Research Catalogue

Islington studio flat 4, at 14 Barnsbury Road, London, 2022, privately rented. Interior design and styling, as art installation. Looted, 2024. Investigatory research with artworks, 2023-2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_(magazine) My personal belongings were still at the property for two months, after I left on 27 March 2024 and was asked to collect them by 3 or 4 April from Woolwich. After I left, the landlords moved in two or three under aged, who I have never met, so that they pretend to be my daughters. Subsequently, they must have been removing them one by one over the last few months and until October 2024. 14 Barnsbury Road was deemed illegal through the courts, on 22 April, shortly after I was forced to leave at the end of March. The maintenance employed many Polish citizens, all dressed in black with black caps, adopting the XRW supporters' fashion code. Twenty-one (20+1) digital photographs of the studio, for twenty (20) missing Albanian and of Albanian ethnicity, non-EU immigrants; as well as one (1) missing Italian citizen. Golden Dawn has taken responsibility. The twenty-one persons whose details got stolen were abducted by mainly Golden Dawn and, secondarily, the NRM; they are deceased. My personal details were stolen, too. Was I going to be the twenty-second victim? Twenty-two (22) and twenty-three (23) photographs, including 2 (two) of myself: NOT a missing person. Golden Dawn were originally pagans, drawing from the ancient Greek mythology and ritualistic practices, including human sacrifice. The art world has been traditionally male dominated. This has not changed dramatically in contemporary art. Female artists have sometimes adopted male attitudes, or personas, to break into the art scene; see Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin from the YBA movement. I hold the view that art is not gendered, that there is no art for women or so-called women's art. Good art transcends such categories, tapping into more universal experiences. Saying this, I would like to quote Nancy Spero, who doesn't crudely distinguish between male and female art, as follows: "What if the default gender for 'artist' were female? What if, when we looked at a work by a woman, we said to ourselves, "That is art," and when we looked at a work by a man, we automatically identified it in our minds as 'men's art'?" In 1999, I wrote a long essay about the architectural uncanny, which I submitted as my graduation thesis for my first MA in architectural theory. I called it "Space as a 'Bad' Object: A criminal investigation on the notion of space". I got inspiration from detective novels and real-life crime stories. The long essay was about the role of architectural space in crime. It was completely unsupervised: I received a distinction by a Bartlett staff member. I took the digital photographs in conceptual adherence with that essay. I was a postgraduate philosophy student 9/2017-11/2019 at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. In this exposition, I include two new photographs from a series of digital photography called "Forensics", taken with my mobile phone, after I was forced to leave the property I was renting, on 27 March 2024. I gave the photography series that name, because it has served the purpose of investigating, recording and tracking a crime, for which architectural space, such as private rentals, has been used. For Chris, who was suddenly transferred by his employer, from London, where his daughter lives, to somewhere outside of London; and for Lawrence, whose temporary post was prematurely terminated, though he was planning to return to his legal studies. And for 'Ali'. To all those who don't just "play" the cultural and racial diversity clause; they don't just rely on identity politics, because the class problem has not been resolved for them, either. Saying this, the UK must still be scoring high on racism. A Nigerian was amongst the Golden Dawn victims of assassination in Greece. The exposition is inspired by jazz music. See exposition in connection with "The Origins of The Game", "Debris", and "XRW (Implicature)".

WALKING AS PRACTICE WAP23 was a process-based residency during September-November 2023, where artists using walking as a method delved into each others’ knowledges and things they encountered together at BKN, the Northern Stockholm Archipelago in Sweden. Fieldworks, share sessions and seminars were created jointly to locate and entangle structures, narratives and themes for walking. The residency formed a transformative, dynamic space for art that engaged with life and nature towards critical and poetic explorations, influenced by the immediate surroundings: the forest, lakes, sea and people living in the rural area. Processing how walking is interlocked in our artistic practices, this exposition represents a gathering of texts, visuals and audio from the walking art residency. The selected artists contributed with interdisciplinary practices, primarily drawing, photography, video, performance and dance. They worked both individually, in spontaneous constellations and in group sessions. The dissemination of the program took place in share sessions upon arrival of new artists - including dinners, open studios, walks, workshops etc. In addition, as the program unfolded, each artist developed their own exposition.

Initiated in 2020, Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

Documentation of the 'Expanding Public (Im)Possibilities' gathering, an international gathering of disciplines that perform public space | Organized by the Fontys Professorship Artistic Connective Practices, Fontys MA Performing Public Space and Fontys Journalism.

