Research Catalogue

בין עין חוד לעין הוד אין עוד. מופע דוקו-תיאטרלי

In this exposition I’m showing you my journey for these past two years of investigating my artistic practice through the meeting of identity and aesthetics. Due to my Iranian background, I have felt a need and curiosity to bring together my Iranian and European identities. This project is a dialogue between myself and music, encompassing sounds, arrangements, physical presence, materiality, technology, context, and politics. By politics I mean; history, cultural appropriation, diversity, colonisation, beliefs, and the current needs of the western culture. A project involving confrontations with habits, default parameters, and elements within digital audio workspaces, thereby incorporating scales.

"How can illustration approach the non-representable?" The question is linked to ways of commemorating the children who died during the Holocaust and what kind of representations could be appropriate. As part of a workshop drawing process, information is unfolded about children whose existence was previously documented only by the ghetto archives and the deportation lists made by the Nazi-German administration of Litzmannstadt ghetto. The methodology has been developed though workshops. In the final step of part I, the project investigates how the material may be developed to a book/archive.

For its Issue #2, HUB continues to develop work along the lines of artistic research, focusing its attention on multiple creative practices and the transversality of the processes explored. Marking one year since the launch of Issue 0, HUB is committed to the Research Catalogue platform and ways of exploring and viewing multimedia material that can do justice to the dynamics between content and reading and browsing modes.

In January of 2022, I traveled with my family to Catarata Gocta, a two-tiered waterfall in the high rainforest, just outside of Cocachimba in Peru’s northeast. I seized this opportunity to conduct an artistic research experiment combining field recording, mystical participation, dream work, philosophy, and psychology. I incite and analyze dreams, peel back the perverse layers of my capitalist induced fantasies, exhaust liquid metaphors, engage in forms of mystical participation, discuss whether it’s even possible to record a place at all and draw connections and conclusions whose coherence is, well, maybe not so coherent. This essay touches on Sonic Journalism, the psychologies of Jung, the art criticism of Sontag and Berger and the art of Cage, Duchamp, and Hunter S. Thompson. The field recordings and images presented here are shreds of evidence supporting my own twisted brand of Gonzo Journalism. It is a tight rope walk across microphone cables and book spines, fueled by coffee, internet databases, and obsessive listening. The gravitational current pulling the waters of Catarata Gocta earthward is the dense center around which this essay orbits. Stretching across its horizon, I feel myself emptied, my thoughts laid bare and made available for self-examination.

This article provides insight into the choreographic situation LUFTIG, where the idea of air as conveyor of tactile experience is passed on, reworked and performed by children and adults. It examines how shifting the focus from movement language to a distinct expressive idea affects the choreographic process, and looks at how involving young people as choreographers and choreographic material affects the aesthetic experience of the now for artists and audience. Drawing on Tygstrup's idea of transformative time (2018), Gumbrecht's concept of the broad present (2018) and Taussig's thoughts on the adult's imagination of the child's imagination (2003), the author argues that in performance work where children are both choreographers and choreographic material, the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination and the actual actions of the physically present child are at the same time mutually dependent on and at odds with each other, leaving the adult teetering on the edge of contemporary reality and primordial retreat. In the work proces, the child has a special propensity for easing the work for all which can only be deployed if we are able to circumvent tendencies of mutual projection of imagined imaginations. This requires a singular work process, where we - children and adults alike - can inhabit questions together without relying wholly on our previous knowledge of and experience with known performance parameters.