KuvA Research Days 12-14 December 2022

This year the Academy of Fine Arts (KuvA) at Uniarts Helsinki Research Days engages with a multiplicity of artistic research contexts through a series of situations that suggest kaleidoscopic relations with each other. We work with entanglements and contrasts between exhibition and symposium, artistic process and teaching situation, city spaces of Helsinki and Johannesburg as well as the relations between critical thinking and play. Parts of the KuvA Research Days 2022 programme can be attended online. Welcome to think together!

The onsite venue for the KuvA Research Days 2022 is the White Studio (Valkoinen studio), Uniarts Helsinki’s Sörnäinen campus, in the Academy of Fine Arts building Mylly (Sörnäisten rantatie 19, Helsinki).

The program on 12–13 December 2022 will also be streamed on the Uniarts Helsinki YouTube channel. Time zone: UTC +2

Program

For full programme information with YouTube links, please go to the KuvA Research Days 2002 webpage

Monday, 12 December 2022

Artistic Research and City Space 1

The two first days of the event focus on artistic research, urban space, and spatial practices. On Monday we focus on the potentials and invisible motives of exceptional city spaces through artistic research, architecture, spatiality of demonstration, legal theory, surrealism, and cultural geography. The day's keynote talk addresses the life-promoting powers of microbes as catalysts for all forms of sociable life, and discusses new communications platforms, evaluation systems and rituals of living together in our cities, so that we may become ecological collaborators, co-creators, and much better neighbors. The invited Wits University guests present their current artistic research practices through rubbling materialities and site-related museum sensibilities.

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9:00–13:00 SPACES OF EXCEPTION, EXCEPTIONAL SPACES – views in parataxis with City as Space of Rules and Dreaming and guests

Maiju Loukola / Anna Jensen / Aino Hirvola / Erna Bodström / Marloeke Van Der Vlugt / Paul Tiensuu / Tanja Tiekso / Tuomo Alhojärvi

14:00–15:00 KEYNOTE INTERVENTION: Rachel Armstrong, Cultures of Life

15:00–15:45 Exhibition visit with presentation "Drone Zone" – artistic research at work in the exhibition "Daily Disasters", part of JKFR's PhD project "Autonomous Animals". 

16:00–18:00 SITES, MATERIALITIES, SENSITIVITIES
Talks by the invited guests from the Wits University (Johannesburg) Brigitta Stone-Johnson and Zen Marie.

 
Tuesday, 13 December 2022

Artistic Research and City Space 2

On Tuesday we continue with artistic research and city space with perspectives highlighting the South African context, with talks and presentations of artistic works touching the scars, holes, and memory traces, as well as urban affective interdependencies through multisensorial artistic research with sound in urban space. On Tuesday we are invited to hear about and discuss practices and ecologies highlighting contingency and non-reductivity in artistic and aesthetic research practices, and community and climate specific research on cross-generational gardening practice and phosphate traveling from Sahara to the Baltic Sea. 

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9:00–12:00 ECOLOGIES, PRACTICES
Stefan Winter / Alex Arteaga / Pekka Niskanen and Mohamed Sleiman Labat

14:00–15:00 KEYNOTE INTERVENTION: Julia Chryssostalis

15:30–19:00 Artistic Research South Africa: URBAN SPACE AS A PALIMPSEST + SOUND CITY SPACE 
Stefan Winter / Christo Doherty / Tanja Sakota / Mocke J van Veuren / Prince Massingham / Neo Monyamane / PlayGroup (Jill Richards / BJ Engelbrecht / Jurgen Meekel) / Uygur Vural / François Sarhan / Emeka Ogboh (in conversation with Stefan Winter, curator of the session)

19:00–19:15 ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND CITY SPACE AFTERMATH – closing discussion with Stefan Winter

Wednesday, 14 December 2022

Applied Non-didactics

At 9:15–17:00

The days´ presentations and experiments will circle around the topic of artist as teacher / teaching at art schools and certain pedagogies that come with this or do not. We will look into questions of how artists can bring in their own artistic work into the teaching process as for how to bridge the gap from theoretical to practice led conversations.

Gert Biesta / Grant White / Frank Brümmel, Hanna Vahvaselkä, Sanna Vuolteenaho, Tapani Heikinheimo and Henna Laininen / Magnus Quaife

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IT'S NOT GOODBYE IT'S SEE YOU LATER – FEAST WITH BOOK LAUNCHES
At 17:30–20:00
Welcome to hear about new books published by the Academy of Fine Art at Uniarts Helsinki. Writers and editors present the books and discuss their content. 

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Exhibitions

Daily Disasters 12.12.2022 – 1.2.2023
Exhibition by JKFR, Filmmaker and Doctoral researcher, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki 
‘Daily Disasters’ consists of several multi-space installations suggesting an active research site that has been hit by a drone.

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Mia Seppälä, Salla Myllylä and Nanni Vapaavuori
INTERIM 16. – 22.12.2022
INTERIM is a brief exhibition by three doctoral researchers in the darkest time of the year, between university terms, in a building emptied by the approaching seasonal festivities.

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Image: Project image Sörnäinen shoreline. Mia Seppälä, 2022.

Inviting South African guest speakers has been made possible through Uniarts Helsinki´s Academy of Fine Arts partnership with the Saastamoinen Foundation. Also, the research project "City as a space of rules and dreaming" (2021–2024) funded by Kone Foundation has contributed to the planning and realisation of parts of the program.