Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  Blocking as Emergence: Painting at the Threshold Between Representation and Abstraction (2025) author(s): Richard Mills published in: Research Catalogue
  This exposition investigates how visual meaning emerges at the threshold between abstraction and representation through a painting process based on “blocking”—the placement of large tonal regions before any detailed painting occurs. Each painting begins with coarse structural square blocks that are then repeatedly fractured or clarified. Rather than illustrating a subject, the method becomes a perceptual experiment: recognition arises as the work shifts between coherence and ambiguity. Alongside the paintings, a set of computationally blocked images and time-based sequences are produced using Colab. These digital transformations mirror the studio process by moving between coarse simplification and increasing visual differentiation. Taken together, the analogue and digital works offer a parallel investigation of how minimal structure can trigger figural recognition, and how ambiguity can be deliberately sustained. The exposition positions “blocking” as both a practical method and a conceptual tool for understanding tipping points between seeing and not-seeing in contemporary painting.
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  FACE NO DIAL OF A CLOCK. Investigating asynchronous experiences of present times by means of art (2025) author(s): Laura von Niederhäusern published in: Research Catalogue
  The subjective experience of time pressure in today’s efficiency- and performance-oriented society is fuelled by a paradox: acceleration is omnipresent due to economic and technological demands, while at the same time complexity and self-responsibility require more time for decisions. This exposition examines individual and institutional ways of dealing with discrepant time demands. Where and how do different age groups experience divergent time regimes that occur simultaneously? Which techniques do individuals and institutions use or invent to synchronize different time perceptions, rhythms, and activities? How can artistic research create asynchronicity and make it experienceable through filmic means? And, finally, to what extent can filmic thinking produce ways of knowing that convey (as yet) unverbalized perceptions of time? Methodologically, this research combines analytical and artistic approaches in an essayistic procedure comprising cinematic practice and writing. On the one hand, it explores different aspects of divergent perceptions of time in a series of case studies under the leitmotif of “asynchronous determinations of time.” Situated in both immaterial and care work, in which bodily and affective temporalities are highly important, these empirical investigations consider the role of lifetime (age, biography, memory) and temporal modes (tempos; imperatives, indicatives, subjunctives). On the other hand, this study develops specific artistic procedures for focusing perception by means of narration, fragmentation, montage, visual and linguistic interventions, extractions and interweavings. Since simultaneous non-simultaneities (tend to) overwhelm subjective experience, the procedures adopted in this research contribute to new forms of filmic thinking and images of thought. They should be understood as an incentive to empathize with different understandings of time.
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  Erased Museums – Destroyed Collections as Conceptual Inheritance (2025) author(s): Dorian Vale published in: Research Catalogue
  This essay proposes the “Erased Museum” as both a critical framework and an institutional ethics: a museum that recognizes loss as its primary collection and disappearance as a mode of curation. Drawing from Absential Aesthetics, it argues that destruction—by fire, flood, war, neglect, theft, or obsolescence—does not terminate cultural meaning but reorganizes it into a second, invisible archive composed of voids, residues, and public conscience. Through case studies and touchstones including the Library of Alexandria, Brazil’s National Museum (2018), the Mosul Museum (2015), and architectural and curatorial practices that preserve wounds rather than conceal them (e.g., post-damage restorations and void-centered memorial architectures), the essay reframes conservation as a dialogue with entropy rather than a fantasy of permanence. It also traces contemporary artistic strategies that curate absence directly—fabricated archives, missing inventories, empty frames, restitution bureaucracies—showing how loss can become documentation rather than mere lament. The work concludes by extending the ethics of disappearance to the digital domain, where decay occurs without smoke, and by proposing “transparent loss protocols” as a future-facing curatorial responsibility.
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  The zoo: A mise-en-scène (2025) author(s): Jocelyn Michel Janon published in: Research Catalogue
  The zoo is not a neutral site of animal display but a meticulously curated mise en scène where scenography dictates perception. This exposition reframes the zoological garden as a dispositif of control, foregrounding fabricated rock formations, artificial lighting, and concealed barriers as theatrical devices. Through square format photographic series that exclude animals, the work exposes the zoo’s fragmented geographies as staged spectacles designed for human imagination rather than ecological integrity. The project interrogates authorship, agency, and representation, inviting viewers to reconsider the zoo as a cultural theatre of estrangement and illusion.
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• The role multichannel Sound Art plays in the Architecture of Theatre and Audience Engagement (2025) author(s): Joshua Dyson published in: Research Catalogue
  This Exposition is an extension of the MRes Thesis "The role multichannel Sound Art plays in the Architecture of Theatre and Audience Engagement.” This nonlinear spread of textual, aural, and visual information will take you through a year of Practice as Research–exploring the field of Sound Art within Cork City–culminating in a multichannel audio installation in Cork Opera House on Culture Night 2025
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  Hidden Stone (2025) author(s): Marte Johnslien published in: Research Catalogue
  The exhibition is deeply rooted in local history—the artist group explores the story of the white pigment titanium dioxide's industrial origin in Sandbekk, and how this world sensation from 1910 has influenced our world today. Titanium dioxide white pigment is a global color phenomenon. Ilmenite is transported from Titania to its sister company Kronos Titan in Fredrikstad, where it is refined into titanium dioxide. From there, the pigment circulates seemingly invisibly in a global network of systems. It is used in paint, plastics, paper, ink, cosmetics, medicine, sunscreen, and millions of products we use daily. This history is the starting point for the development project TiO2: The Materiality of White. Over the past two years, the artist group has visited Titania's mines and deposits, gathering materials from the local history. Just as geologists examined the areas in Sokndal over 150 years ago in search of valuable minerals, the group has wandered through the landscape, picking stones and collecting sand, clay, and rust-colored earth. These findings have been brought back to the ceramic laboratory at KhiO, where they have been processed through ceramic methods.
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