Research Catalogue

A collaboration between multi media artist Tina Douglas and composer/performer Magda Mayas funded by Musikfonds

The title of this project is inspired by geological specimens collected by the Apollo 11 astronauts during their historic lunar landing in 1969. These so-called contingency samples were gathered quickly and somewhat at random, ensuring that at least one specimen would return to Earth should the mission encounter unforeseen difficulties. Before embarking on their journey into space, the astronauts trained in Iceland, learning to identify minerals and geological formations in preparation for their work on the Moon. Both this training and the very idea of a contingency sample invite us to reflect on our own planet: as we confront what many see as the end of times, what might be Earth’s contingency sample? At the same moment that the Moon landing was taking place, a new industrial era was beginning in Iceland and Jamaica. Aluminum, long celebrated as a symbol of the future, was becoming central to the country’s economic and political landscape. Through a triangular relationship connecting Jamaica (bauxite ore export) Greenland (cryolite export), Iceland (aluminium smelters), and through the colonial and decolonial histories embedded in the aluminium industry, we propose to consider aluminium itself as a contingency sample: a material holding the potential to catalyze alternative futures. In this reimagining, the conventional narratives of progress and futurity surrounding this metal give way to a more urgent question: Who holds the right to produce the future? Within the project, we will use artistic methods such as sculpture, video, poetry, and dance to explore how aluminum interlinks geologies, alters landscapes, disrupts environments, and shapes social and cultural histories in the three islands. The artworks created will serve as material manifestations, containers holding the knowledge gained during the research. To share our methods and learn about how aluminum affects communities and the environment, we will invite local children to workshops where they can both practically engage with the material and explore its world-building potentials, creating their own contingency samples and imagining the futures they wish to strive for. The research, artworks, and outcomes from the workshops will come together in an exhibition, which will be presented in Iceland.

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)

Our Days of Gold (ODOG) is an ongoing, durational artwork staged on Instagram at @ourdaysofgold_film since April 2017. Over its eight-year duration, the work has accumulated new layers of memory and interpretation shaped by followers’ responses, shifting platform aesthetics, and changes to Instagram’s visual logic, including the disappearance of the square grid in January 2025. Alongside creative contributions, the project draws on a survey conducted with long-term followers, tracing how experiences of viewing, remembering, and interpreting the work unfold over time. This co-authored exposition includes videos, screen-recorded navigations, and writing produced by followers whose contributions reveal a form of polyvocality: multiple interpretive threads and associations that remediate the archive while shaping its evolving narrative. Within this distributed process, ODOG engages autofiction not as a singular self-narration but as a collective mode of authorship, emerging through dispersed readings, layered memories, and networked resonances. At the same time, the project foregrounds the precarity of social media archives, where redesigns, algorithmic shifts, and potential platform loss constantly reshape how the work circulates and persists. Drawing on debates around remediation and digital preservation, ODOG tests how meaning, memory, and narrative can be sustained within unstable infrastructures while acknowledging their continual transformation.

In this half paper, half soliloquy, I aim to propose re-enactment as a research method. Through textual analysis and situated reflections, I will explore the potential of re-enactments in performative returning to destabilize and reconfigure canonical understandings of the past, and consider any implications this understanding of re-enactment can have within research approaches

In this study I elaborate on how Charms unfolds as a plastic experimentation rooted in an initial vision of the body. It is grounded in a reimagined body image, constructed from other imagined bodies, such as the anatomical flayed figure and protective devices. This study explores the notion of the body turned upside down —both literally and conceptually — reconfigured through an armor-like structure in which flesh paradoxically assumes the role of an external layer. The resulting image is of a body that is both armored and exposed, charged with contradictions that disrupt binary oppositions such as inside/outside, alive/dead, human/animal, and powerful/fragile. This hyperbolic Charms, constructed from two distinct costumes, is offered for visual contemplation, recurring within contemporary visual culture as a manifestation of the scientific body still subjected by imagination and visceral sensation. The work, a multichannel video installation, also investigates the body’s capacity to generate imaginaries through movement, employing measurement tools from the biomechanics research laboratory to visualize this dynamic relationship.