Graduation projects MA Artistic Research 2018

MASTERS ARTISTIC RESEARCH

ARTISTIC RESEARCH The Master Artistic Research is an intensive two-year programme, which attracts highly motivated artists from around the world—all linked by an interrogative and curiosity driven approach to making art. We believe in an education premised on experimentation, collaboration, and innovation, and understand that there are many ways to be an artist. This year, as every year, our students prove this in highly original and divergent realizations of their research projects.

Each student’s personal creative trajectory, and the production that defines this, has formed the heart of their study. They have been asked to open up these creative processes, their thoughts and actions, to discussion and feedback from their core tutors, department guests, and peer group. This exploration, and the supporting parts of the programme, have helped each of them become more knowledgeable and critically aware artists, with both a more complex and rigorous practice, and, importantly, a more complex understanding of the ways that art can intersect with the aesthetic, social, political, and historical fields.

Justin Bennett, Francesco Bernardelli, Henk Borgdoff, Manon Bovenkerk, Clare Butcher, Nora Chipaumire, Henry Coombes, Camilla Crosta, Jeremiah Day, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Feminist Art Gallery, Peter Fengl, Moosje Goosen, Rahila Haque, Hamza Halloubi, Angela Jerardi, Marysia Lewandowska, Alex Martinis Roe, Wayne Modest, Antonis Pittas, Robert Pravda, Mary Redmond, Lisa Robertson, Benjamin Seror, Ben Schott, Vincent van Velsen, Puck Verkade, Danielle van Vree, and Thijs Witty.

Janice McNab Head of Department

This year students worked with curator Sara Giannini and designer Raoul Audouin in the production of their fabulous graduation exhibition and supporting publication. Over their studies, they also worked together to create exhibitions at Quartair Artist Run Space and Zaal 3, both in The Hague; the MARBAR in the school galleries; and a one-night-only show as the culmination of our residency at Hospitalfield House in Scotland.

Other events outside the academy were our trip to Documenta14 Athens; Playground Performance Art Festival in Museum M and Stuk, Leuven; and to GI international Art Festival in Glasgow.

Guests to the programme over the last two years were: Andrius Arutiunian, Tina Bastajian,

202

GRADUATES Paulien Bekker

204

Greta DesirĂŠe Facchinato

205

Xaviera Andrea Michelle Hardjopawiro 206 Wai Lun Hsu

207

Minsook Kang

208

Loretta Moore

209

Valentino Russo

210

Raquel Sanchez Galvez

211

Cristiana Vignatelli Bruni

212

203

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Paulien Bekker paulienbekker@gmail.com http://www.paulienbekker.com The Netherlands Project Palímpsēstos In a ‘Palimpsest’, the surface of costly perkament is being scraped to be written upon again- the original script being neglected, for it has no value anymore. Thinking of the human mind as an adaptable soap-like or wax-like matter (similar to Plato’s wax tablets), we can see that however it might be stretched, pulled or

pressed upon, a trace will remain.

I am interested to find the unseen (hi)story of atypical or undervalued tangible matter, such as soap and fibre. By physical intervention, I strive to activate this matter, until it starts to reveal itself. In my installation each body of soap represents the faint remnants of the past of the matter. The unseen, that what cannot be written, could be unravelled.

Thesis Mind the gap My practice involves atypical or undervalued tangible matter.

Throughout my thesis I kept my main research question in mind: how is, or

how might, time be captured and represented through matter?

I examined the remnants of cave paintings, the art of memory and the montage and the sculpting of time within history, art and matter.

I weaved echoes of the ancient Greek, The Middle Ages with the present and dived into mnenomic devices, various matter and textures.

I analysed the visualisation of memory of matter and time through an exploration of materials such as fibre and soap and examined the visual potential of a gap in time, following traces of the unseen, to reveal the hidden or the latent potential of matter.

