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 reduce 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)

Tässä ekspositiossa (KAS-kuvagalleria) voit tutustua KAS! Kontula Art Schoolin aikuisten kollektiivin jäsenten elokuussa 2024 toteuttamaan Taking Some Space -seinämaalauskokonaisuuteen ja työskentelyprosessiin. Maalauspaikka (Emännänpolun alikulkutunneli) sijaitsee Kontulan ostarin välittömässä läheisyydessä. Ekspositio mukailee taiteellisen toimintani logiikkaa: toiminta sijoittuu konkreettiseen paikkaan, Itä-Helsinkiin ja Kontulaan, kartalle. Maalaamme kartalta tarkemmin rajattua paikkaa, jonka ympärille alkaa kokoontua toiminnan myötä joukko erilaisia ihmisiä, jotka tekevät erilaisia taideteoksia. Nämä ihmiset tekevät samalla myös paikan: ottavat sen haltuun ja määrittelevät sen käytöstä. Eri ihmisten kokemukset paikasta voivat vaihdella ja olla myös ristiriidassa keskenään, jolloin paikkaan kohdistuu erilaisia taiteellisia ja sosiaalisia neuvotteluja. Mitä syvemmälle paikkaan sukeltaa, löytyy sieltä myös kaikki se hiljainen tieto, joka näkyvien teosten pinnan takana on olemassa. Tätä hiljaista tietoa pyrin avaamaan (yhteisö)taiteellisen (toiminta)tutkimukseni avulla. KAS katutaidekartalla näet myös aiemmin Kontula Art School -hankkeen aikana (2019-2025) toteutettujen julkisten ja yhteisöllisten teosten sijainteja ja nimiä. Kuvagallerian prosessikuvien valinnassa olen käyttänyt (tutkimus)eettistä harkintaa. Olen myös halunnut nostaa esille erityisesti erään työparin teosta, joka kärsi maalausprosessin aikana sekä töhrimisestä että kriittisesti keskeneräisen teoksen päälle ennenaikaisesti levitetyn suoja-aineen ja sen poistamisen aiheuttamista vahingoista.

Insubordinate Costume: Inspiring Performance presents a comprehensive study of historical and contemporary examples of scenographic costume – the type of costume that creates an almost complete stage environment by itself, simultaneously acting as costume, set and performance. This book provides readers with an overview of the costumes, designers, context and theory that have contributed to the emerging field of ‘costume as performance’. Focusing on artists and their creative approach to space, form, materials and movement, the book looks at iconic figures such as Loie Fuller, Oskar Schlemmer and Leigh Bowery, amongst contemporary examples of practitioners that are blurring disciplinary boundaries between fashion, dance, performance and theatre. The book includes chapters by Dr Sofia Pantouvaki, who focuses on performance costume as a means of research; Christina Lindgren, who presents the findings of the four-year Costume Agency project at Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway; Charlotte Østergaard, who discusses the implications of 'Listening with costume' and Felix Choong, writing on 'Contemporary Runways, Contemporary Costumes'. The final part of the volume, 'The Practitioners’ Voice', examines current practice through interviews and contributions from key practitioners.

This Exposition contains an archived version of the project website of the EU funded Erasmus+ Project 'Curating in Context’. Curating in Context addresses the challenges of curating contemporary art beyond curatorial approaches inherited from the visual arts. Tanzfabrik Berlin, Lokomotiva Skopje, Stockholm University of the Arts, and the University of Zagreb co-organised the two-year EU funded Erasmus+ project. It aims to enhance curatorial training focused on social impact by engaging local, regional, and international stakeholders, including cultural organisations. The project uses strategies from the performing arts to develop educational resources for universities and ongoing training for cultural workers and citizens. It fosters critical reflection on socio-political and economic contexts and promotes curatorial methods that connect performing arts with activism and social movements. The project's meetings, public events, and resources will emphasise collaborative learning between politics and art valorisation.

This artistic research project in Performing Arts SKH Stockholm University of Arts documents my transition from fine arts into a performative practice. I am focusing on developing a personal toolkit of methods that support this shift to a facilitator and a director/theatre-maker. The first part is my individual exploration that includes methods such as: creating character from image, writing with objects, and working with a real site in developing a semi-fictional space (exploring site-specificity through my observations and video documentation of Riga’s specific environment). The second part is a collaboration with two artists, Ģirts Dubults and Laine Luīze Freidenberga. We use a devised process concept,Sister Planets, to translate our embodied cultural experiences and identities into performative language. This method emphasises building shared poetics through methods of generating shared poems, visualisation, movement with objects, and integrating methods from the collaborators’ individual practices. Alongside methodological development, a strong interest in my identity as a maker emerged, deeply influencing my artistic inquiry. This stiltedness—as a young female artist from Latvia and Eastern Europe—shapes the themes of belonging and alienation in the Scandinavian cultural context and intersectionality in my work. I investigate how cultural, gendered, and geopolitical factors inform performance and dramaturgy. These personal reflections have evolved into shared thematic concerns within my collaborations, where individual histories and embodied memories merge into a collective exploration. Through this research, I seek new dramaturgical forms that channel socio-political narratives within primarily visual and poetic means of expression.

This artistic doctoral research approaches art, not as a variety of artworks or performances, but as a variety of collective bodies that are summoned. It addresses the subordinate and complicit way collective audience bodies form in relation to artistic performances. The commentary introduces the concept of an “audience body”, emerging when individual bodies gather to become an audience. Audience bodies are described through preconditions that are needed for one to appear, conditions that contribute to its subsistence and variables that determine the primary qualities and the degree of actuality of that audience body. More specifically, the commentary addresses the local genre of “esitystaide”, developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Neologism “beforemance art” is introduced due to a lack of an English equivalent. Esitystaide/beforemance art is the artistic context of this study and is presented as a genre of art, in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word “esitys”, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body. The theoretical approach towards audience bodies is presented as impartial with regard to different genres of art, but the practice of research favours esitystaide/beforemance art. This leads to political conclusions that defend the exposed complicity of and the experimental relation to audience bodies which are characteristic for this specific genre. This theoretical argumentation has been developed through an iterative series of 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts, made by the author, as well as through a parapractice of audience membership. The drafts and examined parts are works of esitystaide/beforemance art, in which printed or digital texts are staged in different ways for audiences to read. The works and the thinking developed in them have been significantly affected by dialogues with audience members and their feedback. The commentary discloses how the process of thinking, resulting in the main arguments of the work, has evolved through this artistic research practice and how temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events has been developed to address more adequately the phenomenon of an audience body. The parapractice of audience membership is introduced as a term describing the attendance of artworks made by others—a way of accumulating knowledge parallel to and yet different from practicing art. The arguments made in the commentary aim to provide conceptual tools for artists, scholars and pedagogues who attend the phenomenon of audience in their work. They can also serve as a basis for further research on the political significance of esitystaide/beforemance art and related art forms. Methodologically, the research offers an example of an iterative and dialogical artistic research practice and its presentation; the relationship between art and theory unfolds as both fruitful and troubled. Through the introduction of the parapractice of audience membership, it argues for using art, equally to the use of bibliographical materials, as reference material of artistic research. Through the use of a Finnish term and its local context as part of concept-creation in English, the work defends the importance of local thinking, which links artistic research to the land upon which it takes form.