Research Catalogue

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.

A visual map of the RC. Hover over a screenshot to see the title and author. If you click you will see a gallery with a screenshot of each of its weaves. There is a form which allows you to filter based on title, author, keywords, abstract and date. For an exposition to appear in this map, it needs to be public (share -> public or published). The map is updated once every 24 hours. There is an alternative map that allows you to browse all research by keyword.

The right to have or not to have a religion is a basic human right. Ensuring disbelievers have the same and equal rights with all the citizens of the world – with or without a particular religious inclination – would require globalized legal and cultural structures.

This Exposition is a brief ironic comment on the ongoing degradation, commodification, and colonisation of food and its many dimensions — recipes, ingredients, context — and a reflection on the territorial definitions that shape identity, in this case of South Asians and the Global South, once bound together as a people and still united in the brieftopian world of the Author’s Greatest Biryani: an amalgamative dish of political and cultural reproductions, drenched in time, where old and new contest identity. Through a conversational, autoethnographic lens, the exposition blends historical, colonial, and territorial reflections, using Biryani as both departure point and metaphor for shared identity and dislocation. Visual collages — archival, familial, and sourced — act as probes connecting memory, culture, and belonging. Ultimately, the work offers the Author’s Greatest Biryani as a living document of generational knowledge and a utopian gesture, inviting both insiders and outsiders to gather around a dish transcending borders and time.

There are moments within a performance where destruction and deviation from reality allow an alternative scenario to reveal itself. I argue that these moments can be called ‘brieftopic’, fleeting glimpses into a possible future (Behzad Khosravi Noori, 2024). But what are the connections between reality, deviation and alternative scenario? How can this brieftopia, which materializes for brief moments within a performative event, reverberate outside of it, propagating at a social and political level? During the site-specific improvisation series [in situ], it became evident to me that this brieftopia is tied to an artist’s relinquishment of control, leading to a decentralization of the performance. By introducing the case study, specifically the [in situ] performance held in September 2023 at the Maremma National Park, we will see how unforeseen, unpredictable, and non-linear interactions between myself, the audience, and the non-human components of the ecosystem in which we were immersed, shaped the performance itself, steering it in an unexpected direction and removing it from the continuum of artistic intention, audience perception, and everyday life reflection. In this brieftopia, in a sense, it is existence itself that is reduced to rubble, not for the love of rubble, but for the way out that passes through it, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin.