Research Catalogue

What is OASIS? Does it have a spiritual dimension,or is it something temporal that is shaped by social relationships and achieved collectively? It is about the collective, inclusion, a place of relaxation? Does it have to be about proximity between people or a total isolation in a safe domestic environment and introspection? What happens if, within our social fragility, we leave our personal oasis and enter the public realm, where we are exposed under the gaze of others? If we decide to carry with us , even if it means symbolically , our personal domestic objects that make us feel secure and present , as a shield against the uncertainty of the outside world? Is this the answer?

This performance seeks to form visually narratives about gender fluidity, identity, vulnerability, and the sense of the fragmented self in this fast changing world monitored by cameras, frames and the feeling that we are constantly observed . Body is the main research tool, a moving diary. On its surface are imprinted all the stories, desires and fears experienced during the years. They are collected, and then, interpreted kinetically, blurring the boundaries between the material reality, and the reality of the unspoken. A keeper of all the intimate and domestic moments, trying to protect them from the external world. In this journey, Camera obscura is a companion and an opponent.

This research endeavours to reveal the transformative potential of artistic creativity by combining musical improvisation and yoga-based embodied listening practices. The study incorporates three listening practices: humming and self-observation, listening only with the right ear, and listening to the space within the heart. The effects of these experiments are documented in a journal and recorded as audio files. In addition to improvisation as a musical practice and embodied listening, this research also considers how yoga, - which has become an important part of Indian culture over the centuries with its roots in Vedic culture - can shape artistic identity through its philosophical understanding of sound, and its perspectives on the human body as a cosmos. The research emphasizes subjects such as the healing power of humming, chakra energy, collective consciousness, energetic centers of consciousness in the human body and their potential role in transforming the artist's identity. The thoughts and experiences in this research are personal, but the content of this article has been written based on these experiences as an attempt to present visions for global musicians to transition their musicianship into a more universal form, and to pose multifaceted questions to the reader. This paper draws attention to different improvisation techniques makam terminology and explores existing literature to open innovative doors based on holistic experience. The findings reveal the vibrant and energetic connections between the effects of music and vibrations on human life and the body, and the various philosophies that nourish the artist's identity and expression. This thesis encourages improvisation as a form of existence to establish deep spiritual connections with experiences from the past and present. Highlighting dimensions of music that are unnoticeable due to existing industrial structures and education models, the most importantly, esoteric knowledge of the body, inviting the reader to be open-minded for all sonic possibilities.

This Exposition contains an archived version of the project website of the EU funded Erasmus+ Project 'Curating in Context’. Curating in Context addresses the challenges of curating contemporary art beyond curatorial approaches inherited from the visual arts. Tanzfabrik Berlin, Lokomotiva Skopje, Stockholm University of the Arts, and the University of Zagreb co-organised the two-year EU funded Erasmus+ project. It aims to enhance curatorial training focused on social impact by engaging local, regional, and international stakeholders, including cultural organisations. The project uses strategies from the performing arts to develop educational resources for universities and ongoing training for cultural workers and citizens. It fosters critical reflection on socio-political and economic contexts and promotes curatorial methods that connect performing arts with activism and social movements. The project's meetings, public events, and resources will emphasise collaborative learning between politics and art valorisation.

This artistic research project in Performing Arts SKH Stockholm University of Arts documents my transition from fine arts into a performative practice. I am focusing on developing a personal toolkit of methods that support this shift to a facilitator and a director/theatre-maker. The first part is my individual exploration that includes methods such as: creating character from image, writing with objects, and working with a real site in developing a semi-fictional space (exploring site-specificity through my observations and video documentation of Riga’s specific environment). The second part is a collaboration with two artists, Ģirts Dubults and Laine Luīze Freidenberga. We use a devised process concept,Sister Planets, to translate our embodied cultural experiences and identities into performative language. This method emphasises building shared poetics through methods of generating shared poems, visualisation, movement with objects, and integrating methods from the collaborators’ individual practices. Alongside methodological development, a strong interest in my identity as a maker emerged, deeply influencing my artistic inquiry. This stiltedness—as a young female artist from Latvia and Eastern Europe—shapes the themes of belonging and alienation in the Scandinavian cultural context and intersectionality in my work. I investigate how cultural, gendered, and geopolitical factors inform performance and dramaturgy. These personal reflections have evolved into shared thematic concerns within my collaborations, where individual histories and embodied memories merge into a collective exploration. Through this research, I seek new dramaturgical forms that channel socio-political narratives within primarily visual and poetic means of expression.

This artistic doctoral research approaches art, not as a variety of artworks or performances, but as a variety of collective bodies that are summoned. It addresses the subordinate and complicit way collective audience bodies form in relation to artistic performances. The commentary introduces the concept of an “audience body”, emerging when individual bodies gather to become an audience. Audience bodies are described through preconditions that are needed for one to appear, conditions that contribute to its subsistence and variables that determine the primary qualities and the degree of actuality of that audience body. More specifically, the commentary addresses the local genre of “esitystaide”, developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Neologism “beforemance art” is introduced due to a lack of an English equivalent. Esitystaide/beforemance art is the artistic context of this study and is presented as a genre of art, in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word “esitys”, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body. The theoretical approach towards audience bodies is presented as impartial with regard to different genres of art, but the practice of research favours esitystaide/beforemance art. This leads to political conclusions that defend the exposed complicity of and the experimental relation to audience bodies which are characteristic for this specific genre. This theoretical argumentation has been developed through an iterative series of 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts, made by the author, as well as through a parapractice of audience membership. The drafts and examined parts are works of esitystaide/beforemance art, in which printed or digital texts are staged in different ways for audiences to read. The works and the thinking developed in them have been significantly affected by dialogues with audience members and their feedback. The commentary discloses how the process of thinking, resulting in the main arguments of the work, has evolved through this artistic research practice and how temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events has been developed to address more adequately the phenomenon of an audience body. The parapractice of audience membership is introduced as a term describing the attendance of artworks made by others—a way of accumulating knowledge parallel to and yet different from practicing art. The arguments made in the commentary aim to provide conceptual tools for artists, scholars and pedagogues who attend the phenomenon of audience in their work. They can also serve as a basis for further research on the political significance of esitystaide/beforemance art and related art forms. Methodologically, the research offers an example of an iterative and dialogical artistic research practice and its presentation; the relationship between art and theory unfolds as both fruitful and troubled. Through the introduction of the parapractice of audience membership, it argues for using art, equally to the use of bibliographical materials, as reference material of artistic research. Through the use of a Finnish term and its local context as part of concept-creation in English, the work defends the importance of local thinking, which links artistic research to the land upon which it takes form.