This exposition is the submitted PhD thesis for the doctoral degree in artistic research in Perfroming Art at Malmö Theatre Academy, Lund University December 2024. This artistic research was carried out between 2020 and 2024 and financially supported by Malmö Theatre Academy, Lund University, Sweden. Main supervisor: Sofia Pantouvaki Second supervisor: Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk The exposition is in three parts: FRAMEWORKS – contextualization the artistic research including description of the artistic method in the research. PROJECTS – containing descriptions and analysis of the three artistic projects "AweAre – a movement quintet", "Community Walk" and "Conversation Costume". CONCLUSION Abstract: At the heart of this research are relational encounters between people and textile materials. As the title, Crafting Material Bodies, indicates, the research explores how human bodies are crafted by material bodies (costume) and vice versa. In the research textile materials and people are my co-creators and as co-creators they are invited to relate to, affect and become affected by other human bodies and more-than-human materials. As the subtitle, exploring co-creative costume processes, indicate the main quest is to explore how we (humans) co-create with textile and costume materials and to explore how textile and costume materials become equal co-creating partners. In the artistic projects I invite fellow artists like performers and designers to explore specific connecting costumes (that connect two or more people) with me. As co-creators I invite them to engage, respond, inform, influence and/or interrupt our costume explorations in ways that matter to them and to critically reflect on our explorations. In the projects I study how listening become instances of relational acts between humans and more-than humans that evoke curious embodied and conversational dialogues Such dialogues are invitations to listen with the textile and costume materials, with (human) bodies, to share embodied experiences, to co-create and to elaborate on the various creative perspectives. During the artistic projects I act as more than an observing designer/researcher. I am the host that have crafted the connecting costumes in collaboration with the textile materials and as host I also actively take part in exploring what the costumes evoke and provoke. The goal is to explore how being a participating host affects the explorative costume situations. The research has four focal themes – crafting, listening, hosting and co-creating – which are explored though three artistic projects. The artistic project AweAre, a movement quintet, explores the act of listening, Community Walk explores the act of hosting and Conversation Costume explores the act of co-creating, while all three projects explore different aspects of crafting. As the themes are entangled, all three projects contain aspects of the four themes. With this research I suggest that it is critical that in co-creative situations we cultivate our listening abilities with human and more-than-human others, and I argue that textile and costume materials is a medium that enable us to do so. With this research my ambition is to formulate ideas on co-creative methods that value material-discursive listening and where the hosting attitude is orientated towards communal doings. The aim is that listenings and communal hostings become tools for designers to gain a deeper understanding of how costume affects performers, and the boarder scope is that the research contributes to discussions on how teams can collaborate with humans and more-than-humans in more generous and inclusive manners. One example is that we acknowledge that our different disciplinary perspectives are creative possibilities in our common doing and that we recognise that how we share and exchange our differences has an impact on how we flourish co-creatively with our human and more-than-human co-creators. ISBN: 978-91-88409-39-3

Transforming with the Artistic Palette ‘Transforming with the Artistic Palette’ is my PhD project in artistic research, a practice-led exploration of performer creativity, agency and collaborative composition, carried out at the Norwegian Academy of Music in the years 2018–2024. The central idea of the project is the conceptualization of the artistic palette. The artistic palette comprises the skills and abilities I use in creative work (skillabilities). It develops with the creative work I engage in and is active in imaginative as well as evaluative processes. The artistic palette has been explored in collaborative work with five composers as well as in an own composition. I have explored it as a multidimensional concept, comprising embodied, contextual, relational and intuitive dimensions. By engaging with the artistic palette, new sonic materials and work methods have been created and I have shared compositional processes as a co-composer. It is a poetic and dynamic concept that keep developing with my experiences. By using my artistic palette in shared work, I have explored and expanded my creativity as a performer of contemporary classical music. The five composers involved in the project come from a diverse background of styles, aesthetics and compositional approaches, as minimalistic music, improvisation and music theatre. Some of the creative partnerships build on previous work together. The works created in the project are Gradients (2023) by Karin Hellqvist and Henrik Strindberg, Solastalgia (2022) by Carola Bauckholt and Karin Hellqvist, One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin) (2021–22) by Liza Lim with Karin Hellqvist, Eiksmarka Omland (2024) by Christian Wallumrød and Karin Hellqvist, Pango (2021–24) by Karin Hellqvist and Chain of Triggers (2024) by Manos Tsangaris and Karin Hellqvist. Through the artistic processes undertaken in this project, I have experienced a transformation of my performer’s role into an increasingly creative one. From seeing myself as a faithful performer of works, I have come to view myself as a creating artist involved in the whole lifecycle of the works I perform and co-compose. By exploring the artistic palette in shared work, thoughts about connection, identity, responsibility, empowerment, complementarity, taste, ownership and transformation has come to the fore in my practice. Those topics are discussed across the works created in the project. The methodology of the project is rooted in the specific forms of collaborative composition it comprises; engaging in improvisation, developing technological skills, accessing embodied performance materials, engaging in interdisciplinary work with a printed publication and developing connection through cyclical patterns of work where materials are circulated between participants. A curatorial process of selecting material for research has along with text writing, peer-review and publication processes been important research methods of the project. The structure of this reflection is a compilation of six case studies wrapped with an introduction and a closing discussion. The reflection has been created over the course of the project and includes four already published articles. The project is situated in a broad artistic- and research field with connections to other collaborating performers and composers, artist researchers who develop their performance practices, historical composer-performer collaborations and the rich artistic contexts of the involved artists. I draw on theories of collaborative composition (Taylor, Lim, Östersjö, John-Steiner), Werktreue (Goehr), embodied knowledge (Merleau-Ponty, Lüneburg), eco-anxiety (Albrecht) and identity (Hargreaves, Markus & Nurius).