I Experience as I Experiment – I Experiment as I Experience

I Experience as I Experiment – I Experiment as I Experience. Experience and experimentality in artistic work and research

The exhibition brings together 17 artists and researchers working with installation, sculpture, mixed reality installation, environmental art, performance, photography, moving image, and media art.

The artists discuss how (or why) their artworks relate to their artistic research practice, and what roles experience and experimentality play in their artistic research. These issues are adressed by investigating both momentary experiences (elämykset, Erlebnisse) and experience as something accumulated over time (kokemus, Erfahrung) in the context of the everyday work of artists involved in art making, artistic research and teaching at the university level.

The publication I Experience as I Experiment – I Experiment as I Experience (201) contains texts written by the 17 artist researchers in connection to the works exhibited in the Exhibition Laboratory gallery. The exhibition is open from 27.11–12.12.2019.

Coordinator: Denise Ziegler, postdoctoral researcher, Uniarts Helsinki

The works and texts are discussed in the KuvA Research Days conference on Tuesday 10.12.2019

Participating artists

ANNETTE ARLANDER (DA) is an artist, researcher and pedagogue, who is currently Professor in Performance, Art and Theory at Stockholm University of the Arts and a visiting researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. Her research interests include artistic research, performance-as-research and the environment; her artworks move between performance art, media and environmental art. For a bio and a list of publications please see https://annettearlander.com.

PAUL CEGYS’S (MSc) work merges multiple practices of performance creation and design, from theatre and opera to site-responsive installation and intermedial VR/MR scenographies. Upholding his commitment to ecological imperatives, he merges his artistic work with sustainability practice (Cegy has an MSc degree in Sustainability Science and Environmental Studies from Lund University, Sweden). He is a faculty member of the Department of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo (Canada), and is a PhD Candidate in the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University (Finland).

MATTHEW COWAN is a New Zealand artist and doctoral candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. Cowan works in the realm of traditional European customs, and his works include photographs, videos, installations and sculptures, which play with the inherent strangeness of the continued popularity of long-established folk customs in a modern world. His recent exhibitions have included artistic responses to artefacts and folk objects in museum collections, delving into structures that guide perceptions of popular histories and re-examining what is suggested as evidence in the historical presentation of identity.

ANDREA COYOTZI BORJA (born in Mexico) is an artist based in Helsinki, Finland. She is a doctoral student at Aalto University, where her practice and research focus on the observation and practice of the “infraordinary”, as defined by the author and filmmaker Georges Perec. This subject often eludes definition but can be explored through different concepts, one of which is the notion of gesture. Her artworks have been exhibited in Mexico, the United States, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Bulgaria and Finland.

MIRKA DUIJN is a filmmaker working on documentary, interactive, experimental and fiction projects. She is known for projects like Land of Change (2013), the Emmy Award winning Last Hijack Interactive (2015) and The Industry (2018). Duijn is interested in questions concerning the politics of representation and sub-sequential interaction with/appropriation of the image.

MIKA ELO works currently as Professor of Artistic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. His research interests include the theory of photographic media and general ecology. He takes part in discussions in these fields as an educator, curator, visual artist and researcher.

JACK FABER is a doctoral candidate at the University of the Arts Helsinki and a transdisciplinary artist specializing in moving image and film. After publishing two novels, numerous articles and texts in the artistic arena, he has focused on creating film and video works, mostly as part of site-specific installations for solo and group exhibitions in galleries, museums and other public spaces. His film project Watchmen (2005–2015) became an international juridical precedent after years of censorship, and it has been titled “a groundbreaking Surveillance Artwork” by the press.

Hi. I am TANJA KIIVERI and I am a human. I have a dog named Regina. We are attempting to make a piece together.

PAUL LANDON is the director of the undergraduate programme of the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He takes photos and makes drawings and films. In his free time, Paul Landon enjoys taking walks, looking at buildings and reading old science fiction novels.

JAN LÜTJOHANN’S wooden sculptures and installations take the shape of workspaces, equipment and tools. As a sculptor and educator, he uses pre-industrial tools and obsolete technology in order to contemplate on working with your own hands in a post-industrial society. Originally from northern Germany, he has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and has exhibited his work in Finland and abroad.

MAIJA NÄRHINEN. I make three-dimensional works. I am a tool with which material is shaped into new systems. I realize plans but adapt to the terms set by chance: my operational principle is constantly being updated.

Visual artist and researcher TUULA NÄRHINEN has a doctorate in Fine Arts (DFA) from the University of the Arts Helsinki. Re-adapting methods derived from the natural sciences, her works set out to explore the pictorial agency of natural phenomena (such as water, wind or frost) and to unravel environmental problems related to marine plastic pollution. Her installations showcase the media, materials and the associated DIY instruments; the sea inscribes its pulse on paper and trees trace the shape of wind on their branches, encouraging the spectator to participate in the re-presentation of an event.

ELINA SALORANTA is a visual artist and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki’s Centre for Artistic Research (CfAR). She is also someone who likes to write letters, and in her current work, she engages in correspondence with the Finnish singer Elli Forssell-Rozentāle (1871–1943). In addition to her research, Saloranta teaches writing at the Academy of Fine Arts and coordinates the Nordic Summer University’s study circle on artistic research.

LAUREN O’NEAL is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator who has exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, the Theater Academy of Finland, and Purdue University, and performed in works by Trisha Brown and Heidi Latsky. O’Neal has presented at the College Art Association

Conference and the Nordic Forum for Dance Research. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of the Arts Helsinki.

PILVI PORKOLA is a performance artist, researcher, writer and pedagogue. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Finnish Academy funded project "How to Do Things with Performance?" at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. www.pilviporkola.com

MARLOEKE VAN DER VLUGT (MA) is a Dutch artist and researcher based in Amsterdam. She graduated from DasArts (Amsterdam University of the Arts), where she specialized in assembling theoretical and hands-on knowledge of the relationship between the body and technology. Van der Vlugt is currently affiliated as a lecturer and researcher with HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. In 2015, her book Performance as Interface, Interface as Performance was released. The book provides a personal reflection on six years of artistic practice, exploring life in a technology-driven, networked world and its impact on the body.

A visual artist currently based in Helsinki, SUZANNE MOONEY utilizes photography, moving image, installation, found images and objects within her practice. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, London, she has exhibited extensively, most recently in the AIR Gallery, New York; Lewis Glucksman, Cork; Galleria Hippolyte, Helsinki; Vitrine Gallery, Basel, and the University of Greenwich, London. In her work, she examines fragmentary forms, slippages that emerge between materiality and representation, and the objects’ built-in obsolescence. Suzanne Mooney is currently a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki.

JORIS WEIJDOM (MA) is a researcher and designer of mixed-reality experiences focusing on interdisciplinary creative processes and performativity. He is a lecturer at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, where he founded the Media and Performance Laboratory (MAPLAB), enabling practice-led artistic research on the intersection of performance, media and technology from 2012 until 2015. As part of his PhD project, Joris studies creative processes in collaborative mixed reality environments (CMRE) in collaboration with the Utrecht University and the University of Twente.

DENISE ZIEGLER, born in Switzerland, is a Helsinki-based visual artist and postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. Ziegler’s interventional artworks pose questions to the public infrastructure, to walls, fences, buildings and pedestrian routes. In a post-Beuysian vein, the artist’s workshop is extended to public space in order to work with its mechanisms and possibilities.