Foot Baths for All
(2025)
author(s): Julia Weber, Mayumi Arai
published in: Research Catalogue
The artistic intervention "Foot Baths for All" (2024) emerged from an ethnographic exploration of collective forms of life on wastelands in Switzerland. Ethnographic insights regarding self-organized care, occupation, informal infrastructure, gift economies, and the shared use of water and electricity were fictionalized and recontextualized in the inner city of Zurich, in order to explore new forms of appropriation and participation in urban life.
This exposition aims to share the results and experiences of this research through multiple formats: a video documentation, a how-to guide, and a text that offers insights into the ethnographic research and its translation into an artistic intervention, conceptualizing "Foot Bath Urbanism" as an artistic method for city-making from below.
This project is situated in the field of artistic urban research. It is based on an expanded notion of art that moves beyond institutional contexts to intervene directly in public urban spaces through installations and performative practices, following approaches such as “New Genre Public Art”. The how-to guide is connected to instruction-based art, challenging conventional notions of authorship while emphasizing accessibility, participation, and interactivity, rooted in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Fluxus movement.
Bus Stop
(2025)
author(s): Julija Jonas
published in: FFA BUT – Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology
This exposition reflects on the phenomenon of the public transport stop as a metaphorical framework for the condition of migration and the figure of the waiting individual. By centering the act of waiting, this research examines how mutual understanding and cultural translation unfold within intercultural encounters. The bus stop serves as both a physical site and a symbolic threshold, a space of transition, suspension, and projection toward an uncertain future. Within this context, the project traces the transformative phases of subjectivity experienced during emigration, emphasizing the temporal dimension of waiting, expectation, and the tension inherent in moments of immobility. The final installation is situated directly within the public sphere, specifically at bus stops, where the object destabilizes the everyday rhythm of transit. By oscillating between staged intervention and authentic environment, the project foregrounds the paradoxical beauty of stillness, alongside the latent unease of anticipation.
CRITICAL PLAYGROUND AS PLAY-CE UTOPIA. (MANIFESTO FOR A DIFFERENCE IN ITSELF.)
(2023)
author(s): Anartist
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
City of Panic is an urban intervention, which has been realized by The Anartist (Gian Luigi Biagini and John Dunn). It happened in 2019 in the central train-station square of Helsinki. The installation-performance is a "caged mini-golf", which catches and elicits many disruptive resonances. The intervention challenges, contests and makes visible the "iron cage of rationality" that organizes the capitalist urban space through an ordoliberal trans-institutional consensus that does not leave space for the expression of Difference. The intervention puts in "play-ce" a critical and mystic playground of Difference in Itself that breaks the cage of assimilation to a functional hierarchical identity. The article describes this complex experience of rupture and cata-comic rapture by a phenomenology of the process in becoming. A phenomenology and an ethnography of difference, with theory references "in flight", that cannot be completely grasped by a homogenous and unified signifier, narrative, representation. Even the style of the graphic tries to evoke this "virtual heterogeneity of intertwined planes and becomings" that are sutured and re-composed by creative writing.
Urgent Affairs, Strange Empathy
(2023)
author(s): Sveinung Rudjord Unneland
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
In 2018, Kunst- og designhøgskolen i Bergen (KHiB) moved into brand new premises in Møllendalsveien, and at the same time changed its name and organizational affiliation to Kunstakademiet – Institutt for samtidskunst, Fakultet for kunst musikk og design, Universitetet i Bergen. At the same time, Sveinung Unneland began his work on the doctoral project Urgent Affairs, Strange Empathy. In the project, Unneland examines these structural and architectural changes, in parallel with that he explores how we can establish different autonomous spaces and practices within the institutional context as such.
Only by insisting on a radical openness about what art is or can be, is it possible, in my opinion, to maintain a meaningful relationship with the concept of art. An important question then becomes how we (as artists, researchers, and teachers) best cultivate and safeguard this openness, in our own practice and within the institutional framework many of us find ourselves in.
Urgent Affairs, Strange Empathy places itself in an institutional tradition that in Bergen goes back to the self-organized Vestlandets Kunstakademi (1973). Through practical collaborative projects, Unneland explores how this legacy can be continued within today's institutional framework. Parallel to this, he has worked with painting as an integral part of the research project; a personal practice where he can set up models for possible relationships between the fictional and the real, the personal and the common, the inside and the outside.
