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.
The Plot, The Compositor, Mourning/Mistakes
(2021)
author(s): Alexandra Crouwers
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In the Summer of 2019, a small family forest fell victim to a spruce bark beetle plague. Unusually mild winters caused larvae numbers to explode, and extreme drought weakened the otherwise more resilient trees. Expanding patches of dead forest can be found from the North Sea coast to the Baltics. The cleared forest became The Plot: a witness to climate change, and a gateway to dealing with ecological grief. My own eco-anxiety is utilized as a case study: how to deal with this new kind of loss? What is The Plot telling us? How do we move forward without losing hope? The exposition presents The Plot as fertile ground for artistic and collaborative research, including a contribution by Lisa Jeannin, a custom made font, moving image, and an audio work.
BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended)
(2019)
author(s): John Cussans
published in: Research Catalogue
BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended) is the first phase of a long-term artistic research project called The Skullcracker Suite. Taking its name from Philip K. Dick's 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, the project uses the story of Dick's visit to Vancouver in 1972, and his stay at a rehab clinic for First Nations ex-cons, as a pretext to investigate the cultural politics of decolonization in British Columbia since the 1960's from ethnographic, Indigenous and science fictional perspectives, with a specific focus on the potlatch culture of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of the Pacific Northwest.
50 Billion Micrograms. In the Search of the Aftermath of an Event
(2019)
author(s): Christine Hansen
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition provides an example of how art can offer an alternative way of understanding the past through my work “50 Billion Micrograms”. The project explored a forgotten media event from 1979, in which a gigantic meteorite supposedly landed in a remote lake on the west coast of Norway. The exposition attempts to demonstrate how ambiguity was a fuel the project. In the process what I call "fluctuating thinking" was an important method. This meant that I let seemingly irrelevant and speculative elements be part of the process. In this process, the different conceptual and aesthetic elements had to be studied carefully to consider whether random ideas and speculative elements were relevant for the work. However, such an open-ended approach is often fundamental to artistic research, I argue. I had no hope of finding the answer about the meteorite or explaining this natural phenomenon. My interest was to dwell on the uncertainty and keep the wondering alive. What became increasingly important was to explore the search itself through images and sound. The exposition also ask what is an event, what keeps an event alive? Were does fact and fiction interlace?
This exhibition is an island
(2017)
author(s): Kit Hammonds
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Based around my catalogue essay for Yu-Chen Wang's exhibition 'Nostalgia for the Future' (Taipei Fine Art Museum and Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, 2016), I consider how exhibition narratives are formed. As an experiment in 'curatorial writing', the essay draws from the evolution of science fiction. The method is discussed as reflective rather than explanatory of the artist's practice.
"What the Probes Report": An Exercise in Operative Fiction
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
With Operative Fiction, we propose a practice of spatial storytelling that proceeds along the lingual dynamic of prepositions rather than verbs. The text body is embedded in the medial spatiality of a printed book, a digital interface, or a performance space. Thus, the site (of the text) becomes a constituent and inextricable part of the storytelling. Methods of spatial production invade the text's very texture; in turn, textual compositions influence the unfolding of space, place, and site. Not only the story (conveyed through the text) but the text itself, with its material and procedural potential, activates the site of its action; it entangles itself in the texture of the digital surface. Furthermore, our prepositional practice shifts the spatial (and textual) focus from “location“ to “position” and “positioning”, thus activating the relational potential of multiple textual and chrono-topical layers.
