KuvA research days

The Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts (KuvA) Research Days 2022 engages with a multiplicity of artistic research contexts through a series of situations that suggest kaleidoscopic relations with each other. We work with entanglements and contrasts between exhibition and symposium, artistic process and teaching situation, city spaces of Helsinki and Johannesburg as well as the relations between critical thinking and play. Welcome to think together!

The program on December 12–13, 2022 will be streamed on the Uniarts Helsinki YouTube channel. Time zone: UTC +2. For full program, please visit here.

Monday, December 12, 2022: Artistic research and city space I
The two first day’s focus on artistic research, urban space, and spatial practices. On Monday we focus on the potentials and invisible motives of exceptional city spaces through artistic research, architecture, spatiality of demonstration, legal theory, surrealism, and cultural geography. The keynote addresses the life-promoting powers of microbes as catalysts for all forms of sociable life, and discusses new communications platforms, evaluation systems and rituals of living together in our cities, so that we may become ecological collaborators, co-creators, and much better neighbors. The Wits University guests present their current artistic research practices through rubbling materialities and site-related museum sensibilities.

9am–1pm: Spaces of Exception, Exceptional Spaces—views in parataxis with City as Space of Rules and Dreaming and guests
Maiju Loukola, Anna Jensen, Aino Hirvola, Erna Bodström, Marloeke Van Der Vlugt, Paul Tiensuu, Tanja Tiekso, Tuomo Alhojärvi.
2–3pm: Keynote intervention—Rachel Armstrong, Cultures of Life.
3–3:45pm: Exhibition visit with presentation “Drone Zone”—artistic research at work in the exhibition “Daily Disasters”, part of JKFR’s PhD project “Autonomous Animals”. 
4–6pm: Sites, Materialities, Sensitivies—talks by guests from the Wits University (Johannesburg) Brigitta Stone-Johnson and Zen Marie.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022: Artistic research and city space II
On Tuesday we continue with artistic research and city space with perspectives highlighting the South African context, with presentations of artistic works touching the scars, holes, and memory traces, as well as urban affective interdependencies through multisensorial artistic research with sound in urban space. We hear about and discuss practices and ecologies highlighting contingency and non-reductivity in artistic and aesthetic research practices, and community and climate specific research on cross-generational gardening practice and phosphate traveling from Sahara to the Baltic Sea. 

9am–12pm: Ecologies, Practices—Stefan Winter, Alex Arteaga, Pekka Niskanen and Mohamed Sleiman Labat.
2–3pm: Keynote intervention—Julia Chryssostalis.
2:30–7pm: Artistic Research South Africa—Urban Space as a Palimpsest + Sound City Space, Stefan Winter, Christo Doherty, Tanja Sakota, Mocke J van Veuren, Prince Massingham, Neo Monyamane, PlayGroup (Jill Richards, BJ Engelbrecht, Jurgen Meekel), Uygur Vural, François Sarhan, Emeka Ogboh (in conversation with Stefan Winter, curator of the session).
7–7:15pm: Artistic Research and City Space Aftermath—closing discussion with Stefan Winter.

Wednesday, December 14, 2022: Applied non-didactics
The presentations and experiments will circle around the topic of artist as teacher, teaching at art schools and certain pedagogies that come with this or do not. We will look into questions of how artists can bring in their own artistic work into the teaching process as for how to bridge the gap from theoretical to practice led conversations.

Gert Biesta, Grant White, Frank Brümmel, Hanna Vahvaselkä, Sanna Vuolteenaho, Tapani Heikinheimo and Henna Laininen, Magnus Quaife.

It´s not goodbye it´s see you later: feast with book launches
At 5:30–8 welcome to hear about new books published by the Academy of Fine Art at Uniarts Helsinki. 

Exhibitions: Daily Disasters December 12–22, 2022 / Mia Seppälä, Salla Myllylä and Nanni Vapaavuori: INTERIM December 16–12, 2022. Contact: kuva.researchdays.info [​at​] uniarts.fi.