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for the installation project, developed in the studio and through my participation in urban research workshops, have been archived at AUP-eflux Archive.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.

This Exposition is a brief ironic comment on the ongoing degradation, commodification, and colonisation of food and its many dimensions — recipes, ingredients, context — and a reflection on the territorial definitions that shape identity, in this case of South Asians and the Global South, once bound together as a people and still united in the brieftopian world of the Author’s Greatest Biryani: an amalgamative dish of political and cultural reproductions, drenched in time, where old and new contest identity. Through a conversational, autoethnographic lens, the exposition blends historical, colonial, and territorial reflections, using Biryani as both departure point and metaphor for shared identity and dislocation. Visual collages — archival, familial, and sourced — act as probes connecting memory, culture, and belonging. Ultimately, the work offers the Author’s Greatest Biryani as a living document of generational knowledge and a utopian gesture, inviting both insiders and outsiders to gather around a dish transcending borders and time.

There are moments within a performance where destruction and deviation from reality allow an alternative scenario to reveal itself. I argue that these moments can be called ‘brieftopic’, fleeting glimpses into a possible future (Behzad Khosravi Noori, 2024). But what are the connections between reality, deviation and alternative scenario? How can this brieftopia, which materializes for brief moments within a performative event, reverberate outside of it, propagating at a social and political level? During the site-specific improvisation series [in situ], it became evident to me that this brieftopia is tied to an artist’s relinquishment of control, leading to a decentralization of the performance. By introducing the case study, specifically the [in situ] performance held in September 2023 at the Maremma National Park, we will see how unforeseen, unpredictable, and non-linear interactions between myself, the audience, and the non-human components of the ecosystem in which we were immersed, shaped the performance itself, steering it in an unexpected direction and removing it from the continuum of artistic intention, audience perception, and everyday life reflection. In this brieftopia, in a sense, it is existence itself that is reduced to rubble, not for the love of rubble, but for the way out that passes through it, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin.

The photographic image has always historizised; an artifact of the past, photographic moment. But just as it is conditioned by the temporal and material context of its making, its essence – if there is one – is conditioned by how we encounter the image. This encounter involves both the situation in which the image is seen and our individual selves in relation to it – our histories, beliefs, and expectations. To further reflect on this unstable, temporal quality of the photograph, we explore the meaning of looking at the future by looking at photographs. Artistically and philosophically a contradiction in terms, it is still a practice we experience: How to look ahead with something temporally bound to the past. To do this, we reflect on ‘Regarding the Pain of the Future’ by the first author and develop and discuss an artistic practice emphasising a second, photographic moment.