Research Catalogue

In this artistic research I approach performance art as a language formed through the interplay of materiality, duration, and multiple forms of agency. I adopt a linguistic lens, not to reduce performance art only to language, but to use it as an analytical tool to render its characteristics, regularities, and modes of operation visible. A work of performance art emerges within relations between the performer’s corporeality, materials, space, and time. It weaves together visual, conceptual, and embodied thinking, privileging ephemerality and immediacy over permanence. The audience is integral to the work, as performance is an ephemeral art in which performer and audience share the experience in the same moment. Documentation, especially photography and video, enables the reshaping of temporal and spatial relations, as the camera frames, selects, and reconstructs the situation. My inquiry focuses on relations among human, more-than-human, and nonhuman agents. I situate my practice within the field of new materialist and posthumanist contemporary art, where works take shape through multilayered collaborative processes across diverse agents. Performance studies serves as one of the conceptual frameworks.

In her video performance Alphabet of Performance Art Leena Kela performs with the materials and objects that are typical for performance art. The work is based on over 15 years of research within the art form. She has selected 26 different materials and objects that form the language of the performance art and will perform them from A to Z. If A is an apple, what do you think P could be? Paint, paper, piss?

Hér má finna allar helstu upplýsingar um Research Catalogue (RC) og hvernig hægt er að nýta vettvanginn til að halda utan um og birta rannsóknarafrakstur við Listaháskóla Íslands. RC er opinn vettvangur fyrir akademíska starfsmenn og meistaranema til að miðla afrakstri listrannsókna á greinargóðan og aðgengilegan hátt.

My PhD project explores the aesthetic and affective codes of a particular notion of indebtedness, a 'feeling of indebtedness,' as an outcome of German educational efforts institutionalized in Istanbul over the course of the 20th century. I interrogate this feeling through the lens of affect theory as a pedagogical 'genre,' by bringing my research closer to Black studies and critical migration studies. My high school, the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi [Istanbul High School for Boys, also known as Istanbul High School], which is housed in the former headquarters of a 20th-century European credit institution named the Düyûn-ı Umûmiye [Ottoman Public Debt Administration, OPDA] becomes the imaginative site for 'desire-based research,' as Eve Tuck suggests. If this German school abroad were a credit institution, a time machine, how could it inform me about the historical processes through which a 'feeling of indebtedness' educates collective desires conforming to German labor, emancipation, and citizenship models? Keeping Lauren Berlant’s concept of 'cruel optimism' dear to my research, I question whether the German pedagogical promises in Asia Minor pose an obstacle to the flourishing of migrant subjects desirous of German education. Thus, I critique the violent histories along the modern German-Turkish industrial complexes of labor, culture, and military. I lean on intergovernmental agreements and familial biographies of labor, migration, and conversion. In pursuit of affective remedies for such histories' violence, I depart from 'redemptive migrant images' of my solo exhibition 'Teneffüs' [Recess], which opened at Salt Galata (Istanbul, 2022) in the former headquarters of the Bank-ı Osmanî-i Şahane [Imperial Ottoman Bank]. Employing my methodology of 'flickering migrations,' I hope that it inspires a thriving culture of memory and accountability.

Med utgangspunkt i kunstneriske framstillinger av Arkadiamotivet, og med pastoralen som optikk, vil dette prosjektet utforske «utopiske» forestillinger om fortiden, gjennom arbeid i ulike kunstneriske uttrykksformer, i tekstil, skulptur og tekst.

This research project gathers a series of interviews with some of the closest collaborators of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969–2018). Conducted between 2022 and 2025, the conversations preserve first-hand testimonies of his creative process, collaborative methods, and unique sonic universe. Through the voices of Echo Collective (Neil Leiter & Margaret Hermant), Francesco Donadello, Viktor Orri Árnason, and Yair Elazar Glotman, the project explores themes such as orchestration, sound experimentation, electroacoustic practices, and the integration of music with film. The interviews have been edited and adapted from their original form in order to ensure clarity and contextual coherence, while remaining faithful to the collaborators’ perspectives. Taken together, these accounts shed light on Jóhannsson’s aesthetics and working philosophy, offering a multifaceted portrait of a composer whose legacy continues to influence contemporary music.