Category: Doctoral School

Anders Härm, PhD candidate of the Estonian Academy of Arts, curriculum of Art History and Visual Culture, will defend his thesis „Disobedient Bodies. The Radical Performative Practices in Art and Culture of the 20th and 21st Centuries“ on 21st of February 2023 at 15.30 at Põhja pst 7, room A501.
The defense can be watched in EKA TV.

External reviewers: Dr. Madli Pesti (Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre), Dr. Jaak Tomberg (University of Tartu).
Opponent: Dr. Madli Pesti

The defense will be held in Estonian.

Members of the Defence Committee: Prof. Krista Kodres, Prof. Virve Sarapik, Dr. Anu Allas, Dr. Anneli Randla, Dr. Luule Epner, Prof. Marek Tamm, Prof. Eneken Laanes.

Please find the PhD thesis HERE.

A preparatory course for those interested in pursuing doctoral studies in practice based and/or artistic research in EKA will take place 20.02–17.03. Practice based and artistic research are based on the professional activity of the artist, designer and/or architect and result in new knowledge in the form of creative practice (ouvre, creative process, product, service, etc.) and written dissertation. The course introduces doctoral studies in EKA, its ongoing research and provides tips and guidelines for writing a doctoral project.

The course consists of seven meetings: four seminars, two thematic days and a final seminar where it is possible to get individual feedback on your project. The course will be led by Dr. Liina Unt, Head of the PhD Programme in Art and Design, Dr. Jaana Päeva, other lecturers include PhD students Ulvi Haagensen, Nesli Oktay and the guest lecturers on the thematic days.

The first thematic day, 21 February, focuses on design. The presenters include Dr. Oscar Tomico (ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology), Dr. Verena Fuchsberger (University of Salzburg), Dr. Claudia Núñez-Pacheco (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Dr. Nithikul Nimkulrat (OCAD University).

The traditional PhD Vitamin, on 10 March, will bring together experts from artistic and practice-based research and prospective doctoral candidates.

SCHEDULE
20.02 17.30-19.00
21.02 10.30-17.00 thematic day “Sensorial Design: Feel, Move, Interact!”
28.02 17.30-19.00
02.03 17.30-19.00
06.03 17.30-19.00
10.03 thematic day “PhD Vitamin” (info coming soon)
17.03 17.30-19.00

To participate, please send a short introduction (max 1.5 pages) to irene.hutsi@artun.ee by 13.02. The text should address your motivation, previous experience and the potential topic of your research. The number of places is limited, the acceptance will be confirmed by 15.02. The course will be held in English.

Meetings will take place in EKA at room A501 (except thematic days).

Additional info:

Info session on 8 February: doctoral studies at EKA

Conditions for admission to doctoral studies

Estonian Artistic Research Framework Agreement

EKA Doctoral School is hosting an online info session about doctoral studies at EKA on February 8, 2023, at 15:00 EET (local Estonian time) . 

Info session provides a good opportunity to hear more about doctoral studies at EKA, available programmes, admission requirements and procedure, etc; also meet and ask questions directly from people behind the Doctoral School and the programmes. The info session will be hosted online over Zoom.

RECORDING OF THE INFO SESSION HERE

The Estonian Academy of Arts offers following PhD level programmes for international applicants:

• Architecture and Urban Planning
• Art and Design
• Art History and Visual Culture
• Cultural Heritage and Conservation

Admission period for international PhD applicants for 2023/2024 starts on February 1st, 2023. Deadline for submitting application is March 31st, 2023.

Admission requirements for PhD programmes can be found HERE.

More information:
Irene Hütsi
Doctoral School coordinator
irene.hutsi@artun.ee

The peer-review of Marco Laimre’s exhibition „Crawl out Through the Fallout“ will take place on 12 December 15.30  at EKKM.

