettergren, and Joanna Kalm. In addition, there will be a presentation of recent artistic research journals (Harri Laakso, Ruukku: Re-imagining; Behzad Khosravi Noori, Vis: Brieftopia) that draw attention to similar research issues, as well as a presentation by the recently launched Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIM) in Sweden (Mick Wilson, Kerry Guinan).
Programme (subject to changes)
Venue: White Studio
- 9:30–10:30 Bezhad Khosravi Noori (VIS), Harri Laakso (RUUKU), and Mick Wilson (Moderator). Presentation of special issues Vis #13 Brieftopia and RUUKU Re-imagining
Two recently published special journal issues clearly relate to the issues of the research pavilion presentation Idiorryhmtic Imaginaries, namely VIS (Nordic Journal for Artistic Research), issue 13, Brieftopia (“an exploration of an imagined realm—a fleeting yet delightful sight into an imaginative future, a momentary glimpse into a potential future that is both accessible and tangible, a brief utopia, a Brieftopia) and the special issue of RUUKU (Studies in Artistic Research) Re-Imagining (“research in the context of artistic and creative practice could have a special relation to time; simultaneously attaching itself to a prior moment in time and, from there, propelling imagination to unforeseen futures.”) The editors of both magazines, Bezhad Khosravi Noori (VIS) and Harri Laakso (RUUKU), will present both issues, after which moderator Mick Wilson (Valand Academy Gothenburg) will continue the discussion with them.
Read more about Brieftopia
Read more about RUUKKU Call for Contributions: Re-Imagining in Research Catalogue
- 10:30–10:45 Coffee
Venue: Kuva/Tila Gallery
- 10:45-11:15 Research Pavilion #6 projects: Sophie Durand: (Vilnius Academy of Arts): Excerpts from Field Practice
Through engaging with the surrounds this workshop aims to opens questions as to how artworks could co-become in landscape and asks what might be implied and enabled by some kind of recalibration of production and presentation so that they are simultaneous to each other, and the present might imply and enable. Simply said, how can artworks function as trends; transient states of doing and of being? This is a practice led workshop that draws from Sophie’s own research and process. Read more on Sophie Durand’s webpage.
- 11:15–12:00 Research Pavilion #6 projects: Rut Karin Zettergren (Uniarts Helsinki): Galaxy Revolution
Rut Karin Zettergren will present her and Olando Whyte’s collective artwork Galaxy Revolution, an installation that gathers parts of the online space station of the Historical Spiritual Vibrations space agency. Rut Karin will guide you through the space station, training sessions and game instructions the duo use to imagine training and healing practices for the new space race. You will experience glimpses of space journeys and learn more about the history of the tools and knowledge Whyte&Zettergren bring with them on their missions. The installation gathers documentation of Whyte&Zettergren’s live actions and ritual practices at locations in Iceland where the Apollo 11 astronauts trained for their journey to the Moon. It also includes infrared imagery, a technology used in space visualization to capture light waves invisible to the human eye, recorded during the duo’s space journeys. The duo explores space both as a site where future colonial projects are planned and as a fictional realm for imagining alternative worlds.
Galaxy Revolution
Whyte & Zettergren
Olando Whyte
Rut Karin Zettergren
- 12:00–13:00 Lunch
Venue: White Studio
- 13:00–13:30 Joanna Kalm (Estonian Academy of Arts): A basal animal, location: home
Before we became human – organisms of numerous differentiated tissues, intricate biochemical pathways, and highly effective nervous system regulation – there was “a simpler time”: a time when we were fluid bundles of cells, swarming through liquid spaces, communicating through direct touch, in body and in space, without a central “I” to direct us. Joanna Kalm’s ongoing practice of embodying the logics of basal animals – such as placozoa, often called “the simplest animals on Earth” – does not seek to return to the past. Rather, it invites us to consider and experience how basal modes of organization – where touching, perceiving, moving, and knowing are coterminous – can remain accessible within us, even as 21st-century humans. How might it affect us to go lower – into the depths of embodiment – to the basics of bodying like a placozoa?
Read more from Joanna Kalm’s webpage or from Joanna Kalm’s instagram page.