204

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Greta Desirée Facchinato hello@gretafacchinato.com gretafacchinato.com Italy / Luxembourg Project FOAM - The Listening Body A one by one performance where the costume of the performer is reconsidered as a hidden stage. The materials involved are memory foam and nude lycra textile: materials which are commonly used to isolate and to filter what is supposedly

wanted to be revealed. The space of the costume-stage invites the audience and the performer to come closer, to reach for a hug, to meet, even though still distant. To snuggle and to penetrate, to sink in or to stretch towards the inside, towards the outside. A body which inhabits an another body. A moment of isolation. An intrusion in a corporeal cavity.

Thesis We Are All Ears ‘We are all ears’ is a word pun that challenges the original idiom ‘I am all ears’. It incorporates the notion

of the verb ‘to be’ as an interest to analyse aspects of personality, entity and awareness related to the 21th century Western society within the experience of the ears. Aspects of the self and of the community are highlighted through an extensive study of the technological device of the headphones. ‘We are all ears’ suggests a corporal and bodily attention too: the notion of space is related to the body as the actual origin of sound. In this research listening is first of all conceived as an experience related to an inner sensitivity, to intimacy and hence to vulnerability.

205

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Xaviera Andrea Michelle Hardjopawiro xamhardjopawiro@gmail.com http://www.xavierahardjopawiro.com The Netherlands

things, extending the collage toward an installation, where archival images of the body and found footage are essential. With my work I would like to revisit the misconceptions of value, nature and truth.

Project A state of affairs IV The unfamiliar grounds are of great importance in my artistic practice.

I tend to seek in-between spaces where interactions take place. I question the flat image in contrast with the three-dimensionality of

Thesis The place of interaction How do we relate to the world?

How do you relate to the world?

It is important for me to stand still on the notions of the mental and physical phenomena, because I see it as a way of clarifying one’s relations to the world or better yet

finding a place of belonging, which ultimately defines who we are as human beings. The feeling of displacement is also of great importance in this understanding.

Karin Barad also mentioned, that perhaps it takes the confrontation of the inhumanness within us, for us to realise our lack of compassion and thus making us care, feel and respond. Ultimately this understanding is a very personal one, as Terence McKenna stated: “Just deal with the raw data and trust yourself”.

206

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Wai Lun Hsu hsuwailun11@gmail.com cargocollective.com/lun Hong Kong Project The Rise of Modern China (2018) The title of the work is derived from a scholarly historical book of the same name–The Rise of Modern China, which was first published by Oxford University Press in the US in 1970. Originally written in English, it was translated and published in Traditional Chinese in Hong Kong in 2001, and in Simplified Chinese in

China in 2008 respectively. In China’s edition, 11 chapters, over 200 pages were erased.

The work appropriates and republishes all the removed pages from the original book. Most of the content were unidentified, except the number of year (Gregorian calendar).

It is not only addressing the (wellknown) censorship in China, but also in attempt to think about the notion of historiography, and how national histories were written.

Thesis National Sonic Territory The thesis revolves from the politics of sound and its affirmative qualities

to the masses; how could it summon a community, and formulate a sense of solidarity? By the use of musical sound and non-musical sound, how could a community reject the others, to draw its political and physical territory? How does a nation-state employ sound to defend and how one use it to attack?

Sometimes strong cultural sounds are appropriated by a modern nation, just to deliver a sense of futility–to resist is futile. Birds sing to make noise as a tool for marking territorial boundaries. Do we make noise to give the same statement?

207

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Minsook Kang minsookkang.com@gmail.com www.minsookkang.com South Korea Project Three Stories in Three Actions “Three Stories in Three Actions” is a storytelling performance. Action1.

