Research Catalogue

This exposition documents my explorations of pondering with pine trees. Tämä ekspositio dokumentoi yritykseni miettiä mäntyjen kanssa. Den här ekspositionen dokumenterar mina försök att fundera med furor.

Through 2 workshops in Amsterdam and in Athens, we created a toolkit with artistic games and props, which all passengers can use in order to interact with others in public transport. My aim is to empower citizens to transform the non-place (Augé, 1995) in means of public transportation into performance space/time and, subsequently, social space/time (Lefebvre, 1991) through a creative form of civic encounter. Public transport is not only a public utility and a means of accessing other public places; it is also itself a mobile public space (Paget-Seekins & Tironi, 2016). Using public transport is an outdoor "necessary activity," which is more or less compulsory, such as going to work or waiting for a bus, where people are in "passive contact" with each other -they only see and hear other people- and only minimum activity takes place (Ghel, J. 2011, p. 9-13) " I dance in the shadows of the public and the personal. I travel between the rational and the irrational, between fantasy and reality. I invite you to a trip whose purpose is the journey, to introduce you to my friends, the known and the unknown, the transient, the ephemeral, the everyday. People, passing by, hurrying along, watch me, thousands of them swarm to my temporary island, my railcarriage, my home. They sit down across from me smiling at me. Do you want to play? Do you want to play? in this game there is neither winner nor loser. The realization of the significance, and yet the insignificance of my existence gives me balance. There is no stop-free trip, just as there is no stop without a traveller. I liken life to a string that pulsates and is constantly reshaped at any moment without specific angles or bows and sides, a string that offers us no chance to measure it. This is the field that concerns me primarily, the general reshaping taking place on all levels. I don’t separate life from creation nor do I separate art from life. I bear responsibility for the act of everyday life, conscious of the whole and of the future. I am a sensor of the universe and my actions are recorded and return to me, not so much in the form of punishment or reward, rather as the trajectory I pursue in my own significant / insignificant life. " IOANNIS KAROUNIS

Painting, digital video with dance performance, 2010-2011. Housing renovation, 2016-17. 1. What happens at the borders where two colors meet? Purposefully exposing by meticulously smudging the edges of painted surfaces shows that there is a small area at the margins that remains undecided. 2. How do we formalize external sensory information? Experimenting with painterly techniques, such as pouring paint directly onto paper and moving the paper around to apply liquid paint, processes of rationalization and abstraction for painting a tree branch were methodically followed for the final work. The research for the painting and the final work were produced at a workshop at the Slade School of Fine Art. The digital video was recorded during a rehearsal for a dance performance by choreographer J. Y. Corti at the London Contemporary Dance School.

The exposition Scented Rooms aims to be a form of resistance that finds itself in poetry and politics, poetic imagery, re-thinking censored archives, existential reflections on photography and cinema, and dance. At the very core of the research is an important historic icon in Iran; The country's oldest theater which was burnt down by extremists during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, closed forever and has decayed over time. The burning of this theater, along with many others, was the starting point for imposing restrictions on art and culture. The research departs contextually from the efforts of the Islamic government to control civil society. It is a reaction to a history of imposing a specific language discourse and discarding elements that represent a non-religious view, visual changes in the urban space and limiting access to specific types of information that refer to citizens’ collective memory. Giving agency to this theater, the research aims to revive the collective and public memory of a society, being the voice of those that have been silenced for a long time.

The research project Beyond Cut and Join – Expanding the creative role of film editing comes out of two major observations over decades of professional film editing experience: that a lot of film editing’s potential is untapped in filmmaking, especially in relation to character creation; and that editors’ skills, influence and authorial participation often are misunderstood and undervalued. Through editing practice and writing, this research explores an expanded role of editing by asking: 1. what can editing do to create characters; 2. what is a useful and challenging creative research design for exploring editing; and 3. what expanded description of film editing can be articulated for these explorations. The project aims to share, refine, and add to editing vocabulary by articulating creative strategies for shaping characters. It further aims to challenge notions of authorship in cinema by developing collaborative structures and artistic methods that benefit creative processes in the edit room. By demonstrating how significant the handprint of one individual editor is, the project’s final aim is to highlight the extent to which editors’ personal experiences influence their choices in composition of material. Outcomes of this project are filmmaking methods that place editing and collaboration in the forefront when weaving dramaturgy, aesthetics, and content creation processes that shape film characters and cinematic stories. The output of this research includes films, academic articles, personal essays, a video essay, and pedagogic applications. These outputs cumulatively demonstrate the artistry of the editor and the significance of editing.

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