- 13:30–14:00 Kerry Guinan and Mick Wilson (Valand Academy Gothenburg), Mapping the Political Imaginary
This presentation focuses on aspects of the ongoing “Mapping the Political Imaginary” research strand at the Centre for Art and The Political Imaginary. This research seeks to give an account of divergent ways in which the imaginary and the political imaginary are used as key devices in different research undertakings. Addressing artistic research and a wider spectrum of research across social theory, philosophy, politics and anthropology, this work assumes that there is no singular common construct of the political imaginary at work, but rather multiple and divergent (though often overlapping) theories being operationalised for different research purposes. This presentation provides a first overview of the different formulations that we have encountered so far and the tensions between these. It also considers the challenge of working at the intersection of different research modalities across artistic practice, philosophy, social studies and the humanities. More about The Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary.
- 14:00–14:15 Coffee
Venue: White Studio & Zoom
- 14:15 Christian Nyampeta (New York): Closing keynote residency presentation:
How to Live Together: Some Rhythms of Life (online on Zoom), How do people live in the wake of extreme violence, and why doesn’t knowledge enable them to prevent this violence? How can they break the rhythm of violence, or at least lessen it and slow it down? Christian Nyampeta addresses these questions – entirely in the spirit of Roland Barthes’ Lecon – in the form of eleven lectures that take place and are documented as part of the Research Pavilion. The lectures depart from the perspective of a world with intensities that cause much of today’s suffering, and culminate in a transversal, meandering repertoire of “figures” of Living Together, such as Ancestor, Crisis, Victim, Witness, Perpetrator, Orphan, Punishment, and Memory. Figures that invite us “to live together” in a different way and that have the capacity to seep through the economic, gender, national, racial, and linguistic divides produced by and through the global capital. A harmonious form of inhabitation as a composition without determination – a possible figuring of a gathering that presumes neither the operation of a rule, nor the actualisation of an essence – that Nyampeta aptly characterizes as a poethical and polyphonic way of being in the world. Read more about Christian Nyampeta.
Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries research exhibition
Tuesday 9.12.2025
Objectiles and timelines
Venue: The White Studio
Host: Doctoral programme, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
The day celebrates the past ten years and more to come of KuvA Research Days and dives into the diverse journey of the past, present and emerging doctoral projects. The anniversary coverage includes a curated setting of artistic research in-their-making, on display in the White Studio: a series of ’objectiles’*, framed from within ongoing projects by four current doctoral researchers who have started their doctoral studies in the 2020’s. As part of this day, the Academy of Fine Arts doctoral alumnae will realise their current or past research as a series of ‘timelines’ within the parameters of the White Studio as a play on the ‘poster’ sessions at more traditional academic conferences. The ‘objectiles’ and ‘posters’ form a group display, an exhibition, and a space for symposia presentations all at once.
–*The term objectile was proposed by G. Deleuze to describe objects as events or actions that unfold as they move through space and time. (See Deleuze 1988, The Fold)
Programme (subject to changes)
- 09:00–09:40 Objectiles and Timelines Exhibition, introduced by Maiju Loukola (objectiles), Nina Liebenberg and Ayesha Hameed (timelines)
- 09:40–10:00 Coffee
- 10:00–11:00 Mika Elo, A Decade of KuvA Research Days
- 11:00–11:45 Timo Tähkänen, Objectile 1: Speech in Drag: Queer Listening as Artistic Practice
- 11:45–12:45 Lunch
- 12:45–13:30 Hanneriina Moisseinen, Objectile 2: In Between
- 13:30–14:15 Dominik Fleischmann, Objectile 3: To Fall Like a Leaf
- 14:15–14:30 Coffee
- 14:30–15:15 Arja Kärkkäinen, Objectile 4: Habitable Sculptures
- 15:15–16:15 Poster session: KuvA doctoral alumni and Postdoc researchers: Jan-Erik Andersson Vitruvian Man, Annette Arlander Time with a Pine, Tuula Närhinen Time Flies, Lauren O’Neal At Hand, Vincent Roumagnac Twelve Scenes (Somewhen)
- 16:15–17:00 Panel discussion
Doctoral Researchers’ ‘Objectiles’ presentations
Organised by: Maiju Loukola, University lecturer
‘Objectiles’ (1–4) is a series of presentations of ongoing doctoral research projects and their material manifestations. Brought together as ‘objectiles’ in the vein of the term proposed by G. Deleuze, they embody ‘objects as events or actions that unfold as they move through space and time’. (See Deleuze 1988, The Fold). The open call/ invitation was aimed for the KuvA doctoral researchers who have started their studies in 2020’s (2021, 2023 and 2025), to frame, concretize, and share their ongoing projects, from within, with a wider peer community. In this section, the main role is given to the works, fragments, objects, practices, processes, and other spatial and visual arrangements. The objectiles are on display at the White Studio in the form of a group exhibit together with the ’Posters (Timelines)’ section.