Bio
Sveinung Rudjord Unneland (1981, Farsund) is a visual artist and Ph.D. research fellow at the Art Academy – Institute of contemporary art, at the faculty of art, music and design, University of Bergen. He received his education at the Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen and Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2007). Sveinung Rudjord Unneland has worked with Urgent Affairs, Strange Empathy since 2018 under the guidance of Eamon O'Kane and Ane Hjort Guttu.
GRAPHIC NOVEL CLANDESTINE JOURNAL
(2022)
author(s): ANARTIST
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The article describes, with a self-ethnographic position, the limit and potentiality of an "art of subjectivity" carried out by an a-modal "stranger" thrown into a foreigner country with abstract rationalist features that obstacle the immanent becoming(s) and repress the excess of a practice of interventions that is necessary to shape an uncoded "ethico-aesthetic territory". In this context of extinction the writer of the article, who is also the protagonist of the described art practice, presents the necessity of a new clandestine media for his art research publishing. After a brief outline of a Deleuzian theory of the media, he reveals and presents his project that consists of a "graphic novel clandestine journal". This "graphic novel style form" suits well to his practice of disruptive interventions in public space and the character-avatar "Anartist", which is the mask performed by the writer in its critical urban interventions. The "author" writes that our hyper-capitalist reality is already a form of dystopian graphic novel. For this reason the portrait of his action as a "graphic novel" is a form of realism and an aesthetic strategy to deal with it.
Registers of Disinhibition: Transferred Autonomy and Generative Systems in Artistic Research
(2021)
author(s): Matthias M Sildnik S
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition is a presentation of an artistic method that incorporates generative technologies in artistic intervention. The autonomy of the generative system is analysed not as an isolated capability of a technical object but as a specific configuration between the autonomous operations of the system’s creator, the system itself, and the individuals related to the system. The notion of transferred autonomy is proposed to emphasise this interrelated nature of an entity’s autonomy. In this way, a generative system is positioned in a broader socio-economic and cultural context. To make this interpretation productive in relation to artistic practice, interventionist tactics need to be reconsidered as well. The presented method uses an opinion poll format. The opinion poll is interpreted as a basis for collective individuation enabled by generative processes. The conventional opinion poll format is deformed and reconstructed according to an assemblage of enunciation, enunciative recursion, disinhibition, and individuation. Rather than being a scientific, generalising and analytic method, it becomes an artistic generative, interventionist medium.
Two related projects are presented: ‘Happy Space’ (2016) and ‘Midscape’ (2018). Each describes the specific way in which generative art techniques are adopted and developed. The former presents a case study based on a survey of working and living conditions, hybridising an opinion poll with a procedural genesis of three-dimensional environments. The latter explores the levels on which generative technologies can facilitate the dynamics of structures conceived in the previous project. These dynamics are encapsulated in installation elements, opening a dialogue between physical and social dimensions.
urban peripheries workshop Vol. 1 publication
(2019)
author(s): Maiju Loukola, Bea Tornberg, Una Auri, Virpi Nieminen
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition is a visual and textual map of exploratory projects by 10 Aalto ARTS students and 12 Universität der Künste students in their collaboratory workshop URBAN PERIPHERIES Vol. 1 in Helsinki/Espoo, during 5-20 February 2019.
The exposition is composed by the Aalto ARTS students and their supervisor, and it reflects the interventional works realised by the ARTS + UdK students, and experimental texts realised by the ARTS students after the actual workshop.
The exposition similarly works as a basis for the second part of URBAN PERIPHERIES (Vol. 2) that will take place in UdK Berlin in December 2019. It thus also outlines possible scenarios to be explored on grounds of the first workshop.
City as Space of Rules and Dreaming [2021–2025]
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Maiju Loukola, Jaakko Ruuska, Paul Aleksi Tiensuu
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
CITY AS SPACE OF RULES AND DREAMING promotes emancipation and democratisation in urban space by cross-examination through artistic research, empirical urban research, political theory and legal theory. The study strengthens polyphony of urban space and thereby develops a more just city
It asks: How is urban space formed and shared, and who has access to it? What normative and de facto instruments regulate, control and inhabit this space? What kinds of processes, structures and spaces of inclusion and marginalisation, as well as disagreement and controversy are there in the city? What kind of fractures, escape lines and dreams are hidden in the normativity of urban space? What kinds of spaces of shadow, noise, potentialities and dreams are there and how do they actualise?
