Research Catalogue

I work at the boundary where a finite biological object asymptotically approaches zero and, through this disappearance, gives birth to an infinite aesthetic event — a singularity. The series “Singularity of Beauty” is an ongoing investigation into the moment when decay, entropy, and controlled human intervention collide to rupture the visible world and generate a new, non-representational order. Method: Asymptotic Ritual A chosen organic system (bird, bouquet, insect colony, fungal network) is placed on a prepared surface and deliberately abandoned to natural forces — heat, humidity, insects, gravity, time. During a fixed ritual period (7 days in the current cycle), the object decays following an exponential law analogous to f(t) = a·e⁻ᵏᵗ. The artist is absent; only documentation occurs. At t → ∞ (practically: when the biological object approaches zero), the artist re-enters as a second asymptotic operator. Selective pigment application, removal of material, and layering transform the residue into a visual limit — a singularity point where the initial object has vanished, yet infinite meaning emerges. The final state is neither representation nor abstraction; it is the frozen event of the limit itself. Core Principles Decay is not a theme; it is the first author. Time is treated as a physical material with measurable half-life. Human intervention functions as a controlled perturbation that forces the system past its natural equilibrium into aesthetic infinity. The resulting image is a palimpsest of two incompatible temporalities: biological time (unstoppable) and artistic time (intermittent, intentional). The “demon” is not a depicted figure but the mathematical event of the singularity: the instant when order, passing through zero, becomes infinite and alien.

This exposition gathers all the essential information needed to get started with the Research Catalogue (RC) platform at the Iceland University of the Arts (IUA). It offers a clear overview of how to create a profile, start an exposition, and navigate the basic functions of the platform. The goal is to provide staff with a central reference point for working with RC in the context of artistic research and institutional use.

This exposition serves as an archive for the project "Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees", where Annette Arlander spends time with specific trees and poses for camera together with them. The exposition is under construction

This exposition examines the intersection of drawing, installation, and handmade objects informed by popular culture, spectacle, and visual symbolism. Central to the practice is the duality between physical materiality and virtual environments, a framework through which fictional realities are constructed and analyzed—often reflecting states of exhaustion, overload, and alienation characteristic of hyperactive contemporary culture. The use of low-budget materials and do-it-yourself methods introduces a deliberate tension between meticulous craftsmanship and intentional “amateurism,” while simultaneously subverting the capitalist logics of mass culture through the reuse and recontextualization of its visual language. Connecting introspective and social dimensions, the exposition offers not only an aesthetic experience but also a critical lens on everyday consumer routines, media-shaped reality, and processes of personal self-reflection.

The exhibition is deeply rooted in local history—the artist group explores the story of the white pigment titanium dioxide's industrial origin in Sandbekk, and how this world sensation from 1910 has influenced our world today. Titanium dioxide white pigment is a global color phenomenon. Ilmenite is transported from Titania to its sister company Kronos Titan in Fredrikstad, where it is refined into titanium dioxide. From there, the pigment circulates seemingly invisibly in a global network of systems. It is used in paint, plastics, paper, ink, cosmetics, medicine, sunscreen, and millions of products we use daily. This history is the starting point for the development project TiO2: The Materiality of White. Over the past two years, the artist group has visited Titania's mines and deposits, gathering materials from the local history. Just as geologists examined the areas in Sokndal over 150 years ago in search of valuable minerals, the group has wandered through the landscape, picking stones and collecting sand, clay, and rust-colored earth. These findings have been brought back to the ceramic laboratory at KhiO, where they have been processed through ceramic methods.

This exposition comprises textual fragments (both written and voiced) produced through the act of returning to (in turn re-activating, re-configuring, even re-imagining) conversational transcripts generated within the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. Initiated in January 2021, Dorsal Practices is an artistic collaboration for exploring how the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world. Conceived at the threshold between choreographic-movement practices and language-based artistic research, Dorsal Practices explores how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back, moreover, through a practice of coming back, the act of (re)turning. The original transcript material that forms the basis of this exposition was produced through a practice of conversation undertaken within six interrelated blocks of exploration, taking place over 18 months between October 2022 and February 2024. Within this period of enquiry, we — Brown and Cocker — focused our attention on the act of returning within our shared practice, re-imagined as a "dorsal turn". Through the intermingling of two registers of language-based practice, that is, through the performativity of both the written and spoken texts themselves, within this exposition we attempt to make tangible how the dorsal gesture of the turn and the circling principle of re- become operative as a spinal thread within our shared enquiry. Deviating from the straightforwardness of a strictly linear text, we invite a form of dorsal listening-reading that might engage through loops and returns. We conceive the research artefacts generated through the practice itself as the central focus within this exposition, alongside a supporting text where we introduce the wider enquiry of Dorsal Practices, reflecting on how we conceive the act of turning and of re-turning therein.