Doctoral alumni poster session: ‘Timelines’
Venue: White Studio, Academy of Fine Arts
Host: Professor Ayesha Hameed & Postdoctoral researcher Nina Liebenberg
As part of the KuvA Research Day we invite alumni of the Academy of Fine Arts Doctoral Programme to submit works for the ‘poster’ session on Tuesday, December 9th, taking place in the White studio. As a broad theme, we invite you to consider ‘timelines’: thinking about linear time, time askew, reversed, growing or shrinking, and thinking about how it might manifest, interact or dissolve in the space of the studio. What temporalities, chronotopes, time-scales might your work inhabit? What resonances do they have with histories, deep temporalities outside of the space of the studio? What kind of timelines might bring your work together?
Wednesday 10.12.2025
Maalaus = vä(ä)rin kirjoitus?
Paikka: Valkoinen studio
Vastaava: Siiri Haarla, professori, maalaus, Kuvataideakatemia, Taideyliopisto
Symposium kokoaa yhteen filosofien, taiteilijoiden ja tutkijoiden ajatuksia väristä, maalauksesta ja kielestä. Miten maalaus voidaan ymmärtää kielenä? Miten sanoilla voi tavoittaa värin? Miten väri kirjoittaa maalauksia? Miten väri on olemassa? Julia Kristevan mukaan maalaus-kieli analogia hajoaa, kun värille koitetaan löytää paikka kielen rekisteristä. (Giotton ilo) Maalauksen kielessä jotain menee aina vikaan, ja jää väliin, – mitä siinä halkeamassa syntyy? Onko maalaus värin väärinkirjoitus? Puhujina tilaisuudessa: Martta Heikkilä, Riikka Stewen, Aki Turunen, Maria Matinmikko, Harald Arnkil ja Siiri Haarla.
Ohjelma (luonnos)
- 9.00 –9.15 Kahvi
- 9.15–9.30 Aloitussanat
- 9.30–10.15 Martta Heikkilä: Korvaamaton väri
- 10.15–11.00 Siiri Haarla: Maalarin mu(i)stelmat
- 11.00–11.45 Riikka Stewen: Väri vapauden ja (vallan)kumouksen äärellä
- 11.45 –12.45 Lounas
- 12.45 –13.30 Aki Turunen: Maalauksellisia polttimoita
- 13.30–14.15 Maria Matinmikko: Essee värin liepeillä, liehuu
- 14.15–14.45 Kahvi
- 14.45– 15.30 Harald Arnkil: Väri ei ole kieli
- 15.30–16.00 Loppukeskustelu
Thursday 11.12.2025
Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries 1
Venues: The White Studio and KuvA/Tila Gallery
Host: Henk Slager, Visiting professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
A series of discursive and performative presentations that resonate with the projects presented in the eponymous Research Pavilion exhibition at the Kuva/Tila gallery, curated by Henk Slager. The following questions form the starting point of the Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries research exhibition: What will the future look like? How can we imagine future in a time that seems determined by various crises? And what will be the role of artistic research in this? Presentations provided by: Amanda Beech, Bassam El Baroni, Noora Karjalainen, Marleena Huuhka, Jaime Belmonte & Paola Guzman, Kristiina Koskinen in conversation with Iris van der Tuin, Dom Schlienger in conversation with Tere Vaden, Veli Lehtovaara, and Heidi Hänninen with a guided tour to public art projects in Kontula. Read more about the curatorial project
Programme (subject to changes)
Venue: White Studio
- 9:00– 9:30 Coffee
- 9:30–10:45 Amanda Beech (CalArts Los Angeles, keynote residency). Presentation of the project Map of the Bomb: Different registers for difference and a conversation with Bassam El Baroni (Aalto University).
