The next EARN Gathering will be held in Helsinki in October 2022 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki. Making Artistic Research Public event is a platform for initiating further activities of the EARN working groups and their collaborations.

Making something public is intrinsic to art making and artistic research. How could artistic research be made public on its own terms? To display a work in public might require leaving behind a singular piece or event, in order to proceed further with the work. This could also mean that development of one theme ends and another begins. The occasion of publishing clearly initiates reflection on its reception and leads to new approaches for proceeding with the research. Art and artistic research are not only made for the public; they are also informed by their own publicity.

To what extent does making something public presuppose making it identifiable? Does this something have to be named? Does addressing the public always take the form of production? Are there alternative experimental or experiential ways of relating to matters of publicity?  Could they be more relevant to publishing artistic research than declaring products (artworks, articles, etc.) as outcomes of research or end results of processes? Could publishing be seen as a live model, a prototype for learning processes that develop a relationship with the public?

Exhibition

There will be an exhibition in connection with the gathering which will take place in various spaces in Mylly building at the Academy of Fine Arts. The exhibition will open 27 October, during the gathering, and stay open until 13 November 2022. 

Both the gathering and the exhibition have a free admission and they are open to all, welcome!

Registration

The registration for the event will begin in September and the link to registration will be added here, stay tuned!

The main emphasis of the event

• EARN working groups presentations and artworks exhibited in and around the Academy of Fine Arts building (Mylly)
• Two guest speakers, Basam El Baroni, Assistant Professor at the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University and Paul Tiensuu, University Researcher at the Faculty of Law at Helsinki University.
• Publication events of Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition (MetropolisM Boooks) co-edited by Henk Slager & Mick Wilson and RUUKKU-journal’s thematical issue: Making Artistic Research Public, co-edited by Denise Ziegler, Tero Heikkinen and Saara Hacklin. 

Keynote speakers

Bassam El Baroni is a curator, writer and an associate professor at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University. Through exhibitions, publications and other media, his research most recently engages with financialization in relation to artistic practices, artists’ engagement with infrastructural futures and histories, and new forms of artist-led activism. 

Paul Tiensuu, PhD candidate in law at university of Helsinki, co-creator of the “City as space of rules and dreaming” -project.

Workshops by the six EARN Working Groups

EARN Working Group: Methodology

Three senior artist researchers from Helsinki, Gothenburg and Utrecht will present current research with particular attention to the different ways in which questions of research methodology are being addressed. These three lives of ongoing research are considered from the perspective of the methodologies working group which focuses on methodological invention. The panel is especially interested in how this works beyond the formal domain of doctoral studies.

Partners: Hdk-Valand, Univ. of Gothenburg, School of Media, TU Dublin

EARN Working Group: Curatorial Studies

The curatorial studies workshop will present a new publication Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition (MetropolisM Boooks) co-edited by Henk Slager & Mick Wilson. In this new volume to be launched at the EARN gathering in Helsinki, contributors address the question of exhibition in response to the extensive digitization of culture in general, and the intensive mobilisation of exhibition via digital network infrastructures in particular. As part of the event the editors will be joined by two contributors to the book and will consider the immediate tasks arising within curatorial research. Copies of the new volume will be available during the event.

Partners: HKU Utrecht, GradCAM / TU Dublin, Hdk-Valand, Gothenburg

EARN Working Group: On Value

How do we form values that help us operate in specific contexts while building key ecological relationships? Can alternatives to extractive values be identified e.g. practices that “give back” to their sites, or “borrow” elements which are subsequently returned and emplaced? What is the nature of the public(s), or audience(s) we are trying to reach? How can these specific audiences be invited into an artistic research forum? Can “publics” beyond the city be reached by invoking the “commons” (the things we share like air, nature, language) to widen the perspective of what a public is and what it might become? These are some of the questions that will be addressed by Ciel Grommen, Pepa Ivanova, Tria Amalia Ningsih and Robert Gorman, two artists and two architects who have been engaging through artistic and design research practices, in investigating more-than-human concerns of the former mining town Genk, Belgium. Their explorations will result in different, unconventional ways of mapping the site and its histories, and their contribution during Making Artistic Research Public will experimentally foster dialogues with the particularities of Helsinki.

Partners: LUCA School of Arts,Dept. of Architecture, KU Leuven

EARN Working Group: Space + Practice

We focus on addressing the multiplicity of space and the ecology of spatial practices that they suggest. We prepare and experiment with site and situation specific interventions, gestures, and other space-reckoning practices. We develop collaborative and individual methods of visualizing, materializing, or presenting thoughts on the role of space as structure for taking place of things, gestures, and events. In the four Space + Practice Parasite Course sessions during the spring 2022, peer learning was extended not only to fellow students and teachers but to the following sites around Helsinki city center: we learned from an office space in transition of use and did re-arrangements and interventions in that institutional space, did re-citations with sites on Uunisaari – an island, carried 3-meter wooden sticks to be connected with Agroksenmäki – a rocky hill; and we were exploring the depth of the sea bed from a wooden landing used for washing carpets.

Excerpts of these practices will be part of our presentations and artworks for the EARN gathering. 

In 2022 Space + Practice working group is collaborating with Space + Practise Parasite, a course organised by the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki.

Partners: Academy of Fine Arts and Theatre Academy at Uniarts Helsinki, Slade/UCL London, HKU Utrecht 

EARN Working Group: Sustainability and Attunement

The Sustainability and Attunement working group proposes for a radio show to be installed and broadcast from the University of the Arts Helsinki. The ‘form’ of radio will be used to attune to the nature of institutional collaborations in and out of the EARN ‘network’ and the radiating global principles of sustainability that support social, racial and environmental justice.

As a telepresence, and decentred transmission, the radio show will allow for a multiplicity of live, remote and archival contributions or presences. The material will be developed over the coming months collaboratively, in a series of online rehearsals and bilateral recording sessions at our respective recording studios.  

Partners: Slade/UCL, School of Fine Art, History of Art, Univ. of Leeds, School of Fine Art, History of Art, Univ. of Leeds

EARN Working Group: Politics of Aesthetics

This working group begins from a recognition that meaning-production can be a violent tool of categorizing and othering and that the concept of “research” has long been built on the condition of “extractivism.” An aspect of the work of this group is to challenge, undermine, and transcend these processes. Refusal, opacity, and abjection are among some of the possible political-aesthetic ways of working in the field of art that are considered by the group.

Partners: KUL/The Warburg Institute London, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Contact information for the gathering

Denise Ziegler
University Researcher, artistic research,
Academy of Fine Arts at University of the Arts Helsinki 
+358504080197
denise.ziegler@uniarts.fi

Antti Nyyssölä
Doctoral student, artistic research,
Academy of Fine Arts at University of the Arts Helsinki 
antti.nyyssola@uniarts.fi