The study reaches beyond established art-science boundaries by bringing new and more inclusive means of “soft law” to urban decision-making and inviting different neighborhoods to dream of their own dwelling-regions through imaginary urban archaeology and fictionalising democracy combining different artistic mediums.
The project is coordinated by the Academy of Fine Arts (Doctoral programme) at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Other partners are Helsinki University Faculty of Law, Helsinki University Faculty of Arts/ Aesthetics and Aalto University Department of Built Environment.
In Memoriam Ari Hirvonen (1960–2021)
The responsible leader (PI) of the project is Maiju Loukola at the Academy of Fine Arts / KuvA, Uniarts Helsinki. The other research group members and co-initiators are Aino Hirvola (Dept. of built environment, Aalto University), Tanja Tiekso (Faculty of Arts/Aesthetics, Helsinki University Faculty of Arts/ Aesthetics) and Paul Tiensuu (Helsinki University Faculty of Law). Since 2023 Jaakko Ruuska (KuvA, Uniarts Helsinki), Henna-Riikka Halonen (KuvA, Uniarts Helsinki) and Niran Baibulat (KuvA/Uniarts Helsinki) have contributed as postdoc artist-researchers for shorter periods.
Other collaborators include Stefan Winter, Zen Marie, Brigitta Stone-Johnson, Anita Zsentesi, Chris Butler, Jan Schacher, Josue Moreno, Denise Ziegler, Simon Critchley, Antti Nyyssölä, Gabi Schillig and Kristina Sedlerova. Villanen
We dedicate this project to Ari, and to Stargazing
CAD+SR Residency \ Un-Writing Nature
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Ali Williams
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Center for Art Design + Social Research
Un-Writing Nature
Spoleto, Italy
Words of Mouth
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Laura Adel
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
city intervations taken from a poetic perspective of local society
PRAHO! exposition
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Annamarie Čermáková
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Can an interaction between the inhabitants of a city in a public space lead to a dialogue causing an artistic expression? And is there really a need to define certain places for the arts when we have common spaces / online platform that can fulfill the same function? The goal of this thesis is to give an insight into an artistic project I have been implementing into public space of Prague since Autumn 2021 which is based on the concept of present miscommunication of the arts and digs deep into the possibilities of starting a dialogue through the streets of the city.
By using the city as a certain intermediator, the project aims to outline the potential of the place, to display the city as a kind of mosaic of intersecting lives taking place so close together, and to show different perspectives on the very same place.
The aim of the project is to point out a kind of nuance of anonymous intimacy, which we all experience in the hustle and bustle of the metropolis on a daily basis and to investigate the potential of arts in public space leading to dialog.
Critique and the Cypriot Summer / Kral çıplak / Ήνταμπου κάμνουμεν δαμέ;
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Chrystalleni Loizidou, Marinos Houtris
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
About this project
output from Critique and the Cypriot Summer,
an artist residency in the village of Lofou
4/7/2016 - 9/7/2016
with
Nurtane Karagil
Hayal Gezer
Marinos Houtris
Chrystalleni Loizidou
Invited by
Xarkis & Confrontation Through Art
with the support (in no special order) of
NIMAC
NeMe
ARTos
Re Aphrodite
Point Centre for Contemporary Art
Pater Theofanis
...
Center for Art Design + Social Research Un-Writing Nature Spoleto, Italyopen exposition comments (0)
city intervations taken from a poetic perspective of local societyopen exposition comments (0)
About this project output from Critique and the Cypriot Summer, an artist residency in the village of Lofou 4/7/2016 - 9/7/2016 with Nurtane Karagil Hayal Gezer Marinos Houtris Chrystalleni Loizidou Invited by Xarkis & Confrontation Through Art with the support (in no special order) of NIMAC NeMe ARTos Re Aphrodite Point Centre for Contemporary Art Pater Theofanis ...open exposition comments (0)