Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  23. Re-Imagining This issue addresses the various gestures of going back, returning to take another look, or starting anew. It suggests that research in the context of artistic and creative practice could have a special relation to time; simultaneously attaching itself to a prior moment in time and, from there, propelling imagination to unforeseen futures. The theme "Re-imagining" proposes reassessments where the evaluation of past events, integral to research, is in unison with the anticipation potential, integral to the arts. It wonders about new conceptions of an idea, place, space, object, and ways of doing and making that emerge from a reverse glance — the challenges, updates, and improvements.
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  22. Indigeneities This Ruukku issue has been edited as part of the research project Taking Back the Museum – Opening the Space of Community Museums to Recover the Art of Indigenous People (2021–2025), funded by the Kone Foundation, which brings together artistic research and Indigenous studies.
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  21. Performing Artistic Research in Music – Performing Music in Artistic Research This issue of Ruukku explores the relationship between artistic research and the performance and presentation of music, asking what kind of music performance practices artistic research produces or enables.
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  20. Artivism Our Artivism issue is inspired by dismantling the contemporary conception of art and by a space where working methods, contents, and ideals produced by art have changed. This also enables negotiations and struggles between various conceptions of art.
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  19. Making Artistic Research Public Making something public is intrinsic to both art making and artistic research. This issue of RUUKKU focuses on the variety of ways artistic research is made public and on the effect of published artworks and research on their immediate surroundings, neighborhoods or environments. The issue discusses the relevance of changes and traces that published artworks and artistic research leave in public space and vice versa. The call was opened for researchers and artists to ponder artistic research's relation to its publicity in its diversity.
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  18. Responsibility In this issue of RUUKKU, we are unpacking the notion of responsibility in/with/for arts and artistic research with five expositions and three voices. The RUUKKU issue Responsibility supplements the Art of Research VII conference organized on 3-4 December 2020 at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland.
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  17. Everyday Utopias and Artistic Research What kinds of perspectives can artistic research offer in seeking to cultivate political imagination and utopian thought? What kinds of tools and methods does it suggest for social action and thought? How do spaces, materiality and embodiment shape the practices of imagination? How can artistic research contribute to creating more ecologically and socially sustainable societies?
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  16. Working with Vegetal This, the 16th issue of Ruukku – Studies in Artistic Research, focuses on artists, researchers, scholars, and artistic researchers who are working with the vegetal in various ways. In the call we invited artists and researchers with an experience of working with plants and vegetation in different ways to contribute to this issue with expositions or articles, accounts of work in progress, and artistic experiments.
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  15. Slowness and Silence, Inertia and Tranquility The themes of this issue discuss the methodical, conceptual and practical connections of artistic research to slowness and silence, inertia and tranquility. What kinds of dimensions can silence or slowness open up and catalyse in artistic research? What might silence challenge, and what slowness? Depending on the perspective, slowness can either be worth pursuing or it can clearly refer to "retardation" or a lack (e.g. bureaucracy).
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  14. Ecologies of Practice This issue of RUUKKU has its starting point in the Research Pavilion #3 project that brought together more than fifty artist-researchers from twenty countries over a period of twenty months. The project started with an open call for "Research Cells" in April 2018 and evolved through a series of Research Cell Assemblies organised in Helsinki to an intensive period of activity in the context of the Venice Biennale.
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  13. Sonic Art, Sonic Practice, and Sonic Thought: Artistic Research and Music Sound is omnipresent, and we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound every day. Sound studies have developed mainly in the disciplines of acoustics and music. The former defines sound as mechanical waves while the latter considers it as discrete sounds organised in time. Artistic Research offers us opportunities to study sound from a different perspective. How do we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound as artistic practitioners? What constitutes such knowledge production, and how does this search for knowledge relate to the other modes of knowledge and experience often associated with ‘music'?
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  12. Peripheries RUUKKU #12 considers the conceptual, methodical, concrete and practical peripheries in the arts. This thematic issue ponders questions concerning what kinds of roles margins, peripheries or fringes have in the arts and artistic research? Can artistic research itself be conceived as a peripheral zone on the edge of the rationalistic scientific world?
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  11. How to do Things with Performance Welcome to this 11th issue of Ruukku - studies in artistic research devoted to performance and performance as research, and the question how to do things with performance. Not only what should be done, but how it should be done is today a question as relevant as ever. And some argue we should actually do less, and think a bit more, for example how we do what we do. In the research project How to do things with performance, we have been asking what can be or could be done with performance and how.
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  10. Catalyses Since its very beginning artistic research has openly or unconsciously deemed as its reason for existence the task of finding new ways of doing things; namely new ways of researching this world and new ways of understanding artistic practice. For many, artistic research could be defined as the amalgam of 'research' and 'artistic practice' reinventing and reconfiguring themselves in each other's shadow.
