Research Catalogue

Heidi Hanninen, Academy of Fine Arts / Uniarts Helsinki, 5th year Doctoral student Artistic research: KAS! Kontula Art School – socially engaged public art Possibilities of the community art in culturally diverse contexts In this photo gallery you can take a look inside to KAS! Kontula Art School's socially engaged public art practice through the last artistic part of the artistic research by community artist-researcher Heidi Hänninen. "Kaupunki on meidän koti" ("City is our home") art work includes paintings from 36 KAS community members implemented for the renovated metro station in Kontula suburb. Both sides of the walls by the metro rails were covered by art: other side with the paintings by 18 adults from KAS collective and the other side by KAS Juniors (age 8-19 years). Juniors paintings include word HOME in 29 different languages locally spoken at homes and by friends and relatives of these kids and youngsters involved. Some of the languages are such that our juniors would like to know better or are already learning. In my artistic research initiated in 2021 I focuse on questions about ethically sensitive community art practice in the context of my ongoing project called KAS! Kontula Art School, socially engaged street art project, that I started in 2019 in suburban district Kontula in Eastern Helsinki. The aim of The Kontula Art School is to implement interesting public art but also to strengthen the community spirit and contribute to reducing potential conflicts in the region. Kontula is one of the most vivid, multilingual and culturally rich suburbs in Finland with the income level lower than the average. Kontula has been well known, especially among the media, for drugs used and sold around the shopping mall. The area is conflict sensitive and challenging but also a ground for experimenting new kinds of social / artistic realities and for the birth of communal practices far from the conventional borders and definitions. KAS! project has been cooperating with the local low threshold day center Symppis, where many of the customers have dual diagnosis (issues with both substance use and mental health). The participants of highly heterogeneous Kontula Art School consists of both adults and children. Participants represent various cultures, including substance use cultures. Some of the participants have educational background in arts but majority of them have been self taught. KAS! project has been involving artistically motivated people, regardless of their background, status or the life situation. Through the art making process I have had access to build ethically sensitive methodological toolkit for community art practices in culturally diverse contexts in a changing urban environment like Kontula, where understanding about good life varies greatly between its residents. Art creates possibilities for encountering and helps to break stigmas concerning certain groups of people. From the point of view of “Rebellious Research” (Ryynanen & Suoranta 2016) the world of art has crucial role in the process of fostering wellbeing of people and the justice in our shared society; art can reconstruct thinking and sometimes even the whole life of an individual. The key element in activist art is the act of participating, and questions like how people take part of the process and how does the act of process participates politically arise. (Suoranta & Ryynanen 2016, p. 235) In my study (street) art practice is the method of working and collecting research material (socially engaged art making practice and ready artworks in the public environment) but it is also an intervention for the (social) change. Through this research I suggest that socially engaged art interventions similar to KAS practice can empower both, the authors of the public art works and the whole surrounding community in a unique way, especially when used through the heterogeneous group context. KAS! practice is bringing up critical perspective concerning issues about public art and artistic experience of the urban environment by creating new directions to debate questions related to the community art, artistry, and the nature and possibilities of art itself in this changing world among those new realities that we share and shape together to be lived in. text: Heidi Hänninen (2025) photos: Tanguy Gérôme (2025)

The thesis “Sexy Rooms: Spaces That Seduce - Depictions of Sexual Identity through Spatial Design” explores the visual language of spaces of sexual encounter and the underlying conditioning behind how they depict sexual identity. Beginning with an examination of the webcam modeling industry as a catalyst, the research delves into the realm of digital sex work and the voyeuristic tendencies that define contemporary society. It investigates the role of the backdrop space while touching upon the tension between intimate and exposed, performance and authenticity. The study extends beyond the digital sphere, tracing connections with the origins of reality TV, representations of gendered spaces in film and photography, and the historical example of the boudoir.

Professional Doctorate in Arts + Creative is an educational pilot program in The Netherlands for an advanced degree in universities of applied sciences. The PD program at an university of applied sciences is developed to train an investigative professional. This portal is a platform for publishing artistic research generated by the PD candidates. Within the Professional Doctorate program, this portal will also be used as an internal tool for documentation.

Lectures, panel discussions, and conferences are formats for collective listening, but they took on conventions that make listening difficult: reading aloud complicated texts, speaking quickly in order to squeeze as much material as possible, showing slides with long texts, sitting for a long time without moving. Silence is considered awkward, so there is little time to think about what has been said. In this video paper, I dissect the decorum of oral presentation formats in academia and outline how the attention of the members of an audience diverges and converges with that of the speaker. I also share some observations about verbalizing non-verbal ideas, in particular about how a text description at the beginning of a project can tie its loose ends too tightly. At the end of my talk at the Klagenfurt conference, I handed out questionnaires, in which I asked the audience members to mark the sentences which they remembered from my talk. Then, while another presenter was speaking, I drew a graph of mind wandering of the audience members based on the questionnaires and showed it at the end of the session. In the second part of this video paper, I explain the process of evaluating the responses and present the resulting graph.

This research is grounded in the relation between listening and orientation through a kindred gesture: tending towards. Its object of inquiry is the dialogue between Paul Celan’s poems and Gisèle Lestrange-Celan’s etchings in the publication Atemkristall (Brunidor 1965, Vaduz). The choice of this pairing arises from the possibility of bringing together two elements: the breath and the ground. I follow the flux and exchange between breathing gestures and inscription across the poems and etchings, approaching the images not as illustrations or representations of the text but as spatial configurations of encounter—between readers, listeners, makers, and witnesses. Attendance as a gesture of attention becomes palpable when the poet imagines that “the poem is pneumatically touchable” and that “the reader breathes into the poem.” In this turning-towards-the-poem, the etchings invite a reading of the poet’s gesture as it inclines toward another practice and medium. My interest lies in how, within this publication, both media affect and reorient one another, generating a shared space of reading. Extending this form of listening means approaching the relation between word and image as the opening of spaces of attention—listening as inclination, as stance, before any immediate attempt of translation.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we, in our role as lecturers, conducted hybrid workshops with design and art students from ten partner institutions on five continents. Our goal was to explore soundscapes from different viewpoints, and we were deeply impressed by the outcome. The recordings and their accompanying images and conversations dissolved geographical borders along with social, cultural, and structural differences. We found that a re-sonance or con-sonance emerged from this collective work, in which sounds became manifestations of presence and agency; the sociality and simultaneity of the space we shared together remains with us today. With becoming soundscape, we attempted to bring the social resonance we had experienced in the workshops into the lecture hall.