„Crawl out Through the Fallout“ is a group exhibition, curated by Marco Laimre featuring works by five artists: Camille Laurelli, Keiu Maasik, Marco Laimre, Martin Buschmann ja Reimo Võsa-Tangsoo.
Exhibition is part of the doctoral thesis of Laimre. The thesis is supervised by Dr. Jaak Tomberg.  The peer-reviewers of the exhibition are Dr. Roomet Jakapi and Indrek Grigor.

The exhibition is open until 18 December 2022.

The peer-review of Maria Kapajeva’s exhibition “Loose Photos, Odds and Ends” will take place on 29 November 16.00 at EKA (room A202). This exhibition is the first event of Kapajeva’s practice-based doctoral studies.

The thesis is supervised by Dr. Redi Koobak (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow) and Prof. Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff  (University of Gothenburg). The peer-reviewers of the exhibition are Dr. Ingrid Ruudi (EKA) and Prof. Mika Elo (Uniarts Helsinki).

The exhibition is open 14.06.- 30.12.2022 at Kumu, the Project Space II.

The exhibition “Loose Photos, Odds and Ends” is Maria Kapajeva’s artistic experiment: presenting a research process as an installation. What can you do and what would you do with a random collection of photographs?

Kapajeva experiments with different ways of opening up the potential of the often undervalued, under-researched, marginalised heritage of vernacular photography. In the age of automated face recognition software – partly developed by historical archives, but even more so by state and military institutions and international corporations – her project demonstrates the benefits of “slow recognition”. As she slowed down for an artistic exploration of this collection, Kapajeva also made this a part of her own homecoming, as she has lived abroad for years, just like the photos she is exploring.

Gradual identification of the photographers and the people portrayed by them reveals new perspectives on Estonian (micro-)history, which gain new meaning in the context of the permanent exhibition focusing on “landscapes of identity”. By focussing on the faces of the photographed people, their stories and some other forgotten facts which she learned from these images, Kapajeva shows her appreciation for each person and every individual story in our history.

Exhibition design: LLRRLLRR – Laura Linsi, Karolin Kull
Graphic designer: Maria Muuk
Exhibition coordinator: Magdaleena Maasik
Exhibition technician: Andres Amos
Artist’s research assistant: Ketlin Käpp
With contribution in kind by Linda Kaljundi, Annika Toots and Karmen-Eliise Kiidron

Special thanks to Liisa Kaljula, Merilis Roosalu (Tallinn City Museum – Museum of Photography), Aado Luik, Janeli Suits, Piret Karro, Lembi Anepaio, Aljona Kapajeva and the Sokk family.

Peer-reviewing of Art and Design PhD student Nesli Hazal Oktay’s first design case study “Empathic Placebos—Designing for the bodies in videotelephony” will take place on Friday, September 2, at 15.00-17.00 (EEST) in the Estonian Academy of Arts, auditorium A501.

Nesli Hazal Oktay will present the design process and analysis of the project. Case study “Empathic Placebos—Designing for the bodies in videotelephony” is part of the doctoral thesis of Nesli Hazal Oktay.

The peer review event will be in a hybrid format. Please find the Zoom link to participate HERE.

Supervisors
Dr. Kristi Kuusk, Estonian Academy of Arts
Prof. Danielle Wilde, Umeå University, Sweden and University of Southern Denmark

Reviewers:
Dr. Kristina Andersen, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Dr. Oscar Tomico, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands and Barcelona School of Design and Engineering

The research project titled “Empathic Placebos—Designing for the bodies in videotelephony” is an inquiry into the ways people feel, interact and move during video calls. The project works with the moving bodies as a creative material to design for people who are close by heart but physically apart. Relying on a cultural probe kit study and a three-step embodied design ideation process, the project invites digital natives to be more in contact with their bodies so that they have more chances to shape their experiences with their loved ones and themselves.

