Research Catalogue

This is an exposition of the living archive of Tahto doctoral programme of artistic research

My doctoral research project is a speculative spatial construct, an alternative labyrinthic infrastructure that is flexibly built within and as a response to the artworks it houses. Existing in tension with the framework affecting it, the artworks and the texts leak out from the structure and are performed in and around the physical floorplan. This format renders the configuration of the research project visible and temporary, with the potential to be reformulated and adapted to future contexts. The labyrinthic structure allows the research to go off in different directions, enabling us to consider the multiple perspectives and modes of writing that constitute its story and the complex infrastructures that might support it. As a strategy for artistic, social and political engagement and a reaction to a contemporary condition in which our claim to the positions we occupy is increasingly simplified, my research project creates a space of thinking, imagination and resistance. By confusing the functionality of language, it aims to make visible the power dynamics and infrastructures shaping our world. The notion of power is two-fold, the research examines, on the one hand, the complexity of human interactions and positions concerning hegemonic power structures and on the other hand, the relationship between the visual and the verbal and experience and affect. A number of defining characteristics of our contemporary condition are matters of concern; the speed of the networked globalized economy, the control enacted by states and categorization and exclusion of culture. In artistic research (and the networked world as a whole) there is often a tendency to adopt an overarching view which seeks to unify under a single concept a multiplicity of events. However, here the strategy is to do away with the reductive way of doing theory and instead, to dismantle hierarchical relationships between categories. My research project also contributes to the genealogies of participatory practices and to bridge the gap between language and visual art, I am tapping into similarities and differences of a kind of a virtual staging offered by literature, visual art and digital technologies. I draw from literary strategies of speculative fiction, in particular, those of the French Nouveau Roman. By using chance, paradox (aporia) and uncertainty as guiding principles and as revelatory tools this research endeavours to deconstruct and divert perception and language, emphasizing absurdity and creating sense rather than meaning. More particularly, the research constantly explores its own limits and reflects its involvement with the social and political structures it is addressing to create or anticipate new modes of existence. This project requires the reader/viewer's active participation, leaving holes or unknowns in the narrative structure that moves through entangled nodes of connections and different temporalities to suggest alternative and expansive forms of viewing and making art and research. The research uses my installation/performance Eden The Pow(d)er of Fear (2014) as a frame structure, both as a physical blueprint of a labyrinth and as a story. This approach is not intended as a retrospective view towards the work but proposes instead a speculative re-writing and re-scripting of a work that offers new 'portals' to other works and worlds, through other narrative and theoretical threads opening up new perspectives, concerns, times and spaces. The other works embedded in the structure are the moving image works Moderate Manipulations (2012) and Placeholder (2017).

In this Lektio-series RUUKKU publishes selected introductory talks given by the doctoral candidates in the public examination of their doctoral thesis in artistic research.