Research Catalogue

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)

A work-in-progress artistic research project. Initiated by Hanns Holger Rutz and Nayarí Castillo in autumn 2021, it develops into multiple intermedia objects that involve collaboration between different artists, objects that engage in sensorial exchange among themselves and with humans. This exposition is very much in flux, trying to capture the meanderings of the process.

The photographic image has always historizised; an artifact of the past, photographic moment. But just as it is conditioned by the temporal and material context of its making, its essence – if there is one – is conditioned by how we encounter the image. This encounter involves both the situation in which the image is seen and our individual selves in relation to it – our histories, beliefs, and expectations. To further reflect on this unstable, temporal quality of the photograph, we explore the meaning of looking at the future by looking at photographs. Artistically and philosophically a contradiction in terms, it is still a practice we experience: How to look ahead with something temporally bound to the past. To do this, we reflect on ‘Regarding the Pain of the Future’ by the first author and develop and discuss an artistic practice emphasising a second, photographic moment.

Welcome to Galaxy Revolution, the space station of Historical Spiritual Vibrations space agency. At the station you can access training sessions and game instructions we use to imagine training and healing practices for the new space race. You can experience glimpses of our space journeys and learn more of the history of the tools and knowledge we bring with us on our missions. Dock at our space station and (mis)use our methods to reshape and imagine the past, present, and future in your own way. The exposition gathers documentation of Whyte&Zettergren's live actions and ritual practices at locations in Iceland where the Apollo 11 astronauts trained for their journey to the Moon. It also includes infrared imagery, a technology used in space visualization to capture light waves invisible to the human eye, recorded during the duo’s space journeys. The duo explores space both as a site where future colonial projects are planned and as a fictional realm for imagining alternative worlds. In their work, Zettergren's speculative technofeminism and Whyte's ritual dubfuturism intersect. Practices that reshape futures in various ways; through an intersectional feminist and technocritical lens, and through the experimental remixing of history, ritual, and rhythm in dub culture. When the present feels dystopian, dreams of life in space become a way to envision change, a transformation of the world through imagination, whose echoes vibrate into the future.

”Fata Morgana. An Essay Journey” explores the optical phenomenon of the Fata Morgana and its mythical namesake, Morgain Le Fay, as a figure of thought to explore transcultural and transgeographical relationships between landscape and identity. Conceived as an essay journey with artistic interventions, Fata Morgana argues for rethinking imagined geographies against the territorial bigotry prevalent in Europe and the world, against essentialist ideas of singular or linear origins. Instead, Körschkes uses Fata Morgana as a motif, myth and method for artistic research, employing its ephemerality and “diffuse occurrences” to relocate places into other places, narratives onto other narratives, and thus brings together different spatialities, temporalities and identities into brieftopian co-existence.