RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
About this portal
RUUKKU is a multidisciplinary, multilingual, peer-reviewed journal on artistic research launched in 2013. It is based on the Research Catalogue (RC), an international artistic research platform and database that enables multimedia publication. The primary languages of publication are Finnish, Swedish and English.
RUUKKU publishes thematic issues. See the website for the current call and further information.
6.11.2023 RUUKKU webpage is experiencing technical difficulties, therefore the issues and editorials may be currently unavailable. You may use the Research Catalogue search functions and the issue links below to browse publications within RUUKKU.
Ruukkucontact person(s):
Tero Heikkinen url:
http://ruukku-journal.fi/en
Recent Issues
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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.
Recent Activities
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CRITICAL PLAYGROUND AS PLAY-CE UTOPIA. (MANIFESTO FOR A DIFFERENCE IN ITSELF.)
(2023)
author(s): Anartist
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
City of Panic is an urban intervention, which has been realized by The Anartist (Gian Luigi Biagini and John Dunn). It happened in 2019 in the central train-station square of Helsinki. The installation-performance is a "caged mini-golf", which catches and elicits many disruptive resonances. The intervention challenges, contests and makes visible the "iron cage of rationality" that organizes the capitalist urban space through an ordoliberal trans-institutional consensus that does not leave space for the expression of Difference. The intervention puts in "play-ce" a critical and mystic playground of Difference in Itself that breaks the cage of assimilation to a functional hierarchical identity. The article describes this complex experience of rupture and cata-comic rapture by a phenomenology of the process in becoming. A phenomenology and an ethnography of difference, with theory references "in flight", that cannot be completely grasped by a homogenous and unified signifier, narrative, representation. Even the style of the graphic tries to evoke this "virtual heterogeneity of intertwined planes and becomings" that are sutured and re-composed by creative writing.
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Three gardens as places of performative resistance and resilience
(2023)
author(s): Pekka Ilmari Niskanen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This research paper focuses on three different gardens located far away from one another. The common nominator of these gardens is to bring the community together for sharing vegetables, herbs, and discussions. Two of them are united by a new innovation, combination of sand and water in lieu of traditional soil. These are the Sahrawi sandoponic garden in the refugee camps in southwestern Algeria and a Helsinki Sandoponic Garden in Helsinki Biennial 2023. The Helsinki Sandoponic Garden is a project by an artistic research group called PHOSfate formed by Pekka Niskanen and Mohamed Sleiman Labat in 2018. Our PHOSfate garden emphasizes the injustices the Sahrawi population and the Baltic Sea have faced. Becoming a refugee is the utmost injustice that can happen to an individual. Eutrophication is causing a trauma for the Baltic Sea and for the inhabitants living on its shores. Sahrawis are refugees because of phosphate mining, and phosphate fertilizers are the reason for the eutrophication in the Baltic Sea. Coping with the trauma and healing from it is an aspect shared by the community garden in Paris and the Helsinki PHOSfate Garden. The community garden of Jardin Truillot in Paris was created after the Bataclan terrorist attack 2015 to help those living near the theater to heal from trauma. When focusing on the importance of gardens, I will engage with some of the discourses around environmental justice and ecological justice. In my text, I will show that the recognition of injustice is the central activism in these three gardens and in my garden practices.
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The Unbody of Construction and the Memory of Placeness
(2023)
author(s): Marija Griniuk
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The study explores the connectedness of the narrative of the artwork to the sociopolitical contexts of the public space in change. Through the reflexive artistic research within the project “Construction” I aim to discuss how Memory is bound to the Body. I investigate how Constructs of the public space embody the Memory and how demolishing of those constructs impact the narrative of the presence within absence.
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Terrania
(2023)
author(s): Nat Grant, Nicky Stott
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Terrania is a gothic eco-drama podcast project exploring gender-queer and disability themes in the face of climate catastrophe. This project draws on contemporary environmental realities to explore how (dis)abled, genderqueer bodies might be reimagined in dystopian and utopian futurity narratives.
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Stitching for Material Sensitivity: From Traditional to Activist Embroidery
(2023)
author(s): Fabiola Hernandez Cervantes, Maria Huhmarniemi
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Cochineal is an insect that has been used for textile dyeing since pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico. This exposition discusses the use of the cochineal insect as a natural dye for wool and the bridge between ancient indigenous knowledge and contemporary artistic research. A transatlantic connection is created between the Mexican plateau and the Arctic region, merging traditional knowledge, contemporary art, crafting and conceptualisation through an artistic embroidery initiative involving researchers, craft artists and human rights activists living in the province of Lapland in Finland. Documentary photos of artistic practice and research diaries enhance discussion on sustainability, tradition, craftivism, decolonisation and indigenous knowledge. This exposition embraces collaborative craftivism through a group initiative called Embroidered Stances, discussions about material interconnectedness in a web-of-life conceptual structure that includes sheep wool, cactus, cochineal and ancestral knowledge. The endorsement of material sensitivity is narrated into embroideries by the first author Cervantes and discussed, acknowledging complexities within issues of cultural and ecological sustainability.
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Life Between Art and Blood
(2023)
author(s): Heidi Pietarinen, Amna Qureshi
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Artist-researchers Heidi Pietarinen and Amna Qureshi from the University of Lapland have conducted in-depth work on the innovative BioARTech laboratory environment and utilisation of available resources for a bioart project called Life Between Art and (Reindeer) Blood. The aim and focus of the project were to utilise reindeer blood as a reindeer herding by-material instead of treating it as waste material. Both artist-researchers were curious to see how nature as a living design medium becomes perceptible to humans. In this study, a living design medium refers to material production that incorporates simple living organisms such as reindeer blood, material-driven design and co-designing, with an entity having its own agency. Bioart can be used to develop innovative design and art practice to work with nature (biology) and the non-human, such as live tissues (i.e. materials engineered by nature itself), microbes or living organisms (birds, insects, trees and blood), to bring about new design solutions and life processes. Through the arts-based research (ABR) approach, this ground-breaking research aims to develop activities that integrate environmental biotechnology, bioart, surface pattern design, and science.