Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• TEXT FORMAT The Hijacked Dream in Arts-Based Research: A Work of Surrealist Criticism (2025) author(s): Fey (Faith) Harkey, Cassie Fielding published in: Research Catalogue
  Mention of a surrealist form of criticism comes to us through Breton and Polizzotti, but we have little in the way of criteria or techniques for developing and identifying such critiques. This article, then, begins with the inquiry, what is surrealist criticism—or what might it be? The authors then introduce the focus of their own surrealist critique, the research methodology known as arts-based research (ABR). Over the course of their examination, Fielding and Harkey suggest that an egoic, or will-driven, approach to arts-based research must ultimately fail, in that it both denies the spirit of artmaking and disregards autonomy of figures in psyche. Blending academic and surrealist prose, fiction and poetry, the authors explore ways the ABR methodology can fail to serve either art or research. Still, Jungian thought, as well as the surrealist approach, may offer tools to inform an ABR that supports art, psyche, and research. In exploring the personal complex and the collective unconscious, particularly, Harkey and Fielding offer a window on all that can be lost—or gained—when the life of psyche is considered in an arts-based methodology.
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  Stretching Fiction: in a language-based and visual artistic practice (2025) author(s): Mike Croft published in: Research Catalogue
  The project is a semi-graphic notification of the artist/author’s initiatives to stretch fiction – so-termed analogous to the stretcher component of an umbrella – in his language-based and visual practice. The referenced time-frame is from 2014 through 2025. The contention is that if one considers oneself as subject within one’s work, amidst whatever the work's more objective concerns, then it is a fairly obvious next step to third-person oneself – in the sense that a writer such as Fernando Pessoa invented heteronyms. While in visual practice such a prospect is, arguably, more difficult to articulate, a fictional element instilled in art- or other academic writing already has certain precedents in more experimental writing in the latter fields. If, as in the artist/author’s case, such writing is an adjunct to one’s visual practice, then a fictional characterisation of oneself as another can comment on and variously inhabit one’s visual work. Unlike how characters often populate fiction, however, the artist/author’s strategy is to only partly develop them, hence having them oscillate as, themselves, a question of relevance.
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  Imaginary Conversation with Marinus de Jong (2025) author(s): Nicholas Cornia published in: Research Catalogue
  This article is emulating fictional informal notes that the author would have taken during his research. The handwritten annotations of Marinus de Jong (1891-1984), and his artistic and pedagogical legacy, have formed an interesting case study within the Flemish Archive for Annotated Music (FAAM) at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. The “making of” the documentary Imaginary Conversation with Marinus de Jong, recorded together with pianist Anna Alvizou, is presented in a playfully manner.
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  TO THE ONE I MISS (2024) author(s): Min Ji Cha published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
  [SCHOOL] Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2024. [DEPARTMENT ] BA Interactive Media Design [SUMMERY] How can one unravel their relationship with a void through exploring their personal experience and knowledge of emptiness? Starting from the long lost frustration and unfulfillment for the inner void that I entail and wanting to define and understand what this void is and gain safety and peace in mind with it. By unraveling the complicated knot of the relationship between human and inner void, looking into different experiences of “missing” in my personal life and knowledge of emptiness, such as Korean cultural background, Language gap in translation, Definition of “Home”, Ambivalence in emotion, Moon jar, Clay and The connection in everything.
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  SUPER(IM)POSITIONS: Subverting Melodramatic Representation Through Personal Unpredictability (2024) author(s): Emilio Santoyo published in: Research Catalogue
  This Artistic Research in and through cinema explores the possibilities of using outdated melodramatic elements of cinematic representation in a new way, dissolving the intersection between the personal and the fictional as a tool for creating a redemptive act of filmmaking. "Super (im) positions: Subverting melodramatic representation through personal unpredictability" delves into the transformative potential of these elements within cinematic representation. By dissolving the boundaries between the personal and the fictional, this work engages in a redemptive act of filmmaking that reimagines melodrama. The approach employs a contemporary, polyphonic, and playful film language to propose a new form of melodrama—one that acknowledges its inherent perversity to challenge and deconstruct its toxic narratives. Rooted in the pervasive influence of telenovelas and melodrama, particularly within Mexican culture, this exploration questions and critiques the genre's impact on cultural and individual perceptions of love and relationships. The research was catalysed by a significant personal and professional rupture, leading to a critical examination of the genre's conventions. By employing a contemporary, polyphonic, and playful film language, Santoyo reimagines melodrama as a genre capable of portraying complex, personal emotions and generating critical, boundary-pushing narratives. This self-reflective genre deviation, temporarily termed the "New Melodrama," seeks to subvert traditional melodramatic tropes by acknowledging and confronting their perverse nature. Through this approach, Santoyo aims to dismantle the toxic knowledge perpetuated by conventional melodrama, offering a sophisticated and nuanced critique from within the genre itself. His work presents a trojan horse strategy, using the familiar systems of melodramatic representation to question and ultimately transform them, proposing a relevant and self-aware cinematic experience. Through innovative use of superimpositions and a deliberate deconstruction of melodramatic mise-en-scène, this study aims to create a critical and self-reflective genre deviation termed "New Melodrama." This method seeks to subvert traditional cinematic conventions by integrating multiple perspectives and temporalities, fostering a richer, more complex narrative experience. Ultimately, the research stands as a trojan horse within the film industry, using the very mechanics of melodrama to critique and reinvent it, offering a fresh, introspective take on a genre often dismissed as superficial.