We begin our exercise in Operative Fiction with Thomas Ballhausen’s “What the Probes Report” by transposing the text from the surface of a printed page (FLORA, 2020) into the digital interface of a Research Catalogue exposition. The non-human protagonist, evoked through and evolving throughout the text, disrupts a subject-centred mode of narration: it is entangled in the word- and landscape of its development, thus becoming—by means of its procedural logic and function—a constituent part of its staging. The line, speculatively re-enacting the machines' functions, is the same, drawing the digital landscape's topographic texture. Applying a drawing technique typically used in a performance design draft, we explore the friction between staging and spacing by deploying minimally visible images and textual suggestions of direction. The operational plasticity of the technical images enables the congregation of dramaturgical intensities (staging) while disseminating and dispersing the story through the technological means of the exposition into hyperlinked virtual spaces (spacing). In addition to a linear reading mode, following the initial chronology of the story, we also propose a contingent reading mode activated through time codes. Acting simultaneously as elements of the drawing and as hypertext, these timelines imply the duration of a staged terrain, sometimes congregating multiple time zones within a topographic entity. Timelines act as “more-than-texts”, creating a multiplicity of positions and neighbourhoods, intertwining temporal aspects of space with the speculative grammar of the story.
A Dead Writer Exists in Words, and Language is a Type of Virus
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Linda Stupart, Jakub Jan Ceglarz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Virus" synthesises four years of performative and traditional research—engaging a range of contemporary artists, institutions, and writing practices to reformulate possibilities for art criticism and institutional critique within artworlds. This practice-based research offers new possibilities for embodied art criticism. The work makes visible, interrupts, and challenges the violent and patriarchal structures of the artworld, offering new modes and practices of feminist and queer artmaking, critique, and resistance. As well as the novella, "Virus" comprises sculptural elements, videos, performance, and a series of prints of spells written for/against the artworld.
This research contributes to performance art, situating itself on the borders of ritual, language, and performativity. The spell works are at the centre of a ‘re-emergence’ of witchcraft in art, and new possibilities for performance-as-criticism. "Virus" is a singular output in multiple fields—literary criticism; experimental writing; contemporary art; eco-feminism; queer theory, and objectification studies—and its multidisciplinarity contributes to each of these fields. Its assertion as an art object, in the form of writing, is an integral moment for the conception of the ‘Art Writing’ discipline.
The spells appeared in a major survey show of feminist art touring the UK (‘Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance’, 2018–19), as well as survey shows about witchcraft and contemporary art in Vienna and Cornwall. Stupart performed spells as research outputs at the University of Melbourne; 4S: Society for Social Science annual conference, Sydney; Edinburgh University; Reading University; and as an exemplary of practice-based research in the BCU PGCert lecture program.
"Virus" is the subject of two conference papers: Ass. Prof. Helen Hester (‘Towards a Theory of Thing-Women’, 2017) and Dr Holly Pester (‘Common Rest’ 2016). It is on university reading lists including: Royal Academy of Art, Copenhagen; Reading University; University of Cape Town; Queen Mary and Goldsmiths, London University; and LCC.
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.open exposition comments (0)
In the Summer of 2019, a small family forest fell victim to a spruce bark beetle plague. Unusually mild winters caused larvae numbers to explode, and extreme drought weakened the otherwise more resilient trees. Expanding patches of dead forest can be found from the North Sea coast to the Baltics. The cleared forest became The Plot: a witness to climate change, and a gateway to dealing with ecological grief. My own eco-anxiety is utilized as a case study: how to deal with this new kind of loss? What is The Plot telling us? How do we move forward without losing hope? The exposition presents The Plot as fertile ground for artistic and collaborative research, including a contribution by Lisa Jeannin, a custom made font, moving image, and an audio work.open exposition comments (0)
BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended) is the first phase of a long-term artistic research project called The Skullcracker Suite. Taking its name from Philip K. Dick's 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, the project uses the story of Dick's visit to Vancouver in 1972, and his stay at a rehab clinic for First Nations ex-cons, as a pretext to investigate the cultural politics of decolonization in British Columbia since the 1960's from ethnographic, Indigenous and science fictional perspectives, with a specific focus on the potlatch culture of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of the Pacific Northwest.open exposition comments (0)
Based around my catalogue essay for Yu-Chen Wang's exhibition 'Nostalgia for the Future' (Taipei Fine Art Museum and Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, 2016), I consider how exhibition narratives are formed. As an experiment in 'curatorial writing', the essay draws from the evolution of science fiction. The method is discussed as reflective rather than explanatory of the artist's practice.open exposition comments (0)