Nesli Hazal Oktay is a designer-researcher and educator focusing on the impacts and interactions the emerging technologies could deliver. She holds an MA in Interaction Design from the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn and a Communications BA from the Galatasaray University in Istanbul. Since the academic year 2019/20, she is working as a visiting lecturer and also as a curriculum developer of the Interaction Design MA at the Estonian Academy of Arts. As an educator, she has led several industry collaborations, and her subjects are shaped around interaction design and speculative design. While continuing her journey as a design educator she is also studying at the Academy as a doctoral student. Her research interests include embodied, participatory, and speculative approaches to design. For more information, please visit https://neslihazal.com/

Peer review event of Art and Design PhD student Dila Demir’s second design case study „Caring Companion“ will take place on August 22, 14.00-15.30 at EKA, room A501.
Dila Demir will present the design process and analysis of the project. Along with the peer review event there will be a physical exhibition at EKA on the fifth floor. Case study „Caring Companion“ is part of the artistic doctoral thesis of Dila Demir.

The peer review event will be in hybrid format. Please find Zoom link to participate HERE

Reviewers: Dr. Vasiliki Tsaknaki, assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Dr. Claudia Nuñez-Pacheco, post-doctoral researcher at KTH, Royal Institute of Technology
Supervisors: Dr. Nithikul Nimkulrat and Dr. Kristi Kuusk.

Dila is working in the field of interactive textiles, bodily discomforting experiences i.e., pain, soma design, and somaesthetics. Her second design case titled Caring Companion discusses the emergence of designing discomforting interactions that demonstrates how repeated engagement with the discomfort can lead to new becomings and inform the design of better engaging wearable interactive artefacts (soma extensions). Dila regards bodily discomforts as disturbing experiences that disrupts the everyday flow of the bodies such as fibromyalgia, depression, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) or chronic pain. She specifically works with the chronic pain and aim to induce sensory bodily awareness in her doctoral research. Accordingly, Caring Companion is a collection of various items in the form of a cultural probe kit (CPK) for encouraging people to engage with their bodily discomfort, specifically, chronic pain. Five participants with chronic pain used the Caring Companion kit for a minimum of four days a week for three weeks. For the study, they wore the soma extension – a soft textile artifact – that was included in the kit to practice yoga sequences shown in a YouTube video. They inserted their phones into the soma extension for localized sound effect. After each practice, they reflected on their felt experience of moving with the soma extension textually in the journal and visually by drawing body maps included in the kit and forming the plasticine. Additionally, they choose the words that best describe their felt experiences from the word list that includes 42 words to which they were free to add different words as well. The Caring Companion became part of their routines and supported them to engage and reflect upon their bodily experiences concerning pain.

Roemer van Toorn, external PhD candidate of the Estonian Academy of Arts, curriculum of Architecture and Urban Planning, will defend his thesis „Making Architecture Politically. From Fresh Conservatism to Aesthetics as a Form of Politics“ on 7th of September 2022 at 15.00 at Põhja pst 7, room A501.

The defence can be followed in EKA TV  tv.artun.ee.

External reviewers: Prof. Panu Lehtovuori (Tampere University of Technology), Prof. Arie Graafland (Delft University of Technology).

Opponent: Prof. Arie Graafland

The defense will be held in English.

Making Architecture Politically opens with an analysis of the current conjecture of Neoliberalism through the concept of the Society of the And, opposing an understanding of our condition through modes of Eitherorism. It is a voyage, travelling along the many interdependencies of the revolutionary conservatisms of Fresh Conservatism and Progressive Neoliberalism today — parallel to the arrival of a new phase of global modernisation with a special and elaborated focus on the role of contemporary architecture in Dutch society from the 1990s — while its second chapter moves beyond Fresh Conservatism; towards a possible third of emancipation in architecture with its plea for an Aesthetics as a Form of Politics towards a cosmopolitical outlook.