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  The Dreaming Archaeologist (2024) author(s): Athina Koumela published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
  Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2024. - MA Artistic Research This thesis is a fiction-based text which attempts to answer to the research question of how can art and archaeology contribute to the blending of the fictitious with the real, which has direct consequences on our understanding of (art) history.
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  Ancestry – after DNA test – considered through Drawing (2024) author(s): Mike Croft published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
  To the extent that this research is artistic, it involves the mediums of drawing, drawing towards painting, academic research, academic writing, fiction, and occasional use of video. If artistic research could be an entity with the opacity, so to speak, of such mediums, then it would not be necessary to mention its constituents. However, this is worth stating at the outset because in the author's view the Research Catalogue does have its own mediumistic basis: take the research off the platform and its form and concept alters. The topic of the research is a response to the author's genetic ancestral DNA test provided by i3S (Institute of Investigation and innovation in Health, Porto University). The author is one among a group of participants conducting individual research on the theme of 'Call for Drawing – Genetics and Identity'. This author's activity follows an exposition called 'Ancestry – before DNA test – considered through Drawing', published on the Research Catalogue. The activity concerns the charting of progress of thinking, doing and making up to and including two main pieces of visual-material work, with the expectation that the research will continue to develop.
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  Novel (2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni published in: Research Catalogue
  Single channel digital video, with photography and text, 5' 41'', 2007 'Novel' is a half-photography, half-fiction digital video, which was inspired by my temporary dwelling in different cities during the period of a year. For my contribution to this catalogue, I briefly discuss the artistic process and thinking behind the project. In parallel, I reflect upon the possible theoretical links between visuality, narratives, architecture, and urbanism. I suggest that personal associations are definitive and significant in the ways we tend to occupy and subjectively interpret contemporary urban spaces. After a lengthy process of collecting photographs and digital film footage, as well as selecting written material, some of it in the form of quotes, from my journal, I completed the video in 2007. My method was: - I made preparatory sketches that I included in the video (film still 1). - I used a montage technique I saw in one of Peter Greenaway's films: the separate 'window' on the top or bottom sides of the video (film stills 2, 4, 5) that denotes parallel action. - I overlaid photographs (film still 3), a technique that allowed me to create the animating effect of the moving image, without using film footage. In painting, the artist can make layers out of collaged material that might be unconnected or purposefully juxtaposed to the painting's subject. Using the above method, I asked the viewer to watch the video more like a moving series of paintings, rather than as a film. The video, like my other video art work, was exhibited and archived under my artist's pseudonym, Betty Nigianni. Written in 2012, the essay is a separate piece to accompany this exposition. Note: Please disregard comment I posted about a notification that doesn't appear anymore.
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  Seminar – Of Artistic Research: considered through hybrid writing and visual practice (2023) author(s): Mike Croft published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
  The exposition involves the adaptation of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's logical square, to convey an idea of artistic research practice considered from the perspective of the human subject's position in its midst. As part of the discussion the author has used some evidence of a previous lecture presentation, integrating such material with that of a newer project concerning the visualization of a nightmare image of a phantom in a portal. The tools of the research are a hybrid form of writing that embroils fictional and academic modes as a language-based practice, and visual artistic practice. The author takes Lacan's idea of the confounding of any logical argument by automatic obfuscation of it by unconscious process, and imagines that he has an other to him as a subjective second voice. The question of voices is central to the research; the suggestion that one does speak to oneself in various ways simultaneously that may be fashioned as distinct and separate. It is argued that the research aspect of artistic practice involves just a section of Lacan's logical square, particularly concerning contingency. This orientation may call to question one's tendency to reason and find meaning from the necessary locus of inquiry from the vantage-point of the language-based Symbolic – of Lacan's three psychic structuring registers Imaginary, Symbolic, Real. The element of fiction provides a literary inclination whereby, while the artistic research speaks about itself as research and references a visual practice, the exposition could also be considered a language-based practice in its own right.
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  Strategies of Fiction (2019) author(s): Stephen Bain published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Fictional Worlds as Structures for Public Space Performance is an exposition that fractures into multiple parts, text, performance, spatial design, and creative writing. Fiction is seen as a device for creating shared experience, a familiar process in the performing arts but also observed in the public domain of politics, where a key example is taken to discuss the dynamics of how fiction may be both symbol and action. Relating aesthetics to politics through fiction as a method, a collective influence is confirmed by the event. Fiction is split into various strategies in a poetic reflection on archetypes of space, proposed as 8 distinct fiction-types that open the way for common understanding. Using the format of a screenplay, 8 types are fleshed out and supported by reflections on influential international artworks and theories. Finally these types are used as a tool to analyse my own public space performance experiments in Auckland, New Zealand.
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  Interruption as Dissenting Gesture (2016) author(s): Sepideh Karami published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In this exposition I investigate the tactics of interruption as methods of engaging with the institution through artistic research and approaches. This is developed by drawing upon Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’, Chantal Mouffe’s ‘strategy of engagement’ and Michel de Certeau's idea of 'tactics'. Art as a dissensual activity turns artistic research into a dissident research that can serve to question academic consensus rather than conforming to its established structure. Interruption becomes a dissenting gesture. I use a fictional and fictitious publication as a tool to 'interrupt' institutions. In this fictitious publication, I have borrowed Lieutenant Fontaine from Robert Bresson’s movie, ‘A Man Escaped’, and have introduced him as a protagonist of 'interrupting architecture', investigating his escape plan as an activity of 'architecting'. The journey of this publication goes through two short architectural narrations of two places: a prison (as discipline) and a library (as dominant discourse). These two narrations are combined with three formulae: amateur, fiction, misperformance or disloyalty; each acts as certain characteristics of dissidence. Together, these aim to raise the question: How do tactics of interruption contribute to dissensus in academia?
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  HYBRID NARRATIVES: Approaching Maternal Experience through Collecting, Writing, and Doubling in the Development of Mixed Media Film (last edited: 2025) author(s): Denise Hauser This exposition is in revision and its share status is: visible to all.
  Motherhood in cinema is often a side plot – this PhD project in Artistic Research seeks to challenge that. Through collecting, writing, and “doubling” as methods, it explores the maternal experiences of three filmmakers and how these complex realities can take shape in a hybrid film blending fiction, documentary, live action, and animation. The research addresses a gap in representation, where female doppelgängers and alter egos are rarely linked to motherhood, despite its deeply transformative nature – an obvious foundation for doubling. In filmic narratives, female doubles are often cast as antagonists or disruptions rather than reflections of a mother’s evolving self. The lens post-birth shifts to the child’s development and perspective, leaving the mother’s transformation – her shifting identity and sense of self – largely unexplored. This project takes a different approach, using interviews, video recordings, animated investigations, and personal reflections to explore the challenges of balancing motherhood and filmmaking. By aligning maternal experience with cinematic doubling, it highlights the multifaceted roles women navigate in both fields. The research also engages with filmmakers and artists who challenge conventional portrayals of motherhood. Though caregiving perspectives appear in short-form animation, hybrid long-form representations are still rare. Influences include literary works exploring motherhood, identity, and doubling, such as Matrescence by Lucy Jones and August Blue by Deborah Levy. Rather than aiming for a traditional completed film, the outcome prioritizes the process. It includes a synopsis and excerpts from the evolving script Make Her See, alongside documentary footage, interviews, animation tests, and live-action experiments. Incorporating doppelgängers and animated alter-egos, the project blends realism and surrealism to examine a woman’s vulnerabilities and resilience as she redefines herself. This artistic research expands the representation of motherhood in mixed media film, connects the maternal experience to cinematic doubling, and opens new possibilities for nuanced maternal narratives.
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• The Autobiography of My / A Car (last edited: 2025) author(s): Nadia Sotirova Abadjieva This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
  - Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025 - DEPARTMENT: BA Interactive Media Design
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• You are Leaking: on vision, permeability, and the porous self through fiction and theory (last edited: 2025) author(s): Nilsu Göçer This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
  Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025 BA Fine Arts "You are leaking" tells the story of Iris, an artist caught in a surreal, psychological descent inside a shifting, oppressive studio space. The sterile white room, described as "ravenous" and alive, becomes a character: it breathes, warps, and seeps with liquid. As time fractures and the line between self and environment dissolves, Iris is consumed by disorientation. The story reflects my longing to shed individualism like a skin, to melt into something vast and nameless. The longing to escape the boundaries of self, the ecstasy and terror of permeability, and the cyclical failure of transformation. My work dwells in that unstable space, where “I” frays into “we,” where memories forget their owners and bodies forget their borders.
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