This is the story of the transformation of the left. A future beyond reach, a world that we live in and cannot grasp. Our estrangement from time and agency is painfully underscored in today’s crises of post truth politics and climate change catastrophe. But what if the “noise” we detect is actually just a complex pattern, a schema that underlies all action and is yet to be discovered? What if… we could understand reality? More information on Amanda Beech homepage. - 10:45 – 11:00 Coffee
- 11:00–12:00 Noora Karjalainen (Uniarts Helsinki): The Disobedient Rhythm
Throughout history, countless attempts have been made to fix, cure, or integrate deaf people into the ways of the hearing world. What if deaf bodies and lives were seen as already whole, valuable, and complete? Doctoral researcher Noora Karjalainen, a member of Ursa Minor Ensemble, engages in conversation with the group, exploring how deafness shapes unique rhythms of sensing, knowing, and being, and how these ways of being enact the making of the world. In the gallery space, they bring these reflections to life, performing a score from their research project The Disobedient Gene. More information on Noora Karjalainen homepage - 12:00–12:30 Marleena Huuhka (Tampere University): The Virtual Stage of Resistance: Performance and Play as Mediated Manifestations of Resistance Amidst the Gaza War
This postdoctoral project looks at social media posts depicting street performance situations, play and sports by Gazan people during current war, analysing them as performative, mediated manifestations of resistance. In the work produced for the Research Pavillion (Harmahtava, iltavaloa hehkuva taivas / سماء رمادية تتوهجبضوء المساء / A Greyish Sky Glowing with Evening Light) Huuhka examines the ways LLMs such as ChatGPT sterilize disturbing, controversial content and neutralise scenes of war-related destruction into background noise. - 12:30–13:30 Lunch
Venue: Kuva/Tila Gallery
- 13:30–14:00 Jaime Belmonte & Paola Fernanda (Uniarts Helsinki): Aquatic Universes
Aquatic Universes is a collaboration between composer Jaime Belmonte, visual artist and experimental filmmaker Paola Fernanda and eleven musicians from the Global Music Department of the Sibelius Academy. The aim of the collaboration is to research the liminal spaces of composition and installation art, creating a transdisciplinary work that questions the traditional boundaries between artistic methodologies and disciplinary paradigms. Drawing upon the exploration of personal relationships with bodies of water, the group constructs a collective imaginary that depicts a multifocal conception of what is water. The collaborative process, guided by the ontological turn as a method of artistic research, involves a constant sharing of stories and experiences that shape images, sounds and live interventions. The result is an idiorrhythmic constellation of the aquatic universes that each one of the participants carries within them. More information on Jaime Belmonte’s homepage
- 14:00–14:45 Kristiina Koskinen (University of Lapland) presentation Becoming a Forest, and a conversation with Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University)
Becoming a Forest is an artistic research project about understanding and presenting a forest. The project includes a short film, Definition of Forest (2024), portraying a forest by beginning with its formal definition. The film dives into the shared living of humans and forests, with unruly voiceovers and sensual visual material leading the viewer down conflicting paths, refusing to offer a singular, cohesive perspective or a definitive understanding. The forest, as matter, is active and full of perpetual processes and messy entanglements with the human world. Drawing from new materialist and documentary film theory, the research project explores how a short film can witness, reimagine, and discuss concepts of nature. The film is exhibited with scheduled interventions by a dancer in the gallery space, activating the environment through movement and presence.
In the context of the research days, a conversation will take place about applying agential realism and intra-actions with Iris van der Tuin, Utrecht University. Read more about Kristiina Koskinen on University of Lapland profile page
- 14:45–15:15 Coffee
- 15:15–15:45 Dominik Schlienger (Uniarts Helsinki), presentation GaiaStage and conversation with Tere Vaden (University of Tampere)
GaiaStage, a low-carbon, pedal-powered music stage runs grassroots events on a small scale such as interactive sound installations, as environmental activism, as events at town fêtes or workshops for schools. With the use of the name “Gaia” we consciously associate the project with Bruno Latour’s use of the “Gaia Theory”, describing how living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a complex, interdependent system that maintains and may perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. The GaiaStage installation at RP6 addresses these interdependences in an interconnected world by tracing how social actions situate technical events. We demonstrate that a stage is not the stuff it is built from but the sociality it generates.
Dominik Schlienger will present this project in a conversation with Tere Vaden in which special attention is paid to the embodiment of energy and naphthology. Read more on GaiaStage homepage.