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  9. Practicing New Materialisms in the Arts This issue dedicates itself to the intersections of new materialist theory and artistic or practice-inspired research through a sustained conceptual focus on intra-action and via a wide variety of previously not presented projects. The distinctive main focus of the issue is the intra-active implementation of the notion of intra-action itself. Instead of taking this concept as a theoretical given, the issue's contributions aim to work with, enact, test, expand, and modify it within diverse intra-active settings comprised of highly varied artistic processes, research questions, disciplinary fields of action, and analytical and political concerns.
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  8. Conditions of Sharing RUUKKU – Studies in Artistic Research issue 8 has been collated under the theme of Conditions of Sharing to supplement the Please Specify! conference organized by Uniarts Helsinki together with the Society for Artistic Research in April 2017. The issue explores new perspectives on conditions of sharing research in the artistic field and thus offers a peer-reviewed platform related to the conference theme.
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  7. Practicing and the Practice of Art Each art genre has its own praxis. The way people practice a specific genre of art tells something essential about the genre and about the artists themselves. A performance, an exhibition, or an artwork is a kind of outcome, but with this RUUKKU issue, we peer inside the making of art, where nothing is yet finished and where the direction is not yet settled. Or is there a specific direction in the first place?
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  6. Change in Artistic Research The present issue, titled Change and Artistic Research, shows how artistic research and the ways in which art is made can contribute to not only societal debate but also to methodologies in other disciplines. Indeed, this focus has prompted artist-researchers to take bold steps forward in the worlds of content and form. In the process, they have borrowed and augmented techniques, not only going beyond the conventional boundaries of research but also forging into new areas of modern art, such as media art blogs and the occupation of urban space.
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  5. Research Gestures The expositions of this issue provide diverse – and in no way definitive – approaches to the role of gestures in artistic research. Ultimately the gesture that they perhaps perform the best is one of opening doors to terrain where methodological, discursive and epistemic stakes still run wild.
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  4. Process in Artistic Research Processes can be examined in relation to a starting point or a destination. Here we might as well begin from the call to this fourth issue of Ruukku. In the call we noted that articulating and opening up artistic processes has been considered one of the main aims of artistic research. Since the 1960s "process" has been one of the magic words of contemporary art, with works of art that transform and evolve through time.
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  3. Materiality in Artistic Research II Like any empty vessel, RUUKKU is potentially useful for storing a variety of materials, whether solid or in a state of flow. Are we now beginning to see the real uses of this hollow container or are we still merely testing how much it can hold before cracking?
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  2. Materiality in Artistic Research The theme of the second issue of RUUKKU came from expositions proposed for the first issue, many of which were connected to the idea of materiality. The ideas were presented both at a conceptual level and as explorations of the characteristics and artistic expression of specific materials. In this issue, we approach materiality as a loose term that encompasses different approaches to art, research, materiality and their intersections.
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  1. Experience and Experimentality in Artistic Research The theme of the first issue of RUUKKU "Experience and experimentality in artistic research" involves questions which relate to both art and research. If the concept of experience refers to past time, experimentality opens up to future. However, it is worth noticing that still during the Middle Ages, experimentum and experientia, experiment and experience, were used more or less synonymously and experiments were not arranged in order to gain new information in a systematic way, unlike in later years.

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  Re-enactment as Research, A monologue (2025) author(s): Clare Bottomley published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In this half paper, half soliloquy, I aim to propose re-enactment as a research method. Through textual analysis and situated reflections, I will explore the potential of re-enactments in performative returning to destabilize and reconfigure canonical understandings of the past, and consider any implications this understanding of re-enactment can have within research approaches
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  CHARMS — re-imagining the body in motion: the embodied armoured flesh and the biomechanics research lab (2025) author(s): MARIANA Barrote published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In this study I elaborate on how Charms unfolds as a plastic experimentation rooted in an initial vision of the body. It is grounded in a reimagined body image, constructed from other imagined bodies, such as the anatomical flayed figure and protective devices. This study explores the notion of the body turned upside down —both literally and conceptually — reconfigured through an armor-like structure in which flesh paradoxically assumes the role of an external layer. The resulting image is of a body that is both armored and exposed, charged with contradictions that disrupt binary oppositions such as inside/outside, alive/dead, human/animal, and powerful/fragile. This hyperbolic Charms, constructed from two distinct costumes, is offered for visual contemplation, recurring within contemporary visual culture as a manifestation of the scientific body still subjected by imagination and visceral sensation. The work, a multichannel video installation, also investigates the body’s capacity to generate imaginaries through movement, employing measurement tools from the biomechanics research laboratory to visualize this dynamic relationship.
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  Betwixt and Between (2025) author(s): Max Spielmann, Daniel Hug, Catherine Walthard, Andrea Iten published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we, in our role as lecturers, conducted hybrid workshops with design and art students from ten partner institutions on five continents. Our goal was to explore soundscapes from different viewpoints, and we were deeply impressed by the outcome. The recordings and their accompanying images and conversations dissolved geographical borders along with social, cultural, and structural differences. Following Hartmut Rosa, we understand this atmosphere of connection produced between the participants and the soundscapes themselves to be a resonance space, which only became explicit to us after some time had passed. In this article, we re-interpret this space through personal recollections and theoretical positions, and claim that such a collaboration holds pedagogical and artistic implications for future teaching and creative practice. These include not only the impact upon technology in the classroom, temporal perception, inter-relationality, and care practices, but also the artistic benefits of opening up spaces of resonance as a means of engaging with the challenge of intercultural communication and witnessing in our global world.
