Research Catalogue

"Unlike unrealized architectural projects, which are frequently exhibited and circulated, unrealized artworks tend to remain unnoticed or little known. But perhaps there is another form of artistic agency in the partial expression, the incomplete idea, the projection of a mere intention? Agency of Unrealized Projects (AUP) seeks to document and display these works, in this way charting the terrain of a contingent future." From AUP-eflux Archive In painting, the artist can also be a model for the artwork. In performance art, artist and model come together for the performance. The exposition explores the role of figuration in contemporary art. Some of the material was selected for my participation, with my artistic pseudonym, Betty Nigianni, in conceptual artist's Janine Antoni workshop, "Loving Care", Performance Matters: Performing Idea, Toynbee Studios, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2010 With essay about Marina Abramovic's work, published at eflux/Art and Education papers, 2012; originally presented as a conference paper at the Yale Centre for British Art, 2010, slides including the artist's writings. Fragments of the research for the installation project, developed in the studio and through my participation in urban research workshops, have been archived at AUP-eflux Archive.

A work-in-progress artistic research project. Initiated by Hanns Holger Rutz and Nayarí Castillo in autumn 2021, it develops into multiple intermedia objects that involve collaboration between different artists, objects that engage in sensorial exchange among themselves and with humans. This exposition is very much in flux, trying to capture the meanderings of the process.

GOON In 2023, at the age of 28, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. This life-altering event led me to take a closer look at my sexual desire, question my relationship with my genitals, and rethink how I perceive my gender identity. Today, as I navigate a healing period, I seek to explore sensuality as a space of resistance and emancipation. GOON is an attempt to free myself from the shame surrounding (my) queer sexualities. GOON is a research performance inviting the audience to look up close at the way they see and seek pleasure. With a choreographic approach, I am researching queer eroticism as a place of joy. Ignoring the constraints of sexual norms, this exploration focuses on shaping a body that is both playful and desired, despite its apparent dirtiness.

Agnès Varda was more a photographer and invested in photographic storytelling in her fictions and non-fictions, such as the murals in Faces Places (Visages Villages, 2017). Experimental photographic narration and her artwork-like uses of the internet therefore is not a coincidence. In her internet accounts, she posed with her fans, while her Instagram account looks like an experimental work, an exhibition, open to the public and unfinished. In her first photograph, she is holding a necklace with a cat figure in her hand.

A person listening to Ludwig van Beethoven might think he is in a Jean-Luc Godard movie. An opponent of laws and canons. Beethoven sought to break the convention and laws of harmony. Johann Sebastian Bach, in contrast, never attempted to break the traditions.

The project began as a commitment to 30/30, an initiative offered by Artquest, where subscribing artists were required to upload a new artwork to a 30/30 dedicated platform on a daily basis though the month of February and into March, 2025. The response formatted as this exposition is variations of text, image, and video animation, archived as still-image iterations mostly sized at 21 x 29.5cm and hyperlinked videos of up to two-minutes’ running time. The works’ content wavers between anecdotal and academic/theoretical. (Artquest issued non-obligatory collective prompts at the start of each day, which is in this case sometimes either used.) Any texts from each iteration have been copied to a companion page and corrected, rephrased or explained. The iterations play with oscillation between text and image, where the look of text under these circumstances becomes more noticeable while retaining much of its readability. Theoretical reading during the project had been Isabelle Stengers's book on the philosopher A. N. Whitehead, which is variously referenced in the iterations. At the same time, the author’s recent interest in a question of adaptability of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's Logical Square to the question of the artistic research process is referenced. Given that the theories of these two authors do not in any obvious sense relate, their conflation in a sense holds their function in the iterations open to question, analogous to how one reflects on interests in and through one's visual practice. While the 30/30 structure required daily decision-making and action, any one iteration tended to be of consequence to the next, which afforded continuity of duration to the project.