- 15:45–16:30 Veli Lehtovaara (Uniarts Helsinki): Nature Untitled | The Pier
In this performative presentation Lehtovaara introduces a year long research project The Pier, which begins from this exhibition and travels outdoors onto lakes, ponds and sea during 2026. The presentation contains choreographed movement, speech and sound and is followed by a conversation with the audience.
The pier serves as a choreographic research vessel, a structure for physical study and practice, a meeting place, a stage, a sculpture, a resting place, a shelter and a platform for observation. The structure affords a direct connection with the environment (water, climate, land) as well as meeting with other bodies in multiple constellations. Lehtovaara works in collaboration with artist Jani Hietanen (sound). Read more about Veli Lehtovaara
- 1630–16:45 Break
Venue: White Studio
- 16:45–17:00 Sophie Durand (Vilnius Art Academy) Presentation of the journal LANDING
LANDING an international platform that facilitates critical and creative artistic inquiry, with a special focus on research methods and an ethos of research. LANDING publishes descriptions of how practice-based/led research is done on the ground, in the studio, in the world, with and through materials and other forms of life. (Rather than existing in the space of abstract theory and speculation.) Elaborating on and making-visible the mechanisms behind the scenes of an inquiry, including situating the author. Rather than wanting to take away the magic from art-making, we believe that art can play an increasingly important socio-political role by talking about how processes are interrelated, using arguments and articulations that move beyond the logo-centric. The second issue of Landing titled: Extending the Echoes focuses on ways with documentation in arts based research. Read more on Landing homepage.
- 17:00–17:15 Heidi Hänninen (Uniarts Helsinki), Mapping Kontula Art School (Kontula Metro Station 2025)
Welcome to Kontula! Through the street art tours on the site in suburb Kontula and documentations in the Research Catalogue one can have a look inside to KAS! Kontula Art School’s socially engaged public art practice. “Kaupunki on meidän koti” (“City is our home”), the last artistic part of the artistic research by community artist-researcher Heidi Hänninen, includes paintings from 36 KAS community members, both adults and juniors, implemented for the renovated metrostation in Kontula. In her research (street) art practice is the method of working (socially engaged art making practice and artworks in the public environment), but it is also an intervention for (social) change.
Read more about Heidi Hänninen on Uniarts Cris research portal.
- 17:15 Guided tour travel to Kontula
Friday 12.12.2025
Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries 2
Venues: The White Studio and Kuva / Tila Gallery
Host: Henk Slager, Visiting professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
A second series of discursive and performative presentations: Christian Nyampeta, Sophie Durand, Rut Karin Zettergren, and Joanna Kalm. In addition, there will be a presentation of recent artistic research journals (Harri Laakso, Ruukku: Re-imagining; Behzad Khosravi Noori, Vis: Brieftopia) that draw attention to similar research issues, as well as a presentation by the recently launched Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIM) in Sweden (Mick Wilson, Kerry Guinan).
Programme (subject to changes)
Venue: White Studio
- 9:30–10:30 Bezhad Khosravi Noori (VIS), Harri Laakso (RUUKU), and Mick Wilson (Moderator). Presentation of special issues Vis #13 Brieftopia and RUUKU Re-imagining
Two recently published special journal issues clearly relate to the issues of the research pavilion presentation Idiorryhmtic Imaginaries, namely VIS (Nordic Journal for Artistic Research), issue 13, Brieftopia (“an exploration of an imagined realm—a fleeting yet delightful sight into an imaginative future, a momentary glimpse into a potential future that is both accessible and tangible, a brief utopia, a Brieftopia) and the special issue of RUUKU (Studies in Artistic Research) Re-Imagining (“research in the context of artistic and creative practice could have a special relation to time; simultaneously attaching itself to a prior moment in time and, from there, propelling imagination to unforeseen futures.”) The editors of both magazines, Bezhad Khosravi Noori (VIS) and Harri Laakso (RUUKU), will present both issues, after which moderator Mick Wilson (Valand Academy Gothenburg) will continue the discussion with them.
Read more about Brieftopia
Read more about RUUKKU Call for Contributions: Re-Imagining in Research Catalogue
- 10:30–10:45 Coffee
Venue: Kuva/Tila Gallery
- 10:45-11:15 Research Pavilion #6 projects: Sophie Durand: (Vilnius Academy of Arts): Excerpts from Field Practice
Through engaging with the surrounds this workshop aims to opens questions as to how artworks could co-become in landscape and asks what might be implied and enabled by some kind of recalibration of production and presentation so that they are simultaneous to each other, and the present might imply and enable. Simply said, how can artworks function as trends; transient states of doing and of being? This is a practice led workshop that draws from Sophie’s own research and process. Read more on Sophie Durand’s webpage.
