Research Catalogue

Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material. The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the mini-essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system. Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I use visual art and figurative examples as illustrations, adapting from methods, such as the example, used in analytic philosophy. I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive: "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued. Artworks and archival artistic material are offered for aesthetic contemplation; they don't possess any "magical" qualities, they don't cause any phenomena or events in the world. In this view, I ordered this exposition as a design proposal for two independent, yet interconnected exhibitions: one for the final artistic exhibition show; and one as a general overview for the artist's studio, set up as a stand alone, if parallel, exhibition.

Although it is virtually impossible to formalize what ‘best practice’ on the Research Catalogue might be, it harbours by now numerous examples of expositions that ‘work.’ In this session, I want to introduce a small set of diverse expositions from JAR as a way to highlight successful choices people have taken. With a short explanation of expositionality and virtual witnessing, I aim to support an understanding of the effect that those examples have as a way of describing how media-rich articulations can productively engage with both academic and artistic expectations.

"New ideas might be conceived and developed more rapidly in disciplines that are more abstract. The inductive methods of experimental innovators in painting makes their enterprise resemble the more empirical disciplines considered by psychologists, while the deductive approach of the conceptual innovators makes theirs resemble the more abstract disciplines." David W. Galenson, "The Life Cycles of Modern Artists", NBER Working Paper Series, 2003. Artists and architects have been at times captivated by visionary ideological viewpoints, which they used as inspiration and to make suggestions for applications with their artworks and designs. My use of the diagram and the image aims to convey the simple message that art strives for evolution; meaning to strengthen the mind, to research capabilities, to communicate a disinterested, though not necessarily apolitical, view of social changes, to overcome banality and offer an alternative way of looking at the world. For many artists, this motivation has traditionally often gone hand in hand with political goals and motivations. The decline of the commercial art market in the 1980s gave rise to artists working mainly, but not solely, with ephemeral installations, including the ubiquitous video art, performance, and the broader range of conceptual art. Painting remained as an established fine art practice, with a renewed interest to conceptualism. The portrait is of the artist, myself, at a young age, dated 1993, when I was a student at the NTUA. Betty Nigianni is my name known as (aka), which I also used as my artistic pseudonym.

Integrity of science would surely be challenged by possibilities of bias, errors, mistakes or misinterpretations. Science is charged with methods evaluating the relevance and significance of these — even when the first-person singular, which doesn’t sound objective, is in their research question of any scientific claim. With or without relevance and significance, I mash-up here a narrative with the scientific notes from Atatürk’s Nutuk / Discourse (1927) with respect to NATO.

During the early weeks of the Gezi Park Protests in the summer of 2013, the Turkish government banned gatherings in Taksim Square. One man, however, stood alone in front of the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM), one of the symptoms around the never-ending events and culture wars, with the police around, obviously "obeying" the ban on gatherings. He instantly went viral on the internet: The Standing Man (Duran Adam), reminiscent of an unknown 1950s Hollywood melodrama The Man Who Stood There, while others began to stand "alone" nearby, but not exactly in the legally described form of an assembly or public gathering. As such, only the man's name was mythified and not the other participants'.

Meet the Yunani is my mix-up audio-visual-inscriptive artwork for the Unani or Yunani systems of medicine that are deployed in medical fraud. I deploy cognitive philosophy, art and science in this webart for the real settings of scientific hoaxes, the illusions concealed through prescribed fictions, and represented as the real. A mix-up audio-visual-inscriptive artwork for the Yunani, often touted as a "traditional" and "holistic" approach to health and well-being. In truth, the various versions of deploying Unani in medicine is inothing more than a parascientific hoax perpetrated by those aiming to capitalize on the growing demand for "alternative" and “natural” remedies. Unani (یونانی) is simply a rebranding of the Perso-Arabic medical traditions, which in turn were heavily influenced by the teachings of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, who, while pioneering advances in the human anatomy and physiology, also promoted a flawed model of the human body and health based on the concept of the four humours - blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Unani practitioners of the Perso-Arabic medical traditional medicine, accompanied by Judeo-Hellenic adaptations represented with the neoplatonistic tree of life sefirot (סְפִירוֹת / σφαίρα), Greek humours or "doṣas" (दोष) from the Ayurvedic medicine claim to have inherited this ancient Greek wisdom. In truth they have merely taken these outdated and disproven theories, given them an exotic-sounding name, and presented them as traditional wisdom. Unani's diagnostic methods and treatment approaches, from bloodletting to the use of arcane herbal concoctions, lack scientific bases and were thoroughly debunked by modern medical research. The allure of this “ancient wisdom”, however, continues to draw those in need of alternative healthcare, without knowing that they are falling victim to a sophisticated marketing ploy masquerading as traditional medicine. The Unani's mystical trappings are nothing more than a pseudoscientific hoax rooted in long-refuted Greek four humour theory.