Research Catalogue

50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including: 3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. 12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper. 13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided. 17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish. 1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. 62 pocket sketchbook black marker and ballpoint pen drawings. Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel. I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024. I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about, looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children: how they love, amongst other. I wanted to emphasise that element, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp, but intimate twist, as commentary, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, this artistic style refers to the populist character of actors. The text is written like trip-hop songs: two of the pseudonyms I gave are the artistic names of musicians of colour from the British band "Massive Attack", formed in Bristol. Otherwise, it is loosely structured in a manner inspired by television series. I used heavily popular culture signifiers, names of fictional characters from film, television, music and painting, as reference to actual individuals. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing. Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021. The exposition displays loosely and in lay terms vocabulary as rhetorical devices from analytic metaphysics, as well as gender and romance studies; for instance, I use the word "unactualised" to refer to individuals, who are real and concrete, who exist independently of my mind, however they were not "actualised" in my so-called personal life and dating practices: for that, I would have to select them, in order for them to be "instantiated" in my dating. The exposition is underpinned by an underlying neo-Marxist interpretation that, in my view, is relevant not just to economists and political philosophers, but also to people working in different sectors of our modern economies of advanced capitalism, such as banking and cybersecurity. In the style of art, as painting, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings. For "M" ('Ramadan', 'Julien', "Mr X"), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon ('Magna') (and Nick) - August, September, and October 2024 (March 1996). For "Daddy G" ('Isaac'), 'Eric' ("Her Man"), 'Prudence' ("'Rachel''s Beau", or "Her Man's alter-ego"), 'Moussa', 'Gaetan'; Black 'Humbert Humbert' and friend, 'Miloud'; Mohammed' ('Onzedouze'), 'Hermando', 'Nesseem' and 'Didi' - December 2024, January 2025, May, June, July, August, September, as well as November to December 2025. Seven men of colour and seven white men, who were also targeted, directly and indirectly. Who are not politicians, except for a current one and a former one, but are doing something political, so they must take good care of what they do. All my drawings were stolen in Paris and Brussels, in 2025. See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

Based on the Jungian concept of the shadow, I wanted to develop illustrations that depict a journey within the self, leading to the discovery and understanding of one’s own shadow. It represents the dark side of our personality, which we refuse to acknowledge and accept.

When preparing for the dead, may we peep into the future? In the broader geography of the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, we cook our coffee in the briki or cezve. Every region has its own variation, some heat up the water before adding the powder, some add spices, some make it thick, others thinner. And every person has their own variation as well. Coffee is something as personal as communal. Apart from the daily morning and evening consumption, we also share two uses of the coffee that are central of interest here: the coffee cup reading and the tradition of coffee drinking in funerals and memorials. Imagination and memory, future and past, the association with grief; and the unique timelines traced in each cup. I think that it has been with me for years, the memory of my grandmothers, my mother’s morning ritual of cooking a light Greek coffee in a big cup. The familiarity of the Kafenio. And most importantly, community dynamics; sharing others, participating. Here I aspired to create a meeting space with people, artists or not, with whom I have met over the years and share the subtle fascination about this type of coffee and its rituals. Acknowledging the blood, oppression and displacement behind and around the product. The Cafe Imperial.

This exposition examines the intersection of drawing, installation, and handmade objects informed by popular culture, spectacle, and visual symbolism. Central to the practice is the duality between physical materiality and virtual environments, a framework through which fictional realities are constructed and analyzed—often reflecting states of exhaustion, overload, and alienation characteristic of hyperactive contemporary culture. The use of low-budget materials and do-it-yourself methods introduces a deliberate tension between meticulous craftsmanship and intentional “amateurism,” while simultaneously subverting the capitalist logics of mass culture through the reuse and recontextualization of its visual language. Connecting introspective and social dimensions, the exposition offers not only an aesthetic experience but also a critical lens on everyday consumer routines, media-shaped reality, and processes of personal self-reflection.

The exhibition is deeply rooted in local history—the artist group explores the story of the white pigment titanium dioxide's industrial origin in Sandbekk, and how this world sensation from 1910 has influenced our world today. Titanium dioxide white pigment is a global color phenomenon. Ilmenite is transported from Titania to its sister company Kronos Titan in Fredrikstad, where it is refined into titanium dioxide. From there, the pigment circulates seemingly invisibly in a global network of systems. It is used in paint, plastics, paper, ink, cosmetics, medicine, sunscreen, and millions of products we use daily. This history is the starting point for the development project TiO2: The Materiality of White. Over the past two years, the artist group has visited Titania's mines and deposits, gathering materials from the local history. Just as geologists examined the areas in Sokndal over 150 years ago in search of valuable minerals, the group has wandered through the landscape, picking stones and collecting sand, clay, and rust-colored earth. These findings have been brought back to the ceramic laboratory at KhiO, where they have been processed through ceramic methods.

This exposition comprises textual fragments (both written and voiced) produced through the act of returning to (in turn re-activating, re-configuring, even re-imagining) conversational transcripts generated within the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. Initiated in January 2021, Dorsal Practices is an artistic collaboration for exploring how the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world. Conceived at the threshold between choreographic-movement practices and language-based artistic research, Dorsal Practices explores how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back, moreover, through a practice of coming back, the act of (re)turning. The original transcript material that forms the basis of this exposition was produced through a practice of conversation undertaken within six interrelated blocks of exploration, taking place over 18 months between October 2022 and February 2024. Within this period of enquiry, we — Brown and Cocker — focused our attention on the act of returning within our shared practice, re-imagined as a "dorsal turn". Through the intermingling of two registers of language-based practice, that is, through the performativity of both the written and spoken texts themselves, within this exposition we attempt to make tangible how the dorsal gesture of the turn and the circling principle of re- become operative as a spinal thread within our shared enquiry. Deviating from the straightforwardness of a strictly linear text, we invite a form of dorsal listening-reading that might engage through loops and returns. We conceive the research artefacts generated through the practice itself as the central focus within this exposition, alongside a supporting text where we introduce the wider enquiry of Dorsal Practices, reflecting on how we conceive the act of turning and of re-turning therein.