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?

This exposition or archive is a work in progress, under construction, for gathering material of encounters with junipers.

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)

Russia’s war of aggression is a multidimensional process of conquest that expands its time and space through sound. As Russian forces continue their advance into Ukraine, seizing Ukrainian territories both “horizontally” and “vertically,” as warfare scholar Svitlana Matviyenko (2024) has argued, Ukrainians across the country find themselves living in the sonic expanse of Russian assault. This research paper refers to this experience as one of warbound, of a (sonically) lived relation to war. To explore this relation and situated relationality it may entail, I turn to the work of Ukrainian sound artists and practitioners who participated in collective audio streaming, seeking to recast the Ukrainian testimony of the Russian invasion as a contingent truth claim. The paper examines the 2022 iteration of the audio stream project Listen Live, constitutive to the Land To Return, Land To Care research-creation laboratory. The project is studied in the scope of its testimonial reach and activist pursuit, as well as its humanist and posthumanist performativity.

Språktap er en vanlig konsekvens av okkupasjon, fordriving og flukt. I Halo of Shame utforsker Shwan Dler Qaradaki hvordan den politiske undertrykkelsen av kurdisk – hans morsmål - har formet hans kunstneriske praksis. Med inspirasjon fra både vestlig klassisk kunst og islamsk miniatyrkunst skaper han et visuelt uttrykk som balanserer mellom øst og vest, fortid og nåtid, objekt og subjekt. Gjennom dette arbeidet utvikler han et dekolonialt bildespråk som kan romme de komplekse lagene av identitet, erfaring og motstand. Veiledere: Tiril Schrøder: 2021-2025 Merete Røstad: 2021-2023 Ane Hjort Guttu: 2023-2025 Web disegner: Ellen Palmeira Bilder, video, tekst og tegninger: Shwan Dler Qaradaki

This project identifies a shortcoming in the range and coherence of the language that musicians use, in particular the Norwegian instrumental traditional music (folk music), when they aim to communicate the craft elements of their practice. The Craftmanship project identifies craft as deep knowledge that is a result of skills based activities that again result in tacit knowledge. This knowledge has traditionally been communicated between practitioners or from master to apprentice through a series of subtle cues, ideas or metaphors, which resist language – it is learned through experience and a form attunement between the participants. The project therefore, proposes to develop a vocabulary, based on and drawn from a practitioner’s perspective, through the “languaging” of keywords, and a critique of scores in order to revitalise the transmission of this knowledge for a new generation of musicians. Furthermore, it proposes that when attunement happens, it facilitates profound moments in performances, where the musician and audience reach a tacit recognition. The project proposes that these moments, colloquially described as ‘Magic Moments’ are the aim of most musicians in performance situations. These moments are often dependent on social situations. The project aims to construct a framework for further investigation of the contexts within which these moments manifest themselves.