Research Catalogue

Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, this Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) provides contexts for coming together via the exchange of language-based research. The intent is to support developments in the field of expanded language-based practices by inviting attention, time and space for enabling understanding of/and via these practices anew.

This is an exposition presenting the project Year of the Rabbit, which took place on Harakka island off Helsinki in 2011 and was presented for the first time in Gallery Jangva in 2013.

This is an exposition presenting the project Year of the Tiger, which took place on Harakka island off Helsinki in 2010 and was presented for the first time in Gallery Jangva in 2012.

The project is a semi-graphic notification of the artist/author’s initiatives to stretch fiction – so-termed analogous to the stretcher component of an umbrella – in his language-based and visual practice. The referenced time-frame is from 2014 through 2025. The contention is that if one considers oneself as subject within one’s work, amidst whatever the work's more objective concerns, then it is a fairly obvious next step to third-person oneself – in the sense that a writer such as Fernando Pessoa invented heteronyms. While in visual practice such a prospect is, arguably, more difficult to articulate, a fictional element instilled in art- or other academic writing already has certain precedents in more experimental writing in the latter fields. If, as in the artist/author’s case, such writing is an adjunct to one’s visual practice, then a fictional characterisation of oneself as another can comment on and variously inhabit one’s visual work. Unlike how characters often populate fiction, however, the artist/author’s strategy is to only partly develop them, hence having them oscillate as, themselves, a question of relevance.

This project explores the cultural disappearance of Czech railway station pubs—once vibrant, affordable communal spaces where different layers of society met. As gentrification and modernization erase these places, the project treats them as social relics: through photography, objects, gestures, and staged re-enactments, it asks what is lost when shared public rituals fade. The research approaches the railway pub as a vanishing cultural microcosm. The aim is not only to document, but to interrogate the meaning of these spaces for both national identity and personal memory.

This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, performance, production, and technology. This interview features Rafiq Bhatia, American guitarist, composer, and producer, and member of the experimental trio Son Lux. Bhatia’s work dissolves the boundaries between jazz, electronic, and contemporary classical music, exploring sound as a sculptural and spatial material. His practice embodies a deep integration of composition, production, and performance—where the studio becomes an instrument, and the act of shaping sound is inseparable from the act of composing. In the conversation, Bhatia reflects on the interdependence between the roles of composer, performer, and producer, on the DAW as a generative and compositional environment, and on the emergence of sonic identity through timbre, space, and texture. He discusses collaboration within Son Lux, his process of scoring for film, and the relationship between abstraction and precision in communicating musical ideas to orchestras and ensembles. Bhatia’s reflections reveal an artistic vision in which technology and human expression coexist symbiotically: music as a living, evolving ecosystem of gestures, resonances, and spaces—an art of listening, translation, and transformation.