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.

In this exposition, I explore my artistic practice based on collaborations between female folk singers in Finland and Bulgaria from 2018 to 2022. The artistic material of the exposition consists of a music video trilogy (2019, 2020 and 2022) based on my compositions and arrangements in the solo album Nani (2020), produced in cooperation with the younger generation of the Bulgarian women's choir, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. In addition to the collaborative artistic practice, I interviewed six of the Bulgarian singers. Insights from the data gathered in these ethnographic interviews are intertwined with the analysis of the artistic practice. Throughout the artistic and ethnographic research processes, I applied a feminist intersectional pedagogical approach by focusing particularly on the power relations and the question of female agency in the arts and wider society. In this exposition, I argue that the incorporation of intersectional feminist perspectives in transnational artistic work can contribute to both artistic practice and transnational interactions in ways that may strengthen women's agency in the folk music field of their respective cultural and social environments. Feminist folk music composition was applied at all stages of the artistic and research work. By highlighting the stories, voices, and bodies of women of different ages and cultural locations, the artistic practice represented the construction of counter-myths and transgenerationality. In addition, an intersectional feminist approach helped to identify the power relations involved in transnational collaboration, particularly regarding economic inequality and the roles and different opportunities of women musicians in Finland and Bulgaria. Download Accessible PDF

ES: ¿Existe un enfoque, principio o disposición de la investigación artística que dé unidad a los elementos heterogéneos que la conforman (diferentes procedencias disciplinares y enfoques epistemológicos) y le confiera carácter propio? Ese proceder, se propone aquí, es el especulativo. Desde la danza y mediante ejercicios coreográficos, se quiere hallar descripción de lo que sería una especulación estética, aquella que consideraría al acto de creación como parte del proceso del pensar. Con tal propósito, se desarrolla una propuesta acerca del amor y, específicamente, el eros, entendido como disposición frente a lo que se quiere investigar; añadiendo que esta disposición es también la fuerza que reúne todos los aspectos de la investigación. La acción especulativa estética sería el proceder investigativo del amor que une la dimensión poiética (creativa-imaginativa) y la gnoseológica en la investigación en las artes. EN: Is there an approach, principle or disposition of artistic research that gives unity to the heterogeneous elements that comprise it (different disciplinary origins and epistemological approaches) and gives it its own character? This procedure, it is proposed here, is speculative. From dance and through choreographic exercises, we seek to find a description of what would be an aesthetic speculation, one that would consider the act of creation as part of the thinking process. To this end, a proposal is developed about love and, specifically, eros, understood as a disposition towards what we want to investigate; adding that this disposition is also the force that brings together all aspects of research. The aesthetic speculative action would be the investigative procedure of love that unites the poietic (creative-imaginative) and gnoseological dimensions in research in the arts. Download Accessible PDF

The concept of non-hierarchical collaboration in score-based music offers a new perspective on the score and the instrument as distinct agents within the creative process. This case study, based on my co-creative collaboration with composer Francisco Corthey, explores how my relationship with the instrument – and other experiential factors – shaped the development of the composition, addressed ethical questions surrounding collaboration, and contributed to the production of musical meaning in a work presented to me as a notated score. By sharing control over musical parameters with my instrument and body – and by deliberately unlearning aspects of my instrumental technique – I aimed to cultivate a practice specific to this work, one that treats the musical composition as a site- and context-responsive event. This approach led me to examine how elements such as performance context, venue, and audience affect the emergence of meaning and inform my evolving performance strategies, through processes of responsiveness and an awareness of fragility as a generative force. Several of these reflections are gathered in the Shared Space model – an ongoing artistic experiment that explores inclusive, responsive practices within concert settings. Download Accessible PDF