- 11:15–12:00 Research Pavilion #6 projects: Rut Karin Zettergren (Uniarts Helsinki): Galaxy Revolution
Rut Karin Zettergren will present her and Olando Whyte’s collective artwork Galaxy Revolution, an installation that gathers parts of the online space station of the Historical Spiritual Vibrations space agency. Rut Karin will guide you through the space station, training sessions and game instructions the duo use to imagine training and healing practices for the new space race. You will experience glimpses of space journeys and learn more about the history of the tools and knowledge Whyte&Zettergren bring with them on their missions. The installation gathers documentation of Whyte&Zettergren’s live actions and ritual practices at locations in Iceland where the Apollo 11 astronauts trained for their journey to the Moon. It also includes infrared imagery, a technology used in space visualization to capture light waves invisible to the human eye, recorded during the duo’s space journeys. The duo explores space both as a site where future colonial projects are planned and as a fictional realm for imagining alternative worlds.
Galaxy Revolution
Whyte & Zettergren
Olando Whyte
Rut Karin Zettergren
- 12:00–13:00 Lunch
Venue: White Studio
- 13:00–13:30 Joanna Kalm (Estonian Academy of Arts): A basal animal, location: home
Before we became human – organisms of numerous differentiated tissues, intricate biochemical pathways, and highly effective nervous system regulation – there was “a simpler time”: a time when we were fluid bundles of cells, swarming through liquid spaces, communicating through direct touch, in body and in space, without a central “I” to direct us. Joanna Kalm’s ongoing practice of embodying the logics of basal animals – such as placozoa, often called “the simplest animals on Earth” – does not seek to return to the past. Rather, it invites us to consider and experience how basal modes of organization – where touching, perceiving, moving, and knowing are coterminous – can remain accessible within us, even as 21st-century humans. How might it affect us to go lower – into the depths of embodiment – to the basics of bodying like a placozoa?
Read more from Joanna Kalm’s webpage or from Joanna Kalm’s instagram page.
- 13:30–14:00 Kerry Guinan and Mick Wilson (Valand Academy Gothenburg), Mapping the Political Imaginary
This presentation focuses on aspects of the ongoing “Mapping the Political Imaginary” research strand at the Centre for Art and The Political Imaginary. This research seeks to give an account of divergent ways in which the imaginary and the political imaginary are used as key devices in different research undertakings. Addressing artistic research and a wider spectrum of research across social theory, philosophy, politics and anthropology, this work assumes that there is no singular common construct of the political imaginary at work, but rather multiple and divergent (though often overlapping) theories being operationalised for different research purposes. This presentation provides a first overview of the different formulations that we have encountered so far and the tensions between these. It also considers the challenge of working at the intersection of different research modalities across artistic practice, philosophy, social studies and the humanities. More about The Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary.
- 14:00–14:15 Coffee
Venue: White Studio & Zoom
- 14:15 Christian Nyampeta (New York): Closing keynote residency presentation:
How to Live Together: Some Rhythms of Life (online on Zoom), How do people live in the wake of extreme violence, and why doesn’t knowledge enable them to prevent this violence? How can they break the rhythm of violence, or at least lessen it and slow it down? Christian Nyampeta addresses these questions – entirely in the spirit of Roland Barthes’ Lecon – in the form of eleven lectures that take place and are documented as part of the Research Pavilion. The lectures depart from the perspective of a world with intensities that cause much of today’s suffering, and culminate in a transversal, meandering repertoire of “figures” of Living Together, such as Ancestor, Crisis, Victim, Witness, Perpetrator, Orphan, Punishment, and Memory. Figures that invite us “to live together” in a different way and that have the capacity to seep through the economic, gender, national, racial, and linguistic divides produced by and through the global capital. A harmonious form of inhabitation as a composition without determination – a possible figuring of a gathering that presumes neither the operation of a rule, nor the actualisation of an essence – that Nyampeta aptly characterizes as a poethical and polyphonic way of being in the world. Read more about Christian Nyampeta.