Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 1. PhD in Practice | Artistic Research Works The PhD in Practice is a doctoral program for artistic research. It provides participants with the opportunity to pursue their individual artistic research projects in a collective environment with a strongly transdisciplinary and international focus.

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  Sirius descends, Goldelse flickers: German-Turkish debts of becoming and flickering migrations as remedies (2025) author(s): Aykan Safoglu published in: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
  My PhD project explores the aesthetic and affective codes of a particular notion of indebtedness, a 'feeling of indebtedness,' as an outcome of German educational efforts institutionalized in Istanbul over the course of the 20th century. I interrogate this feeling through the lens of affect theory as a pedagogical 'genre,' by bringing my research closer to Black studies and critical migration studies. My high school, the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi [Istanbul High School for Boys, also known as Istanbul High School], which is housed in the former headquarters of a 20th-century European credit institution named the Düyûn-ı Umûmiye [Ottoman Public Debt Administration, OPDA] becomes the imaginative site for 'desire-based research,' as Eve Tuck suggests. If this German school abroad were a credit institution, a time machine, how could it inform me about the historical processes through which a 'feeling of indebtedness' educates collective desires conforming to German labor, emancipation, and citizenship models? Keeping Lauren Berlant’s concept of 'cruel optimism' dear to my research, I question whether the German pedagogical promises in Asia Minor pose an obstacle to the flourishing of migrant subjects desirous of German education. Thus, I critique the violent histories along the modern German-Turkish industrial complexes of labor, culture, and military. I lean on intergovernmental agreements and familial biographies of labor, migration, and conversion. In pursuit of affective remedies for such histories' violence, I depart from 'redemptive migrant images' of my solo exhibition 'Teneffüs' [Recess], which opened at Salt Galata (Istanbul, 2022) in the former headquarters of the Bank-ı Osmanî-i Şahane [Imperial Ottoman Bank]. Employing my methodology of 'flickering migrations,' I hope that it inspires a thriving culture of memory and accountability.
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  Lost and Shared: Approaches to collective mourning towards affective and transformative politics (2025) author(s): Eliana Otta published in: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
  Taking as a departure point my experience working with war survivors in Peru, this project investigates how art can enable the collectivization of mourning. I connected my interest in the act of mourning human losses with my experiences living in Athens, Greece, where I encountered depression as a common diagnosis on both the individual and collective levels. If being depressed relates to unresolved mourning processes, what are the objects of loss caused by economic crisis and political disillusion? How can art help us to mourn an abstract loss, such as a political project, a certain sense of dignity, a particular relation with time and nature, or a fixed role in the familial structure? How could mourning be shared to allow communities to reframe and re-signify those objects of loss, towards transforming our relation to the economic and political? Lost and Shared creates dialogue between theory and affective labour, through collective experiences that connect emotions, critical thinking, body and space. The intuitions and questions brought by conversations with Greek activists and artists are the core of the project. Later on, facing the impossibility of working as planned due to the pandemic, Lost and Shared was adapted to the new socializing conditions and to acknowledge how crisis and mourning had become a global concern. Thus, the project ends up proposing the idea of “fertilizing mourning” as a concept in the making - an open invitation to collectively create practices that help us reconsidering the entanglements between life, death, and regeneration. Urgent practices we need today in order to contest the increasing, global processes of loss caused by capitalism.
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• Dreamachinery (2024) author(s): Ruthia Jenrbekova connected to: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna published in: Research Catalogue
  The exposition presents individual outcomes of the collective PEEK project “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine: Post-Soviet Queerness, Archiving, and the Art of Resistance” (AR 567), which was implemented in 2020—2024 by four artists/researchers: Katharina Wiedlack, Masha Godovannaya, Iain Zabolotny and Ruthia Jenrbekova. The overall conceptual frame, based on the well-known artefact called “Dreamachine”, has been developed by this collective, however, the exposition at hand present a particular approach and outcomes by its author, a PhD-in-Practice candidate Ruthia Jenrbekova. Our experimental art-research project was a study of queer lives in a number of post-soviet cities. One of the project’s ambition was developing and testing an experimental artistic methodology, which in my version is called “Dreamachinery”. Trying to connect it to a particular artistic tradition that I labeled as “Queer Light & Magic”, I present here a few outcomes of my personal interactions with the participants of a series of workshops that I conducted in the cities of Almaty, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Berlin and Vienna.
