Can Philosophy Exist?
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material.
The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the mini-essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system.
Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I use visual art and figurative examples as illustrations, adapting from methods, such as the example, used in analytic philosophy.
I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive: "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued. Artworks and archival artistic material are offered for aesthetic contemplation; they don't possess any "magical" qualities, they don't cause any phenomena or events in the world. In this view, I ordered this exposition as a design proposal for two independent, yet interconnected exhibitions: one for the final artistic exhibition show; and one as a general overview for the artist's studio, set up as a stand alone, if parallel, exhibition.
Evolution
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Betty Nigianni
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"New ideas might be conceived and developed more rapidly in disciplines that are more abstract.
The inductive methods of experimental innovators in painting makes their enterprise resemble the more empirical disciplines considered by psychologists, while the deductive approach of the conceptual innovators makes theirs resemble the more abstract disciplines."
David W. Galenson, "The Life Cycles of Modern Artists", NBER Working Paper Series, 2003.
Artists and architects have been at times captivated by visionary ideological viewpoints, which they used as inspiration and to make suggestions for applications with their artworks and designs. My use of the diagram and the image aims to convey the simple message that art strives for evolution; meaning to strengthen the mind, to research capabilities, to communicate a disinterested, though not necessarily apolitical, view of social changes, to overcome banality and offer an alternative way of looking at the world. For many artists, this motivation has traditionally often gone hand in hand with political goals and motivations.
The decline of the commercial art market in the 1980s gave rise to artists working mainly, but not solely, with ephemeral installations, including the ubiquitous video art, performance, and the broader range of conceptual art. Painting remained as an established fine art practice, with a renewed interest to conceptualism.
The portrait is of the artist, myself, at a young age, dated 1993, when I was a student at the NTUA. Betty Nigianni is my name known as (aka), which I also used as my artistic pseudonym.
EARN Working Group - Value
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Veerle Van der Sluys, Dieter De Vlieghere
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
EARN (European Artistic Research Network) was established to share and exchange knowledge and experience in artistic research; foster mobility, exchange and dialogue among art researchers; promote wider dissemination of artistic research; and enable global connectivity and exchange for artistic research.
The network is organized in different working groups that look at artistic research from different angles. The working group Value.
Art and research create new forms of insight, experience, communities of learning, non-disciplinary forms of knowledge and action. Their recognition and appropriate application require different forms of attention, valuing, and articulating what we value. Outlining the roles of trust, recognition, and expressing preferences, this session asks fundamental questions around what we value, at a time when the prosperity of life—including our own—on this planet, is questioned daily.