How to Get Rid of Homophobia and Sexism in Your Country
(2024)
author(s): Darja Popolitova
published in: Research Catalogue
How to Get Rid of Homophobia and Sexism in Your Country is a performative video piece featuring the Drag Face Filter, created for the exhibition Magical Hotspot at Vent Space Gallery in 2020. The work explores pseudomagic through digital augmentation, performative rituals, and speculative identity transformations. In the video, the jewellery witch Seraphita applies a custom augmented reality (AR) face filter to official portraits of conservative politicians, digitally queering their faces with exaggerated drag features such as bold makeup and extravagant eyebrows. This act symbolises a ritual of resistance, challenging societal norms and confronting political authority through speculative digital adornment.
The piece employs Haptic Visuality, blending tactile digital manipulation with performative gestures. The act of scrolling and selecting filters with long, manicured fingernails becomes an embodied ritual, making the interface physically felt through close-up shots and dynamic interactions with the cracked phone screen. This multisensory approach transforms the Drag Face Filter into a charged pseudomagical artefact, blurring the boundaries between political critique, performance art, and speculative jewellery.
Idea and performance: Darja Popolitova
Video effects: Ando Naulainen
Sound: Andres Nõlvak
© Darja Popolitova
How to Get Rid of Loneliness
(2024)
author(s): Jewellery witch Seraphita
published in: Research Catalogue
"How to Get Rid of Loneliness" refers to a video artwork by Darja Popolitova featured in the Magical Hotspot exhibition at Vent Space Gallery in 2020. In the video, the jewellery witch Seraphita performs a ritual using the Seastone Necklace, a natural stone with a hole worn as a pendant. She taps its surface with her long nails, whispering affirmations as if typing messages on a phone screen. The necklace becomes a ritualistic tool for dispelling loneliness, symbolising a bridge between isolation and connection.
How to Integrate Yourself into Society
(2024)
author(s): Jewellery witch Seraphita
published in: Research Catalogue
"How to Integrate Yourself into Society" is a performative video piece featuring the Ethnic Brooch, created for the exhibition Magical Hotspot at Vent Space Gallery in 2020. The work explores pseudomagic through symbolic ritual and material interaction. In the video, the character Seraphita pricks her finger with the brooch’s needle, allowing blood to drip onto a cracked phone screen. This act symbolises a ritualistic attempt at integration, merging personal identity with digital and societal representations.
The piece employs haptic-visuality, emphasising the tactile experience of the brooch’s needle piercing the skin, creating a visceral connection for the viewer. Close-up shots and textural details enhance the sensory impact, making the act of penetration both symbolically and physically felt. This multisensory approach intensifies the emotional resonance of the ritual, transforming the brooch into a charged object within a speculative, magical context.
testing Y1 RC function
(2024)
author(s): Hoai Tran
published in: Research Catalogue
This is a playground to explore RC function. I would like to use Abstract as a into/ summary for this expo.
Heaven on Earth: Revelation of the 10th Avatar
(2024)
author(s): Bradly Couch
published in: Research Catalogue
"Heaven on Earth: Revelation of the 10th Avatar" makes connections between ancient myths and Earth's topography that correspond to Hinduism's ten incarnations of Vishnu, resulting in visual evidence of the prophesied return of Kalki to usher in the Golden Age of Satya Yuga.
Picturing Clouds of Unknowing: Photography, Lostness, and Cognitive Decline
(2024)
author(s): Lucy Carolan
published in: Research Catalogue
The central premise of this doctoral project is that the progressive cognitive ambiguity that is dementia can be creatively apprehended by way of lostness. As defined by Rebecca Solnit, ‘lost’ holds “...two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.” The initial hypothesis of this research was that in certain neurodegenerative conditions the familiar and unfamiliar can confoundingly combine, and that it’s through the lens of this particular combination that some comprehension of dementia as lived experience may be approached. The disorienting misperceptions most commonly encountered in cognitive decline are visual in nature. Given, then, that dementia reveals the importance of vision to perception, how may the photographic, with lostness as optic, be used to illuminate cognitive decline? In what ways can creatively visualising aspects of neurodegeneration in dementia inform understandings of its existential ambiguities?