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  Approcreations - Weight of an Absent Ancestry (2025) author(s): Maarika Autio published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In the globalising world, our cultural influences have become more diversified than ever. At the same time, the code of good conduct on honouring intercultural sources of inspiration is still being written in the collective consciences of artists and audiences alike. The current mindset is being explored in an artistic research project, of which the concert this article focuses on was a component. “Approcreations”, an experimental solo concert, was atypical in terms of the conventions of the instruments played. The recital trialled the public’s receptiveness by developing pioneering uses for a tradition-oozing instrument while casting thoughts into the perception of artistic identity in the crossfire of preconceptions, aftermaths of colonialism and cultural appropriation disputes. Would the public’s sentiments differ from the performer’s expectations? The author, having developed a time-tested perspective after decades of international touring as a non-African player of the Mande diatonic balafon, now zeroes in on the factors influencing how we interpret and feel about culturally complex art practices. Sociocultural and symbolic connotations of musical instruments are analysed in light of the affordance theory, and the instruments’ evolution from cultural assets into universal vehicles for human creativity is pondered upon. Video samples from the concert stage concretise words into sounds and colours. The outcome of this artistic component is then inquired based on both self-reflection and audience feedback. Finally, as the controversy around cultural appropriation vs. inspiration extends beyond music to encompass a broader range of performing arts, the conclusion seeks to identify tendencies in the findings that might benefit art practitioners in other genres as well.
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  Acts of Transfer: Documentation as Creative Reimagining. (2025) author(s): Katy Beinart, Lizzie Lloyd published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition presents parts of a practice-based artistic research project, Acts of Transfer, a collaboration between artist Katy Beinart and writer Lizzie Lloyd (2020–2021). The project consists of a series of ‘chapters’ which revisit artworks from the recent past that involved social engagement or public participation, documenting both the process and outcomes of our returns. Acts of Transfer was interested in what the afterlife of such artworks might be and how they might be meaningfully represented in the future. Each return or ‘chapter’ generates new artwork, while retaining some sense of the original. They include a range of outcomes: excerpts (screenshots, photographs, readings, instructions etc.) from the original artworks made by our participants, as well as our own documentation through photography, drawings, and notes taken during our returns, alongside passages of experimental writing and films. In presenting parts of this project in Acts of Transfer: Documentation as Creative Reimagining, we further explore how documentation might serve as a means to reenact and reimagine the artworks to which we returned. In each case, we consider how aesthetic, emotional, physical, psychological or conceptual transfer might signify to those involved and to future audiences. We expose the complicated relationships that underlie practices that rely on participation, and highlight how meaning develops beyond the immediate duration of such projects. What follows renders these complications tangible, leading to new artworks that are intentionally emergent and fragmented. We look to evoke the effervescent experience of participating, remembering and communicating experiences of social, relational and durational artwork, to hold fast to what is lost and what might be reimagined.
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  11 UNDERGROUND: Reenactment, Social Practice and Political Intervention (2025) author(s): Arturo Delgado Pereira published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition centres around the fieldwork and shooting process of my documentary feature film, 11 Underground (Chico Pereira, 2024). 11 Underground is a reenactment film project based on a mining strike that happened in Almadén in the summer of 1984, in which 11 miners locked themselves in at 650 meters underground to protest their precarious working and social conditions. After 11 days of enduring the dark and toxic underground galleries, the Almadén Mining Company finally accepted the miners’ claims and the miners came out of the dark hole, received as heroes by their neighbours. As a local filmmaker belonging to the first non-mining generation in over 2000 years, I thought of the premise of making a reenactment film in town: what if 11 people locked-in in the underground mine for 11 days now to pay homage to the 1984 strike? Out of this rather strange proposition there was a desire to create an event -partly social, partly artistic-, that could help to collectively reflect -or re-imagine- our present by reenacting a collective action from the past. On the one hand, 11 Underground can be presented as a loose reenactment that reproduces the form and duration of a past strike: 11 people confined inside a mine for 11 whole days. On the other hand, the speculative character of this what if scenario (what would happen if..), opens these 11 days to the unexpected, to new actions and directions that might emerge from the implementation of that speculative scenario into the town’s present reality. The intrinsic relation of reenactment with the past, together with the future-oriented nature of what if scenarios -as ways of engaging creatively with possibilities- are, in fact, representative and metaphorical of the current situation of Almadén, which tries to construct a future from the remains of the mining past, while deeply struggling with the negative consequences of the lack of structural plans after the end of mining. Overall, the way this artistic research approaches reenactment is by using the historical referent (i.e. the past mining strike) as a documentary scenario and performing it in the current socio-political conditions, opening the possibility to intervene in the present and collectively imagine possibilities for a better future.
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