Nurturing as an active Stance of Care and Resistance
(2025)
author(s): Asrafun Nahar Ruhin
published in: Research Catalogue, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
- Research document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025
- Master Artistic Research
This research begins with memories of monsoon rains in my hometown, stray dogs disappearing after municipal “relocations,” and the recurring ache of loss. These personal moments ground a broader inquiry into nurturing as an active form of care and resistance. Positioned within artistic practice, nurturing emerges not as passive sentiment but as embodied engagement with both human and more-than-human worlds.
Structured through three interconnected acts—re-assembling, re-cognition, and refusal—the work examines how care often collapses under human-centered hegemony yet persists as a regenerative force in creative practice. Reflecting on feminist theorists such as María Puig de la Bellacasa and Gloria Anzaldúa, the study critiques the violence of anthropocentric agencies, where more-than-human beings are used as utility or resources. Through case studies of Dominique White’s shipwreck forms, Maksud Ali Mondal’s installations, and my own ritual work with termite mounds, this research explores how material practices can restore hidden labor, amplify muted voices, and resist extractive narratives.
This research embraces diverse complexity, uncertainty, and situated approaches above linear solutions. It focuses on practices like Bengali women’s ephemeral crafts and collective practices like the Gram Art Project to center marginalized ways of knowing. In doing so, it reimagines art as an ethico-political negotiation. It is an act of attunement to grief, land, and layered histories.
Rather than offering closure, this research stays with the trouble. Nurturing becomes a subtle, subversive, and ongoing dialogue within existing dominant hegemony. It allows working with exploited things, collective grief, and discluded concerns. In an era of clichéd ecological concern, nurturing is not a static ethic, but a resistance lies within contentious mundane rituals that fertilize a ruined soil.
Volatile Life
(2025)
author(s): Ghazale Mohammadi Moqanaki
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
MA Artistic research,
Volatile Life is a thesis exploring the yearning for emancipation in an uncertain world, examined through puppet theatre. The thesis consists of four prologues that establish the context and motivations for the exploration. The prologues set clear objectives for the thesis, including storytelling as a means of disruption, theatre as a rehearsal for revolution, and reevaluating power dynamics in puppet theatre. Uncertainty serves as the driving force behind the investigation, with the play's structure embracing this uncertainty as a means of exploration.
Within the play, a powerful voice gradually emerges, engaging in a dialogue with a girl and transforming into moving shadows that morph between various objects. At the play's conclusion, the voice manifests as a physical head, engaging in a discourse about puppetry. This narrative concept draws inspiration from the Jinn mythology found in Islamic cultures. The Jinn initially manipulates humans through a voice in their heads, gradually gaining power and eventually revealing itself in physical forms when the humans surrender to its influence.
Tears are the lubricant of life
(2025)
author(s): Noor Remmen
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague 2022
MA Artistic Research
Writing introductions and quickly pitching my thesis must have become easier by now I suppose. I’ve talked about it so much these past months and to my surprise people get excited when I do. Somewhere along the fragmented lines of my communication I must do something good. I’ve caught myself often in that I keep saying the same thing. Which I suppose I will do again now when people ask me what it is about. It’s a multifocal piece, written my me and my friends, through conversations and interviews, in which we try to deconstruct our notions on intimacy. I guess it’s about (auto)cannibalism, sliminess, sex, love, anglerfish, grinder, bodies, sickness, healing and community too. The body as an archipelago and a guide to how to slowly consume oneself and the other.
One day you shall only speak to the bees
(2025)
author(s): Matthew Seán Mc Carty
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
This work focuses on the position of the blow-in, or outsider in Irish society. From this, the text discusses Irish, queer and white guilt in isolated community dynamics. Questioning the acts of group assimilation, ascension and self-annihilation all through poetics.
Ethics of joy: the disruptive immanent in art thinking and art making
(2025)
author(s): Clara Pallí Monguilod
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
MA Artistic Research
Ethics of Joy: the Disruptive Immanent in Art Thinking and Art Making, I explore the ‘image’ as a form of resistance and the experience of joy that emanates from questioning (through images) dominant modes of representation. Specifically, I look for ways to propose new modes of possibility within current capitalist approaches, by studying the workings of a series of painAngs from the seventeenth century. I look for strategies of resistance at a time when early capitalism started configuring visual representations of ‘progress’. Such strategies could be used today to subvert ongoing representations of ‘future’ and the transcendental beliefs that might still be implicit in them, in order to shape our own paths.
The Group Who Loved to Draw a Flag
(2024)
author(s): Riki Stollar
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
Master Artistic Research (MAR).
Designed by Faina Faigin
Reflecting on personal experiences of being part of some groups and excluded from others makes me wonder how we connect when we are already clinging. Communities can be either chosen or forced, or both, which raises questions about how these bonds are formed and when we no longer belong.
We Live on the Razor's Edge. On Law and its Performativity
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Raquel Coll i Juncosa
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
Master Artistic Research
This publication explores the performativity of law through fiction, language, and theatricality. It reflects on authorship, obedience, and the instability of meaning in legal discourse.
The Group Who Loved To Draw A Flag
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Riki Stollar
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
Master Artistic Research (MAR).
Designed by Faina Faigin
Reflecting on personal experiences of being part of some groups and excluded from others makes me wonder how we connect when we are already clinging. Communities can be either chosen or forced, or both, which raises questions about how these bonds are formed and when we no longer belong.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague 2022 MA Artistic Research Writing introductions and quickly pitching my thesis must have become easier by now I suppose. I’ve talked about it so much these past months and to my surprise people get excited when I do. Somewhere along the fragmented lines of my communication I must do something good. I’ve caught myself often in that I keep saying the same thing. Which I suppose I will do again now when people ask me what it is about. It’s a multifocal piece, written my me and my friends, through conversations and interviews, in which we try to deconstruct our notions on intimacy. I guess it’s about (auto)cannibalism, sliminess, sex, love, anglerfish, grinder, bodies, sickness, healing and community too. The body as an archipelago and a guide to how to slowly consume oneself and the other.open exposition comments (0)
This work focuses on the position of the blow-in, or outsider in Irish society. From this, the text discusses Irish, queer and white guilt in isolated community dynamics. Questioning the acts of group assimilation, ascension and self-annihilation all through poetics.open exposition comments (0)
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 MA Artistic Research Ethics of Joy: the Disruptive Immanent in Art Thinking and Art Making, I explore the ‘image’ as a form of resistance and the experience of joy that emanates from questioning (through images) dominant modes of representation. Specifically, I look for ways to propose new modes of possibility within current capitalist approaches, by studying the workings of a series of painAngs from the seventeenth century. I look for strategies of resistance at a time when early capitalism started configuring visual representations of ‘progress’. Such strategies could be used today to subvert ongoing representations of ‘future’ and the transcendental beliefs that might still be implicit in them, in order to shape our own paths.open exposition comments (0)
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. Master Artistic Research (MAR). Designed by Faina Faigin Reflecting on personal experiences of being part of some groups and excluded from others makes me wonder how we connect when we are already clinging. Communities can be either chosen or forced, or both, which raises questions about how these bonds are formed and when we no longer belong.open exposition comments (0)
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. Master Artistic Research (MAR). Designed by Faina Faigin Reflecting on personal experiences of being part of some groups and excluded from others makes me wonder how we connect when we are already clinging. Communities can be either chosen or forced, or both, which raises questions about how these bonds are formed and when we no longer belong.open exposition comments (0)