Pictures from Research Week 2025
This year, Research Week was organised by research subject. During each of the four days, a profile professor together with one or more heads of subject curated a programme that highlighted specific issues within their own subject. Here Professor Petra Bauer together with the head of subject for film and media, Tinna Joné. All photos: Johan Palme/SKH
Artistic research encompasses a wide range of different ways of exploring artistic practices. Christian Vippola is investigating the use of flexible materials such as carbon fibre in traditionally rigid trapezes, to examine both artistic possibilities and whether it can prevent injury.
Not all research in dance has to involve movement. The cross-disciplinary project Bodies as Ears by dance researchers Martin Sonderkamp and Ulrika Berg together with composer Hara Alonso and sound artist Jenny Sunesson, explores artistic listening, here in the form of a workshop on what listening can mean without sound.
All sessions of Research Week included audience questions as well as roundtable discussions to contextualise the presentations on stage.
The vast majority of Research Week is streamed live to reach as many people as possible. Here, Jarosław Kaliski, assistant professor of musical interpretation, shows his research on how understanding the inherent limitations of a grand piano can also be transferred to enriching opera singing technique.
One theme that recurred several times during the week was how AI technology might affect the arts. In the workshop Movements, body and AI technology with Katarina Lundmark and Åsa Johannisson, participants practised how to convey the sense of weight in motion capture, which could then be understood and used by a choreography-oriented AI model.
New PhD student Claudia Bosse took us on a virtual tour of the performance installation BONES and STONES – An ecological utopia through 5 virtual spaces that explores the kinship between stones, bones and beings through different times, which among other things looks at using the imperfections of 3D scanning to abstract the human body.
Costanza Julia Bani’s video installation Darkness Matters explores humankind's impact on the experience of nights – and also the technical feasibility of filming and transferring the night from its natural habitat to a completely different environment. In this version, a panorama is projected onto three fabric walls in a darkened room.
One of the major completed research projects presented was Sustainability in performing arts production, where the entire faculty in the subject area of Performing Arts together explored how the idea of ecological sustainability can affect all aspects of a performance. Here Gunilla Pettersson Thafvelin, assistant professor of make-up and wig design, explains how the research was applied to last year’s student presentations.
The tension in the exchange between thought and movement is one of the central issues in dance. In Zoë Poluch's research project Dancingisdancingfordancingwithdancingthrough, different contextualisations of dance also affect its forms, and its forms affect its contextualisations. Of course, this means that it is appropriate to both dance and talk during the presentation.