The Research Catalogue (RC) is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research provided by the Society for Artistic Research. The RC is free to use for artists and researchers. It serves also as a backbone for teaching purposes, student assessment, peer review workflows and research funding administration. It strives to be an open space for experimentation and exchange.

recent activities <>

"Esparto, embodied"; Hand insights on resisting disposability (2025) Pilar Miralles
"Esparto, embodied" is the second of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. In this exposition, I aim to unpack the research process leading to this event and its outcomes after I opened doors to it on October 18th, 2025, in Organo Hall of the Helsinki Music Center. The research project in which this series of installations is contextualized aims at understanding listening as a catalyst of remembrance in the context of a world in which things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten. The project has been developing through the documentation of my field trips – re-encountering certain places, objects, and voices in my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain –, the re-engagement with the documented material back in Finland, and its re-assemblage at the installations, so that this re-engagement can be further extended to an audience. The first installation, "Esparto, approached", discussed in an earlier exposition on Research Catalogue , represented a first attempt at verbalizing some of the ideas derived from working in the field and working with the materials from the field. On the other hand, the second installation, "Esparto, embodied", created many frictions emanating from a deeper questioning of those preliminary ideas. This exposition subsequently represents a space where those discomforts can cohabitate with an imaginal supposition of what the third and last installation, "Esparto, revisited", could help reveal. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3779770/3779771 Previous exposition
open exposition
Insubordinate Costume: Inspiring Performance (2025) Susan Marshall
Insubordinate Costume: Inspiring Performance presents a comprehensive study of historical and contemporary examples of scenographic costume – the type of costume that creates an almost complete stage environment by itself, simultaneously acting as costume, set and performance. This book provides readers with an overview of the costumes, designers, context and theory that have contributed to the emerging field of ‘costume as performance’. Focusing on artists and their creative approach to space, form, materials and movement, the book looks at iconic figures such as Loie Fuller, Oskar Schlemmer and Leigh Bowery, amongst contemporary examples of practitioners that are blurring disciplinary boundaries between fashion, dance, performance and theatre. The book includes chapters by Dr Sofia Pantouvaki, who focuses on performance costume as a means of research; Christina Lindgren, who presents the findings of the four-year Costume Agency project at Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway; Charlotte Østergaard, who discusses the implications of 'Listening with costume' and Felix Choong, writing on 'Contemporary Runways, Contemporary Costumes'. The final part of the volume, 'The Practitioners’ Voice', examines current practice through interviews and contributions from key practitioners.
open exposition
The Tarot Walk - an artistic methodology (2025) Elinor Rowlands
The Tarot Walk Part of Elinor Rowlands' practice based research in autistic stimming as artistic methodology
open exposition

recent publications <>

An Authoritarian Dystopia (2025) Tolga Theo Yalur
From the Gezi Park protests of 2013 onwards, Turkey has witnessed a troubling trajectory that reflects signs of an authoritarian dystopia —a word that might resonate with scholars of philosophy. This article interprets the variables of this authoritarianism, raising a question of law and exception on a local-global span. The modern panorama of Turkey presents an urgent case study for scholars examining the interplay between state power, civil liberties, and the public sphere.
open exposition
Before Meaning, Measure - Pythagoras, Proportion, and the Ethics of Post-Interpretive Witness (2025) Dorian Vale
This essay situates Post-Interpretive Criticism within the philosophical lineage of Pythagorean thought, arguing that both traditions uphold alignment, not interpretation, as the rightful posture toward truth. Drawing from the procedural structure of the seven liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium), the essay proposes a framework wherein aesthetic experience is not produced by commentary but preserved through restraint, ratio, and spatial ethics. The critic, like the Pythagorean listener, is not a performer of insight but a tuning instrument for fidelity. Geometry here is not symbolic but disciplinary. Harmony is not decoration but evidence of structural truth. Against the inflation of language in contemporary criticism, the essay defends the doctrine of restraint, articulated in the Post-Interpretive Lexicon as the ethical refusal to speak first, to dominate with explanation, or to distort the interval between viewer and work . By reanimating ancient principles of proportion, breath, and silent recognition, it positions criticism not as a pursuit of meaning but as a form of fidelity to what already holds its law. Using examples from art, music, architecture, and mathematics, the essay formalizes the alignment-based criteria for valid aesthetic response. These include grammatical clarity, logical coherence, rhetorical proportion, and quadrivial discipline, culminating in a methodologically grounded alternative to contemporary interpretive excess. Where most criticism seeks to explain the work, Post-Interpretive Criticism seeks to stand before it correctly. The work is not a message to decode, but a geometry to hold. The critic’s task is not verbal performance but spatial obedience. Truth, in this essay, is redefined not as insight delivered, but as harmony preserved. This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Canon of Witnesses (Q136565881)
open exposition
Accompanying Public Amateurs and Ignorant Generalists: Propositions for (Experimental) Pedagogical Approaches to PhD in Art and Scientific-Artistic Projects (2025) Ruth Anderwald, Leonhard Grond
Based on our experience conducting our own independent artistic-scientific and practice-based research projects and the experiences made over the last years leading the Doctoral Programme for Artistic Research at the University of Applied Arts and now working at ARC Artistic Research Center and their Doctor Artium programme, at mdw University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, we propose new and unconventional approaches to supervising and supporting doctoral artistic research work, whether their focus is more practice-based, theory-oriented or artistic-scientific. Design approaches, such as the pooling of supervision and strategically introducing moments of epistemic decompression, can support projects as well as candidates in a more sustainable and pluri-vocal manner, ultimately leading to the artist-researchers’ long-term independence, transcultural versatility and well-being. Reflexivity, methodology, and (somatic) learning theory are key points, as well as defining and conceptualising possibilities for supporting and supervising a line of work, which is directed into the unknown, unknowable, and uncertain, or located within limit-experiences.
open exposition

sar announcements <>

Subscribe to SARA