Chapter one, entitled Fresh Conservatism critically addresses how the much-celebrated Superdutch movement in architecture paved the way of an upcoming Neoliberal phase of capitalism. The problem for many was not to make political architecture, on the contrary, its innovative practices — without being too conscious about the political — affirmed what later was called the post-political. With Aesthetics as a Form of Politics of chapter two, exemplary alternative horizons of possibility are being discerned; ones that make architecture politically through their aesthetic regime. It has everything to do with how freedom can be created with constraints, how one can dance with enmeshment, can move beyond limiting adversary, and dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy through the redistribution of the sensible. By grappling with making architecture politically, finding it wanting through critical analysis, observing the exemplary and often a-political role contemporary Dutch architecture played in the 90s and onward, it turns out the problem is not to make political architecture — all architecture is political — but how to make architecture politically.

Making architecture politically is about the creation of running room; a sense of polity — an aesthetic regime redistributing the sensible — that allows for a multiplication of connections and disconnections that reframe the relations between people, the world they live in, and the way they are supposed to act and behave. Such a field of possibility concerns a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of the common experience of the human and non-human that change the cartography of the perceptible, the imaginative and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and emancipatory possibilities of collective and private enunciation. Instead of slipping into paternalism or control, the idea of such a radical openness is characterized by indeterminacy, nuance, incommensurability, dissensus and the multitude of encounters it could generate. It is about a becoming that breaks open the conventional way space is experienced, thought and distributed, one that displaces the binary dialectics of colonizer and colonized, the one against the other by introducing a third (And) that belongs to both the one and the other while opening alternative horizons.

Members of the Defence Committee: Dr. Jüri Soolep, Dr. Anu Allas, Dr. Renee Puusepp, Prof. Maros Krivy, Prof. Andres Kurg, Prof. Klaske Havik, Prof. Claus Peder Pedersen.

Please find the PhD thesis HERE.

On the 6th of June at 10.00, the pre-reviewing of Art & Design doctoral student Tõnis Jürgens’ exhibition “Dreaming of Babylon” will take place via Zoom. Link HERE

“Dreaming of Babylon” is the first solo exhibition related to Jürgens’ artistic research doctoral thesis. The thesis is supervised by dr Rolf Hughes (KU Leuven, Belgium). The pre-reviewers of the exhibition are dr Eva Näripea and Taavi Talve.

The virtual exhibition was open during 28.02.–10.04.2022 at the post-gallery.online platform, and is archived here: https://www.post-gallery.online/archive/dreamingofbabylon/index.

“Dreaming of Babylon” is a nostalgic-satirical vision of the future whose central motifs are distraction and the materiality of data.

The film and online exhibition form one possible imagination of a post-human time, where the drive for better life, novelty and technological solipsism has led to the total melding of conscience into code, and digital ruins, around which the earthy nature keeps on perpetuating.

The title refers to a novel by American prose writer Richard Brautigan. In a parody of 1940s noir fiction, Brautigan’s protagonist is a private detective and hapless dreamer who, while trying to solve a case, incessantly becomes entangled in his own daydreams. As a response to the explicitly rapid and brief chapters of Brautigan’s novel, this film instead adheres to the lingering style of slow cinema, whilst tipping its hat to the romantic medium of 16mm film.

film crew
executive producer: Fidelia Regina Randmäe
1st assistant camera: Erki Kase
2nd assistant camera: Aadu Lambot

post-gallery.online
programmer: Kelli Gedvil
management: Kristen Rästas

thanks
Joosep Ehasalu, Toomas Jürgens, Raul Keller, Kristo Kiis, Kalju Karl Kivi, Piibe Kolka, Paul Kuimet, Kulla Laas, Ian Simon Märjama, Allan Proos, Rene Tamm, Erko Valdmets

supported by
Balti Filmi- ja Meediakool, Eesti Kultuurkapital, Eesti Rahvuskultuuri Fond, Jõelähtme vald, Kino Sõprus, Kuusalu vald, Paekivitoodete Tehas OÜ, Rae vald, Rahvusarhiiv, Silikaat AS, Tallinna Strateegiakeskus, Telia Eesti AS

PhD VITAMIN 2023 – OPEN LECTURES AND CONSULTATIONS FOR DOCTORAL ASPIRANTS

On March 10,  PhD Vitamin will take place at the Estonian Academy of Arts, room A501.