“The Unknown Person’s Funeral” is about attending loner’s funeral as an artistic gesture. Action2. “The (In) Visible Vintage Shop” is a conversation piece with the owner of the vintage shop on a variety of unspecific topics. Action 3. “The Christmas

Tree Project” is a long journey to save Christmas trees that have been discarded on the streets after Christmas holiday. By instigating simple gestures, I attempt to reveal structures that might underpin the everyday reality of experience. These micropolitical actions can interweave and juxtapose the personal scale of experience and the historical and political scale of collective being as a form of resistance.

Thesis The Right to Opacity This research focuses on a specific space which is unknown, abandoned, fragile, hidden, unseen,

invisible, missing, forgotten, neglected and/or unloved so-called “other/poetic space.” By attempting to rescue, recover and reclaim the value of “other/poetic space,” I suggest that we strive for opacity – the right to opacity – and to consider how to be with others in ways that are alternative, sustainable and radical. It can be viewed as the most powerful and authentic way of living not to lose their identity and critical position. This is not about quantity, but about quality. That is what we really want today.

208

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Loretta Moore ellmoore8@gmail.com Ireland Project To decorate. To be decorated.

Radical botanicals, wild weeds grow through cracks of controlled concrete aesthetics, through the man-

ufactured urban islands, present in streams of automated travel, where the journey and journal become intertwined, histories of botanical scientific publication, hand drawn intimacy transferred to the mass produced encyclopedic, a domestic science of social acceptability, self research, self resilience, pioneering female botanists, to name the unnamed with torn threshold footings,

to grow from below and blossom, to decorate and be decorated, to thrive through the cracks of control as radical botanicals. A series of blockcut prints.

Thesis Journeying, Journaling and Islands.

In what way does the journey, effect artists models of production?

209

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Valentino Russo valeruxo@gmail.com http://valentinorusso.altervista.org/ Italy Project Minutes to Midnight ‘Minutes to Midnight’ tells the story of the Grim Reaper’s existential crisis: he has been asked to teminate

mankind, and he faces the abyss of unemployment. How can Death survive doomsday? Rather than extinction, the solution is eternal sleep. Death would still exist in a new world of never-ending dreams.

Thesis The Sweet Escape ‘The Sweet Escape’ is a journey through the urge to systematise, to define, to inscribe events in

structures and to form meaningful narratives in order to make sense of existence; but at the same time to escape, to rupture, to make room for nonsense. These two poles are expressions of different, but indeed complementary, human conditions: the need for solid answers and silly questions, for silly answers and solid questions.

210

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Raquel Sanchez Galvez rsagalvez@gmail.com Spain Project Continuum Blower My interest in making this work has been an intent of understanding, by the process of filmmaking, certain problematics that are linked to a specific event. By turning them into different directions, what probably

had started as something condemnatory, turns to be digested in a more processed way. The idea is not to illustrate a story but actually to transmit affect by reenactment. It encompasses an emotional stimuli (accomplished through/by the cinema apparatus) that goes beyond mimic rules.

compared to any live experience.

Perhaps the meaning of the word continuum (a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, but the extremes are quite distinct) helps us to understand this sort of time movement towards‌ p.15

Thesis Resilience Through Reenactment in Film The film here is almost like an adaptive process which could be 211

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Cristiana Vignatelli Bruni cristianavignatelli@gmail.com www.cristianavignatellibruni.com Italy

struction of an aural spatiality starts from the cracks of crude material.

The sound they produce triggers a reverberation, which is creation of a participated zone, unification between bodies and people.

Project The Mut(at)ing Form In a resonating chamber layers of voices and noises underline the tension between materiality and the evanescence of sound. The con-

Thesis The Mut(at)ing Form. Movements between Matter, Sound and Space Raw matter has as intrinsic behavior the capacity to evolve and to create alloys. But while in a neoliberal society matter has become associated

with commodification, defined by its being a product, sound still has a great degree of freedom. What is discussed here is the chance of a transformation from materiality to sound. This is possible because of a rupture, a crack, a wound into given structures, be it the neoliberal culture, the state, the economy and the current social systems in general.

212