Research Catalogue

"Unlike unrealized architectural projects, which are frequently exhibited and circulated, unrealized artworks tend to remain unnoticed or little known. But perhaps there is another form of artistic agency in the partial expression, the incomplete idea, the projection of a mere intention? Agency of Unrealized Projects (AUP) seeks to document and display these works, in this way charting the terrain of a contingent future." From AUP-eflux Archive In painting, the artist can also be a model for the artwork. In performance art, artist and model come together for the performance. The exposition explores the role of figuration in contemporary art. Some of the material was selected for my participation, with my artistic pseudonym, Betty Nigianni, in conceptual artist's Janine Antoni workshop, "Loving Care", Performance Matters: Performing Idea, Toynbee Studios, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2010 With essay about Marina Abramovic's work, published at eflux/Art and Education papers, 2012; originally presented as a conference paper at the Yale Centre for British Art, 2010, slides including the artist's writings. Fragments of the research for the installation project, developed in the studio and through my participation in urban research workshops, have been archived at AUP-eflux Archive.

Initiated in 2020, Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

A cross disciplinary artistic research project that departs from, and investigates several encounters and alignments between Contemporary Art and Archaeology. Its primary goal is to create a broad selection of autonomous and collaborative artistic, poetic and scientific expressions and responses to Prehistoric Art and its contemporary images. It will seek to stimulate a deeper understanding of contemporary and prehistoric artistic expression and the contemporary and prehistoric human condition. The participating artists and archaeologists will create autonomous projects, but also interact with each other in workshops, seminars and collaborative artistic projects. The secondary goal of Matter, Gesture and Soul is to establish an international cross disciplinary research network at the University of Bergen and strengthen the expertise in cross disciplinary artistic and scientific work with artistic research as the driving force. The project is financed by DIKU and UiB and supported by Global Challenges (UiB)

The project began as a commitment to 30/30, an initiative offered by Artquest, where subscribing artists were required to upload a new artwork to a 30/30 dedicated platform on a daily basis though the month of February and into March, 2025. The response formatted as this exposition is variations of text, image, and video animation, archived as still-image iterations mostly sized at 21 x 29.5cm and hyperlinked videos of up to two-minutes’ running time. The works’ content wavers between anecdotal and academic/theoretical. (Artquest issued non-obligatory collective prompts at the start of each day, which is in this case sometimes either used.) Any texts from each iteration have been copied to a companion page and corrected, rephrased or explained. The iterations play with oscillation between text and image, where the look of text under these circumstances becomes more noticeable while retaining much of its readability. Theoretical reading during the project had been Isabelle Stengers's book on the philosopher A. N. Whitehead, which is variously referenced in the iterations. At the same time, the author’s recent interest in a question of adaptability of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's Logical Square to the question of the artistic research process is referenced. Given that the theories of these two authors do not in any obvious sense relate, their conflation in a sense holds their function in the iterations open to question, analogous to how one reflects on interests in and through one's visual practice. While the 30/30 structure required daily decision-making and action, any one iteration tended to be of consequence to the next, which afforded continuity of duration to the project.

Cognitive Architecture est un détour cognitif-psychanalytique autour des théories, hypothèses et des revendications cognitives d’économie mondiale, des idéologies, et des leurs conventions ou réfutations. Bien qu’il soit davantage rencontré dans les sciences humaines, la mode de structuration des événements, des happenings, est également un concept significatif dans les sciences cognitives. Les sciences cognitives conçoivent les fictions des realite faire des données du sens commun et postulats qui décident des problèmes dans leur conditionnement même. Sans doute apparaît-il d’emblée que les cadres dans lesquels les sciences humaines classent les phénomènes en sensations, perceptions, images, croyances, fonctions et travaillés logiques, jugements, etc., sont empruntés comme tels au travail de siècles de philosophie. Loin d’avoir été forgés pour une conception objective de la réalité humaine, ces cadres ne sont que les produits de la destruction abstraite où se tracent les vicissitudes d’un effort spécifique, qui pousse l’homme à chercher la confiance, la vérité, la conscience de soi et l’univers. Une confiance qui est transcendante dans sa position, et qui le reste donc dans la forme, même lorsque le philosophe en nie l'existence. Les tendances à une confiance absolue dans les explications naturalistes des phénomènes culturellement conditionnés exigent une un encadrer l'appropriation cognitive des concepts scientifiques d’économie mondiale. Dans les chapitres consécutives, ce livre critiques d'appropriations des concepts darwinienne dans les discours libérale détourne le darwinisme scientifique dans l’idée de s’appropriation moins avec ou aux technologies avancées que de les adapter aux valeurs idéologiques libérales croissantes qui elles- mêmes sont devenues plus autoritaires dans leurs règles non écrites d’entrepreneuriat, d’auto-évaluation et de développement individuel, particulièrement l’esprit humaine.

Turkish Female director Tomris Giritlioğlu was one of the first in Turkish cinema to touch upon the long-forgotten and pathological consequences of the Turkification efforts in Turkey since forever. In Salkım Hanımın Taneleri / Mrs. Salkım's Diamonds, she (re)creates the recent and pessimistic past of the one-party Turkey of 1943 Wealth Tax, trying to overthrow the official discourse of the chaotic institutionalization and nationalization times in Turkey. In Güz Sancısı / Pains of Autumn (2009), she formed a part of the identity carnival of 6-7 September 1955 Events/Pogrom. In these two films, Tomris Giritlioğlu offers a series of interesting contexts to examine the Turkish government’s national stance and the identity formation in two decades from the 1943 Wealth Tax and to the 6-7 September 1955 Events/Pogrom.