Research Catalogue

When preparing for the dead, may we peep into the future? In the broader geography of the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, we cook our coffee in the briki or cezve. Every region has its own variation, some heat up the water before adding the powder, some add spices, some make it thick, others thinner. And every person has their own variation as well. Coffee is something as personal as communal. Apart from the daily morning and evening consumption, we also share two uses of the coffee that are central of interest here: the coffee cup reading and the tradition of coffee drinking in funerals and memorials. Imagination and memory, future and past, the association with grief; and the unique timelines traced in each cup. I think that it has been with me for years, the memory of my grandmothers, my mother’s morning ritual of cooking a light Greek coffee in a big cup. The familiarity of the Kafenio. And most importantly, community dynamics; sharing others, participating. Here I aspired to create a meeting space with people, artists or not, with whom I have met over the years and share the subtle fascination about this type of coffee and its rituals. Acknowledging the blood, oppression and displacement behind and around the product. The Cafe Imperial.

Although it is virtually impossible to formalize what ‘best practice’ on the Research Catalogue might be, it harbours by now numerous examples of expositions that ‘work.’ In this session, I want to introduce a small set of diverse expositions from JAR as a way to highlight successful choices people have taken. With a short explanation of expositionality and virtual witnessing, I aim to support an understanding of the effect that those examples have as a way of describing how media-rich articulations can productively engage with both academic and artistic expectations.

short bio and cv

SKVR:n kantelerunot alueittain koottuina ja vanhakantaiseen kanteleperinteeseen linkitettyinä. The SKVR collection (1908–1948, 1997) comprises 34 editions and 89,247 texts of oral Kalevala metre lyrics collected from Karelians, Ingrians, and Finns and published by the Finnish Literature Society. This exhibition features texts from the collection relating to the mythical origins and music of the kantele. The front page provides an overview of the regional characteristics, and the tabs offer texts from each region. The exhibition is in Finnish.

The histories, stories, and names of Chinese railroad workers who dedicated their lives to constructing the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad have remained in the shadows for over a century. Completed in 1869, the railroad was a monumental achievement in America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ during the nineteenth century. But despite their contributions, the Chinese laborers have not received the recognition they deserve. This project seeks to remember Chinese railroad workers via arts-based research methods (ABR). Archives are not merely repositories of the past but also products of political power. In this light, the project poses a key methodological question: How can art-making critically reconfigure the power of archives and lost history? We seek to ask questions, initiate a dialogue, acknowledge the absence, and give form to the invisible. Building upon the historical recovery work of previous scholars, we reconstruct fragmented pieces through remixed artworks. The current article highlights key artworks that demonstrate the scope and variety of a much larger project (Yu 2025b). We dedicate this work to the Chinese master railroad builders––to the great-grandfathers––whose stories and names demand remembrance.

The concept of spatial context is often presented and visualized commonly through its relation to the built environment. Its significance predominantly plays a fundamental role in understanding the world and forming relations between various diverse experiences, and interpretations of reality. These influences, in which knowledge is produced and transformed by inhabiting the process of being seen, felt, and perceived, overlap where the notion of time unfolds intricate reflections of itself regarding happenings, entities, and physical elements. By exploring the spatial context in a non-linear timeline, it is possible to identify unique hidden dimensions that enrich the understanding of the totality that is related to spaces and their surroundings. This nonlinearity is achievable through the phenomenological understanding of lived spaces which brings mental, physical, and sensory, at the same time largely subjective realities to conceivable participation. With these guidelines, this research consists of an artistic exploration that aims to visually investigate artistic methods and processes of revealing extended visual qualities of mental space, and what type of connections are intertwined within its architectonic surroundings. My aim is to phenomenologically uncover hidden dimensions inherited within mental space. Therefore I destabilize conventional meanings of space by visually exploring and rendering the mental and emotional geographies that shape our lived experience, internalizing and revealing the constructedness of mental spatiality through an artistic process that reflects psychogeographic embodying. By challenging linear and objective representations of space by engaging in an artistic exploration of mental and emotional landscapes, I unfold non-linear timelines, subjective lived experiences, and the overlaps of perception and time, where memory and the present co-narrate within us.