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• Politics of collective movements in post-socialisms (2024) author(s): olia sosnovskaya connected to: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna published in: Research Catalogue
  The research addresses collective movements and their exhaustion (bodily and political) in post-socialisms, focusing on choreographies of protest actions, socialist mass celebrations and raves, and the relation between festive and the political. The project departs from archival materials on the socialist mass celebrations and the experience of the 2020-21 anti-governmental uprising in Belarus, re-addressing it in the context of the current Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, which involves Belarusian territories and infrastructures, and of the anti-war resistance. It analyses specific collective choreographies (state parades, protest marches and gatherings, raves, various acts of disruptions and sabotage) and traces the transformations of “the political” and political movement in post-socialisms, while approaching the notion of post-socialism critically (in its equating different historical experiences and being always bound to the past on one hand, or seen as non-linear and non-unified on the other). The project tackles those issues through the concept of a movement score (movement notation), used in dance studies to graphically record, analyze, preserve (archive) and transmit (further perform) dance and movement. In this research, a movement score is seen as any kind of graphic transcript of movement (including text) that intersects multiple temporalities of its enactment, and is used as a tool to critically approach the temporality of political action and to question the linear time of revolutionary event.
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• the gaze as a protest (2024) author(s): ujjwal utkarsh connected to: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna published in: Research Catalogue
  My PhD project lies in the intersection of observational filmmaking and the act of protests. For me, the observational form is not really geared towards the goal of objectivity but rather with a sensorial experiential approach an intent to make the invisible, visible. The position of the auteur becomes critically important here. In this position it is important for me that I do NOT claim or seem to be claiming ‘their position’ or voice. And while being an outsider, it is an attempt to not just look ‘at them’. But rather an attempt to ‘be with’. Through this presentation, I would like to explore this position further and also explore as to if through such an approach can then various realities be acknowledged as realities without being reduced to singular notions of truth? My PhD project lies in the intersection of observational filmmaking and the act of protests. For me, the observational form is not really geared towards the goal of objectivity but rather with a sensorial experiential approach an intent to make the invisible, visible. Through this presentation I would like to further eXplore the position of the observer or the auteur. The position of the observer becomes critical as it defines and is interconnected with what to look at, and how to look. While ‘observing’, for me it is important that I do NOT claim or seem to be claiming ‘their position’ or voice. And while being an outsider, it is an attempt to not just look ‘at them’. But rather an attempt to ‘be with’. Can such a position then help us acknowledge various realities as realities and not reduce them to singular notions of truth? My PhD project lies in the intersection of observational filmmaking and the act of protest. For me, the observational form is not geared towards objectivity but rather as a sensorial experiential approach with an intent to make the invisible, visible. In this case, the position of the auteur or the observer becomes critical. For instance, it is important for me that I do NOT claim ‘their position’ or voice. And, while being an outsider, to not just look ‘at them’ but rather attempt to ‘be with’. In this presentation, I will further explore this position and see if in trying to be with and be adjacent to an ‘other’ while observing, can we evoke the possibility of a multiplicity of narratives? Can then various realities be acknowledged without being reduced to singular notions of truth?
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  At Cross Purposes, reflections on constellations (2024) author(s): Janne Schipper connected to: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna published in: Research Catalogue
  When gazing at the night sky together with someone, it can be challenging to guide the other person’s attention to a specific star or cluster. To completely follow the alignment of the eyes and the tip of the index finger to the object in mind would require us to climb into the other, to see the world through their eyes. How do we know if we have the same star in mind as the person next to us? Are we talking at cross-purposes? At Cross Purposes, reflections on constellations, comprises three texts by different authors on language, narrative, sign and signification, as well as poetry and anxiety in art.
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