Contemporary artworks speak: The traumatic transgenerational memory.
(2025)
author(s): Marija Griniuk
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
This research investigates the visual narrative built within artworks that deal with colonial memory in Sapmi, and the heavy layers of history in the Baltics, particularly Lithuania during the Soviet era. The research question is: How can themes of Gulag, colonial history and traumatic transgenerational memory be addressed by the artists and by curators in large-scale exhibitions and art venues?
The aim of this study is to examine how visual expression is aesthetically communicated by the artists, how their artworks are presented in exhibitions and media channels, and how they are received by audiences. The study examines four cases: artworks and projects by two Sami artists and two Lithuanian artists. The research is conducted as artistic research, where the author acts as the artist, curator, and spectator of the artworks being analyzed. The author has been actively involved in the creative curatorial processes, including designing the curatorial setup of the Sami artists' artworks for their audience. The comparative analysis of the visual expression is done through the reflexive tools of the author. The study's findings provide an outline of the tools that artists use within their artworks, as well as the curatorial strategies applied when presenting those artworks to audiences.
ideally, the biryani that brings us all together
(2025)
author(s): Saniya Jafri
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
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.
Dreams of Lands: Unlearning the Modern Heritage for a Resilient Tomorrow.
(2024)
author(s): Fanny Noel
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Fine Arts
Dreams of Lands weaves the author's personal heritage to the modern history of Europe in order to understand the current ecological crisis. Questioning the cultural European context in parallel to the native American cosmology, the author enhances the current dynamics of extraction and production that overshadow most of the urban dweller's life.
The research is followed by a gardening handbook for artists and the detailed process of the realisation of a garden in the Royal Academy of the Arts. Both are thought as concrete tools for changing the way we are being human in our world in crisis.
Musical Monticello: Classical Music and America
(2022)
author(s): Jasper Snow
published in: KC Research Portal
Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation is here used as a case-study examiningclassical music’s foundations in the United States. Among other titles, Jefferson was a statesman, diplomat, slave master, and avid violinist. He is remembered as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third U.S. President. Early documentation suggests he was a gifted musician, reading notation at age nine and practicing “no less than three hours a day” for “a dozen years”. Music played an important role in the courtship of his wife, Martha Skelton Wayles, a harpsichordist and singer. They parented six children, of which two daughters survived to adulthood. Both received substantial keyboard training and their eldest inherited her father’s “taste and talent for music”. Upon their mother's death in 1782, Thomas began a complicated relationship with his late wife’s enslaved half sister, Sally Hemings. She became pregnant at sixteen and bore six of Jefferson’s children, four of which survived to adulthood. While Jefferson’s white daughters learned keyboard, two of his enslaved black sons were taught violin. It is likely that Jefferson himself taught them using the treatises of his expansive musical library, notably Geminani’s “Art of Playing the Violin”. A year after Jefferson’s death, the two sons were given their freedom; the youngest’s profession is listed as “musician” in the 1850 census; he is remembered as an “accomplished caller of dances”. These sons span the full stylistic gamut available in 19th century American music: from fiddle to violin. Thomas Jefferson and his family represent the kernels of America’s musical traditions, and the way they have morphed in parallel with America itself. The musical ecosystem of Monticello plantation is a dynamic location to discuss colonial music’s intersections with class, race, gender, and national identity.
We Shared A Belly Podcast
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Lakisha Apostel
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'We shared a belly' is a intimate podcast which explores displacement from the perspective of Lakisha Apostel, a person of African descent who grew up on Curaçao. The prevalent presence of displacement within her life and art practice has led her to make this podcast as she concludes her Bachelors at The Royal Academy of The Hague.
This podcast consist of five episodes, each one of them tackle different questions and topics surrounding displacement, origin and the rejection origin. The content moves between the personal and collective with help of authors such as Édouard Glissant and Toni Morrison. One can view the 'We shared a belly' podcast as a precipice from which one can jump into a myriad of different of topics, questions or thoughts surrounding displacement. This podcast is available on the Research Catalogue and Soundcloud.
The Palestinian music-making experience in the West Bank, 1920s to 1959: Nationalism, colonialism, and identity
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Issa Boulos
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Research by Issa Boulos.
Before 1936, musical practices in Palestine relied heavily on colloquial poetry, especially in rural communities, which constituted most of the population. During the first half of the twentieth century, Palestinian music evolved as a reflection of the social, cultural, and political evolution of Palestinians. Palestinian music-making evolved exponentially resulting in the expansion of various folk tunes into shaʿbī songs, the creation of the Palestinian qaṣīda song genre, new compositions of instrumental music for traditional and Western music formations, the establishment of choirs and children music programing, and active engagement in composing in the styles of the dominant Egyptian genres of the time as well as muwashshaḥāt.
In 1948, the vast majority of Palestinians were displaced, and musicians found themselves at the frontier of implementing new political and cultural visions in the countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. Therefore, the continuation of the musical narrative in the West Bank did not seem attainable. By the early 1950s, Palestinian musicians and intellectuals developed a vocabulary that reflected the topography, scenery, culture, dialects, and history of al-Mashriq, one that is independent of Egypt’s. Their input, intuition, experience, and convictions of various Palestinian musicians helped to make the music scene in Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan what they are today.
'We shared a belly' is a intimate podcast which explores displacement from the perspective of Lakisha Apostel, a person of African descent who grew up on Curaçao. The prevalent presence of displacement within her life and art practice has led her to make this podcast as she concludes her Bachelors at The Royal Academy of The Hague. This podcast consist of five episodes, each one of them tackle different questions and topics surrounding displacement, origin and the rejection origin. The content moves between the personal and collective with help of authors such as Édouard Glissant and Toni Morrison. One can view the 'We shared a belly' podcast as a precipice from which one can jump into a myriad of different of topics, questions or thoughts surrounding displacement. This podcast is available on the Research Catalogue and Soundcloud.open exposition comments (0)