Friday 20.11.2015

KuvA Research Days

During the last couple of decades, the questions of what artistic research is, what it could be, and how it should be named have been under a lot of discussion. KuvA Research Days will not continue these already somewhat repetitious discussions, instead it will illuminate, reflect on, and problematize the contexts in which artist-researchers work and think. The first KuvA Research Days focus on topics close to the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts Helsinki artist-researchers in a three-day symposium. Each day is an independent unit.

7.12. OBJECTS OF FEMINISM

Objects of feminism are the subject/object relations of contemporary capitalism, pieces of inorganic matter embedded in living tissue, bits of flesh, chunks of fleshed out knowledge. Through the specific and varied inquiries of the invited guests the event approaches feminism from a range of angles relating to its artistic, academic and political significance, taking it as both discourse and method. The day will contain presentations and a panel, followed by a film screening.

13:30 Introduction. Maija Timonen
13:45 Female Complaints and the question of Personal Equilibrium in Neuroleadership. Mona Mannevuo
14:30 Hannah Black: TBC
15:30 On Inorganic Hope. Vappu Jalonen
16:15 She Dead: on Gender, Death and the Death of Gender. Hannah Proctor
17:00 She's Singing: I can feel boxes break (performance). Cara Tolmie
17:45 Panel discussion with participants
18:30–20:00 screening: Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden 1983)

8.12. TAKING POSITIONS. AVANT-GARDE AND COMMON POLITICS

The seminar looks at the different ways the Leftist Avant-Garde acted and reacted in the changing political climates from the 1920s onward, and asks if there are the lessons to be learned in the present age.

10:00 Spectres of Formalism (Keynote). Dr. Margarita Tupitsyn
11:00 Informal Disagreement. Making of the Formalist Surrender. Jyrki Siukonen, Visiting Research Fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki
12:30 Asymptopic Futurity. The October Revolution and the Yugoslavian Avant-Garde. Dr. Sezgin Boynik
13:00 Future in the Past as the Imperfect Tense or What Can the Leftist Avant-Garde Give for Today's Artistic Practice? Ilya Orlov, Doctoral Student, Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki
13:30–14:00 Discussion and Closing Remarks

9.12. WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS

The symposium is a part of Henna-Riikka Halonen's doctorate Staging F(r)iction, Art as a strategy of world making. There is a tendency to stress the social readability over the visual in so many of the recent art projects, that this symposium is set out to resist this by putting very specific emphasis on both fictional, visual and ambiguous dimensions of the work. Staging F(r)iction therefore becomes, here, a sort of anthropological concept, a science-fictional strategy of world(s) making, creation of systems within systems, stories within stories.

10:00 Introduction: Throws of Dice. Henna-Riikka Halonen
11:00 Sound Fossils and Arche-Fossils: Towards a Mineral Ontology of Contemporary Art. Dr. Amelia Barikin
13:00 Conversation in Pieces. Jani Ruscica discusses his multidisciplinary work in progress.
14:00 The apartment and its proxy. Professor Harri Laakso
15:30–16:15 On Doubling, a Staged Encounter. Lena Seraphin with Henna-Riikka Halonen
16:15–17:00 Discussion