PhD Vitamin aims to support and pave the way – and inspire artists with a research approach on their way to doctoral studies. The goal is to introduce artistic research and advise potential candidates for postgraduate studies in planning a doctoral thesis project. In a program consisting of public lectures and one-on-one consultations, artists and experts discuss their approach to artistic research and share individual advice.

Artists, designers, alumni of EKA and other creative universities, and graduate students interested in artistic research methods are invited to participate.

The event will be held in English.

To participate in a one-on-one consultation, please fill out the FORM.

A detailed consultation schedule will be sent to your email after registration. Be quick – the number of participants in consultations is limited!

In case of additional questions, please write to kati.saarits@artun.ee

PROGRAMME

10.03, Friday, room A501

11:30-12:00 Coffee and welcome

12:00-12:45 Jaana Kokko “Ideals and Practices”

12:45-13:30 Daniel Peltz “Rural Contextual Practice: Long-term, place-based research in a centre for Peripheral Study”

13:30-14.00 Taavet Jansen “Directing a hybrid event as practice-based research”

14:00-15:00 Moderated discussion: Daniel Peltz, Jaana Kokko, Taavet Jansen, Maarin Ektermann

15:00-15:30 break

15:30-18.15 Consultations with Daniel Peltz and Jaana Kokko

SPEAKERS:

Daniel Peltz is an artist and Professor of Time and Space Arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki. Prior to his professorship in Helsinki, Peltz served as Professor of Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design and co-founded the long-term, place-based, artistic-research project Rejmyre Art Lab’s Centre for Peripheral Studies, in Rejmyre, Sweden.

In his presentation “Rural Contextual Practice: Long-term, place-based research in a centre for Peripheral Study”, Peltz will provide an introduction to some of the strategies he has developed over the past 20 years of making works that emanate from engagements with specific communities and socio-cultural situations. The works intertwine multiple planes of existence from the ecological, to the social, to the financial, to the spiritual. There will be a particular focus on his epic, long-term engagement (going on 15 years) with the rural, glass-factory town of Rejmyre, Sweden. 

Jaana Kokko is an artist, filmmaker, educator and occasional curator based in Helsinki. In her artistic practice she is now in the search of the common: the emergent need for the change that is starting from our practices of art making, learning and being together. Her practice-based Phd project for the Aalto University is thinking the political together with Hannah Arendt and others.

She is and has been teaching and lecturing f.ex. at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Turku Art Academy, Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Latvian Academy of Arts, Riga and Akademie der Bildende Künste, Nürnberg. Her work has been exhibited f.ex. at the Lithuanian National Gallery in Vilnius, Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, Tallinn Art Hall, Helsinki Art Hall, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Joensuu Art Museum in Finland, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Tampere Film Festival and Tokyo Media Art Festival. 

www.jaanakokko.com

Taavet Jansen is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in dance, choreography, sound, and video. His current research focuses on creating immersive experiences for online art events. He is pursuing his doctoral degree at EKA and working on enhancing the elektron.art platform for online art events. His project promises to bring fresh perspectives to the digital creative sphere and contribute to the performing arts community.

Maarin Ektermann is an art worker, based in Tallinn, Estonia, who is working on intersections between contemporary art and more-or-less experimental education. Recent projects have included “Artists in Collections” (w M-A Talvistu, 2017 – ), re-imagining social rituals of the cultural field under RESKRIPT (w H. Hütt, 2019 – ), proposal for fair fee system for Estonian art scene (w A. Triisberg, 2019 – ) and since 2020 running a new educational platform proloogkool (“school of prologues”). On a daily basis she works  as a Head of Center for General Theory Subjects at Estonian Art Academy and teaches there courses on art history of 20th century, self-organized practices and on art criticism.